Jason Robert Brown

Quarantine does strange things to people. In this case, it compelled my old college buddy Mike Titlebaum (now the Director of Jazz Studies at Ithaca College) to reach out to me and ask if I wanted to do a social-isolation collaboration. Almost immediately, I thought of this song, and then improvised this totally arbitrary and cruel arrangement for Mike to figure out, which he did, with all his usual brilliance and sangfroid. Then Mike took it one step further and made this insane video, which includes, among other inexplicable things, terrifying footage of our band in college, the Eastman ChamberRead More »

I have a friend who lives in Beijing, and by the time of the TADA! gala, he and his family had already been in lockdown for over a month. I remember not being able to imagine what that was like. I can imagine it now. But in the days after the gala, things in the US had started to intensify. In particular, there was a cluster of coronavirus cases in a nursing home in Seattle that seemed to foretell something very scary, but it was hard to know if it was just a blip or the first rumblings of anRead More »

Back in those long ago days when we could all still get together and make music and celebrate, Georgia and I were honored by our favorite youth theater company, TADA!, with a gala at Tribeca 360, featuring some of our favorite singers, some of our favorite musicians, some of our favorite songs, and both of our favorite daughters. This is the 35th year that TADA! has been creating original musicals performed by tri-state area kids, as well as providing high-level arts education and, most importantly, building community among the members, giving pre-teens and teens a sense of discipline, accomplishment, andRead More »

Back in the early 90s, when all the musicals seemed to be Cameron Mackintosh spectacles from across the ocean, every tenor in the musical theater tried to sound like an old British rock star. Hundreds of young men came in to auditions grinding out “Gethsemane” and “This Is The Moment,” yelping heroically on high B’s and proudly barking out ridiculously pompous lyrics as though they were intoning Scripture, while squeezed into too-tight black jeans with their knees constantly bent, the veins on their forehead throbbing, and their eyes shut. It was agonizing. And then one day in 1992, while IRead More »

In September of 2004, my friend Dan Elish and I did a private reading of the first twenty pages or so of a new musical we were working on called 13.  We filled a room with thirteen kids, all of whom were between 12 and 14 years old, and we watched as they brought our story to life. No one had ever proposed doing a Broadway show with a cast and band made up entirely of teenagers, but we were just nuts enough to think that it would be the most thrilling way to tell our story.  It took fourRead More »