Posted on October 9, 2025 at 4:23 am

I have played a few concerts in my life where I felt something shift, like every concert afterward would be informed by what had happened onstage that night. The general structure of my concerts doesn’t change much from show to show, but over the course of these last thirty years of performances, there are nights when an accreted series of small changes in repertoire, in personnel, even in phrasing, suddenly coalesces into something new. I can’t predict when that will happen – in fact, I don’t think it’s happened more than ten times – but I sense it onstage as it’s occurring, a feeling of things clicking into place. And it definitely happened Saturday night at Groton Hill.

I don’t know anyplace in the country like Groton Hill Music Center. It’s a whole complex dedicated to music plopped in the middle of farmland about an hour’s drive from Boston, with an acclaimed music school, a farm-to-table restaurant and, at the heart of it all, an astonishing concert hall whose design somewhat reminds me of Disney Hall in LA but more intimate, more flexible, and with an unmatched acoustic pattern. The venue has only been open for three years, and so it feels like even people in the Greater Boston area are still discovering it. It was a truly magical place to perform, and I knew when they booked me that I had to do something special.

Since so much of my writing lately is focused on ensemble singing, I had to do some very stealthy casting, because I knew that both vocalists would have to be top-notch backup singers for half the show even though they also needed to be ferocious soloists. I had spent all spring marveling at Nasia Thomas’s voice and presence during understudy rehearsals for The Last Five Years on Broadway, so I knew she’d be perfect for the show. I was a little nervous about asking Sierra Boggess, one of Broadway’s great leading ladies, if she would take on learning all this material for just one night. But I’ve known Sierra a long time and she is always up for a challenge, and thankfully, I’d built up enough goodwill in our years working together that she said yes (and then instantly regretted it when I sent her the first three songs to learn, which totaled fifty-one densely packed pages of music).

It’s important to me at these concerts to keep the focus on my newer work without neglecting some of the older songs that I know the audience wants to hear (and which I happen to love as well). I felt like this show got the balance just right. It’s so exciting for me to feel the attention of the crowd focus as they discover a new song like “Mary Mallon,” and then watch them look forward to doing that over and over again as the evening goes on.

Saturday night was also the first time that this band played together, and there was an almost mystical alchemy to this group, where songs would grow and pulse and breathe in unexpected ways as we listened to each other. Sam Minaie and Hiddy Honari were the bassist and guitarist for the Broadway run of The Last Five Years along with Jamie on drums, so they already had a shorthand with each other; it was actually an interesting experience for me to play the L5Y material with them because they had found a whole other universe of colors and feels in those songs, so we had to learn to integrate each others’ interpretations. And Alison Shearer started playing with me in 2022, and every show feels like an joyful exploration and a discovery. (Alison has an excellent new album with her quartet coming out this week on Pinch Records – it’s called “In The Garden” and I strongly recommend checking it out!)

At the end of the show, I told the origin story of “Wait Til You See What’s Next,” which I wrote originally for Prince of Broadway when Hal asked me for a big finale. What really inspired the song was Hal’s penchant for moving forward, not getting stuck dwelling on the last thing but plunging headlong into the next adventure. I explained to the audience that that was a good trait for a director, but it isn’t natural for a writer – I spend most of my time looking backwards, trying to make sense of what happened so I can contextualize whatever is coming up. But in the years since Hal died, I’ve come to think of the song as a gift from him to me, a way for me to think about the world differently. There is work to do, and it’s my job to be out there doing it. Especially at this particular moment in our country’s vertiginously weird history, I feel an obligation to push ahead, to keep moving, not to be paralyzed by indecision or despair. And that was the moment when I was joined by twenty of Groton Hall’s voice students, who sang with passion and precision, and looked for all the world like the best possible hope for our future.

Hope from How We React and How We Recover (2018)
KPR (2022)
NASIA & JRB: The Shed Shack from Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (2024)
Shiksa Goddess from The Last Five Years (2002)
SIERRA: Another Life from The Bridges of Madison County (2013)
NASIA:  I Can Do Better Than That from The Last Five Years (2002)
It All Fades Away from The Bridges of Madison County (2013)
Boat from Less (2021)
SIERRA: Mary Mallon (2021)
NASIA: You Don’t Know This Man from Parade (1998)
The Voice of My Generation from The Connector (2024)
SIERRA: Cassandra from The Connector (2024)
Sanctuary from Coming From Inside The House (2022)
SIERRA & JRB: I’d Give It All For You from Songs for a New World (1995)
NASIA: Zohra’s Song from Less (2023)
The Western Wall from The Connector (2024)
Wait Til You See What’s Next from How We React and How We Recover (2018)
featuring Voice Students of Groton Hill Music School (Daon Drisdom, choral director)
~
All Things In Time from How We React and How We Recover (2018)

JRB: piano & vocal
Sierra Boggess: vocals
Nasia Thomas: vocals
Voice Students of Groton Hill Music School, Daon Drisdom, choral director
Alison Shearer: flute, saxes and percussion
Jamie Eblen: drums, percussion and guitar
Hidayat Honari: electric and acoustic guitars
Sam Minaie: electric and upright basses

Photography by Gabrielle Delgado