Jason Robert Brown

I’ll tell you what I hear. I hear my band in college, with a big Earth, Wind & Fire-style horn section, playing a riff that I eventually turned into “The River Won’t Flow.” 1988, I was eighteen years old, that’s thirty-seven years ago. I was dating one of the backup singers, I can still hear her part on that song. I hear Paula Wayne’s cranky Chow Chow grunting at me. Paula was teaching at a performing arts school in Miami that hired me as an accompanist. She said I could come to her house and use her piano any timeRead More »

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 asRead More »

I got asked if I would come watch a run-through of a new musical because the producers were considering replacing the musical director and wondered if I would be open to taking over. The catch was that the show was going into tech in three days, in Miami of all places, and – not to cause panic, but – none of the arrangements or orchestrations were written yet. At that point in my life, I had pretty much given up on show business (this happens with me every couple of years), so I figured I’d be nice and watch theRead More »

The world I travel in is filled with gay men and women, trans people, and folks who inhabit basically every millimeter of the gender-and-sexuality spectrum. They are my collaborators, my friends, my family, my supporters, my inspirations, and the bedrock of the theater community. And right now they live in a country that is trying even more vociferously than usual to marginalize them, to isolate them, to legislate them out of existence. It is impossible to stand by and watch it happen. I’m doing what I can to help. On Monday September 8, I drove to Philadelphia where I metRead More »

It seems unlikely, I know, but I lived in Los Angeles for almost a decade and I really loved it, and one of the things I loved was my relationship with some of the local theater companies. In 2005, right after I got to town, the Rubicon Theater Company in Ventura did a really thrilling environmental production of Songs for a New World (directed masterfully by Jon Lawrence Rivera), and the theater’s producer, Karyl Lynn Burns, invited me to come work with the cast and do a concert after the closing night show. I’ve been able to maintain a looseRead More »