Jason Robert Brown

In the summer of 1984, I signed up to be in the Rock Band program at French Woods. Every other kid in Rock Band that summer was a guitarist or a drummer; no one ever knew what to do with a keyboard player. (And in those pre-DX7 days, a keyboard was generally an unmiked upright piano off to the side of the rehearsal room.) The repertoire, therefore, leaned heavily towards the kind of things teenage guitar players and drummers like – loud, mid-tempo, no more than four chords. I had been hoping for the Beatles, maybe Queen, or at worstRead More »

It feels like a cliché to write about a performer’s “passion,” such an overused word, and yet I can’t think of any other way to discuss the experience of putting this show together with Raúl Esparza. What was evident from the outset was his incredible passion – passion for telling stories, passion for doing the work at its highest level, passion for the music of Cuba, passion for singing. It is rare for any of my guests to do more than four or five songs, but Raúl’s passion was so insistent, so defining, that he kept asking to do more,Read More »

Last night I went to Lincoln Center to see Grace McLean‘s thrilling musical, “In The Green.” I have been a fan of Grace’s for years, and she was my guest at a particularly wild SubCulture concert two years ago, so I’ve been excited to see this piece ever since Grace first mentioned it to me back then. To see it come to fruition now, in a really visceral production directed by Lee Sunday Evans and cast with five magnificently versatile and emotional singers, is a very special experience. The thing is, I don’t usually find much musical inspiration from theRead More »

I started writing Parade twenty-five years ago, in 1994, and today I happened to be doing some work in my storage unit when I found a couple of really fun pieces of history from that show. This is my pencil draft for the lyrics of “Come Up To My Office.” The monologue at the top is what Alfred Uhry sent me initially to give me some lyric ideas, and you can see how I took little phrases of his and used them as punch lines in my version. You can also see the title we were using for the showRead More »