Jason Robert Brown

It’s surely one of the less expected things on my résumé, but for a brief period of time in 2003, I put on a cowboy hat and boots every night and led the band of the Broadway musical, Urban Cowboy. Today is exactly 20 years from the opening night of that show, and while the musical itself was indefensibly ridiculous, that experience was one of the best times of my life, and I celebrate the craziness of Urban Cowboy whenever I can. (For those of you under the age of 50, Urban Cowboy the Musical was based on a phenomenallyRead More »

Real big news: As of today, right now, this very instant, you can stream and/or download the 2023 Broadway cast album of PARADE! Produced by myself and Jeffrey Lesser, with Ben Platt, Micaela Diamond, Alex Joseph Grayson and the whole amazing cast AND the 24-piece City Center orchestra (featuring Georgia Stitt on the piano!), the album contains seventy-nine minutes and fifty seconds of lush, delicious and sometimes terrifying music recorded in pristine digital stereo, including several new songs written for the Donmar production and now preserved for the first time in their full symphonic orchestration. Thanks to the folks atRead More »

On February 21, 2023, the night of the first preview of the new Broadway production of Parade (a musical about the Leo Frank case that premiered in 1998), audience members waiting to enter the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater were harangued by members of a far-right White Supremacist group, “The National Socialist Movement.” Details can be found in this article on Playbill.com. The composer and lyricist of Parade, Jason Robert Brown, has written the following note in response to that event. February 22, 2023, Nyack, NY So, the Neo-Nazis. There is a website about the Leo Frank case that is notRead More »

A gorgeous autumnal Sunday in suburban New Jersey with my magnificent band and truly one of the most amazing singers in the world. Not only did we get to play extended versions of some of our favorite songs, but we also got to accompany Mykal on two glorious songs from his wonderful debut album, A Man Born Black. Also, Mykal made me join TikTok, the results of which remain to be seen. Moving Too Fast from The Last Five Years (2002)I Love Betsy from Honeymoon In Vegas (2014)Hallowed Ground from How We React and How We Recover (2018)Boat from UntitledRead More »

An amazing weekend with the folks at Red Mountain Theater in Birmingham AL. I’m always surprised that I have this long, rich relationship with a theater in the Deep South, but Keith Cromwell asked me to come work with his Musical Theater students back in 2006, and it’s been a mutual admiration society ever since then. Red Mountain is deeply committed to bringing musical theater to its community at the highest possible level, which includes an incredible education department that has guided some remarkable talents – Jordan Fisher, Audrey Cardwell, Abigail Barlow and her sister Anna Grace are just aRead More »