Jason Robert Brown

A gloomy, rainy Monday night in the middle of winter in a small college town in Eastern Pennsylvania turned into a wonderful chance to make some music, tell some stories, and listen to one of my favorite singers go to town on my songs. Regular readers of this blog know about Nova Y. Payton, first from her appearance in a symphonic version of Songs for a New World in Washington DC in 2014, and then from her explosive, thrilling concert at SubCulture two years ago. Nobody sings like Nova! So when I got the call to come out to MisericordiaRead More »

Betty Buckley and I have been circling each other for over a quarter-century, always saying how much we love each other’s work and how much we’d love to collaborate, but never knowing exactly how to do it. I’ve conducted for her at some benefits and taught some classes with her, and she’s sung several of my songs brilliantly in her concerts, but the opportunity to really make music together has eluded us. Until now. When I saw that Betty was wrapping up her year of touring with Hello, Dolly!, I crossed my fingers that she might have a small periodRead More »

I can’t predict how 2020 is going to go, but I can tell you one thing: I was more than ready to be done with 2019. Show #56 of the SubCulture Residency was designed to start the year off right. As we begin our sixth year of concerts on Bleecker Street, I was looking for hope, for joy, for relief. On New Year’s Eve, I performed, as I often do, in the Concert for Peace at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. The first time I was part of that concert was in 1999, the eve of the Millennium,Read More »

Yesterday, December 16, I was the musical director of a memorial for my mentor, the legendary director and producer Hal Prince, at the Majestic Theater on Broadway, where The Phantom of the Opera is still playing, as it has been for almost 32 years. Almost two thousand people showed up to pay tribute to Hal and his astonishing career on Broadway, which started when he was the assistant stage manager of a revue called Tickets, Please! in 1950 and continued to the last musical he directed, Prince of Broadway in 2017. For the finale, a choir was put together featuringRead More »

Audition story #1: On January 9, 2006, we had our first auditions for a workshop production of 13 at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles. A girl named Sara Niemietz came in – I had previously seen her on Broadway as a young Carol Burnett in a play that Hal Prince had directed called Hollywood Arms – and she opened her mouth to sing and knocked us all out with her voice. When she read the sides, she brought a real empathy and extraordinary warmth to the character. We loved her, we cast her, she played the role ofRead More »