Jason Robert Brown

Is there anyone in the entire entertainment industry who contains as much pure joy and such innate glorious musicality as Gavin Creel? Let me answer that for you: no. No, there is not. And he brought that contagious joy and stupendous mastery to the stage at SubCulture (on his night off from his Tony Award-winning role in Hello, Dolly!) for a truly wonderful evening of music-making. We started by breaking out a classic Dixie Chicks song and moved on to Loggins & Messina, and along the way, we got a beautifully gender-crossed “Another Life,” a thrashing version of a songRead More »

The last couple shows were a little emotional, maybe, so this time I made everyone wear Electric Mayhem t-shirts (except Amber, who went with a NWA/Cookie Monster mashup deal my kids found at Target), and Nick played a new tune, and Amber did a reggae version of “Invisible” that we made up during rehearsal, and we did a bunch of stuff from The Connector and the new album, and basically, Nick is the most charming and naturally musical guy you’ve ever met, and I swear I’ve never seen any human more comfortable on a stage than Amber, and we allRead More »

Friday Night Is Music Night has been broadcast on BBC Radio 2 continuously since 1953, devised to feature the extraordinary musicians of the BBC Concert Orchestra. It is now the longest-running orchestral radio programme in the world. I can’t imagine the founders ever planned for a quirky middle-aged American songwriter to hijack the entire thing with a whole madcap band of merry dingbats, but that’s what happened this week, and it was honestly everything I ever wanted from a concert in my life. Anyone who knows me knows that my deepest joy is getting to make music with other greatRead More »

Four years ago, I went to Potomac, Maryland, to conduct a concert version of Songs for a New World. Among the 87 instrumentalists and 35 singers involved was a woman named Nova Y. Payton, who sang the most electrifying version of “The Flagmaker” that I had ever heard.  I made a mental note that if there were ever a reason to do that song in New York, I wanted Nova there to do it. These are tough times in America. If you pay any attention to politics, and you should, you are aware that the country is adrift, splintered, flailingRead More »

Sutton Foster is a star. Broadway musical performers generally drive me crazy because I find they fall into one of two camps – either they’re insanely proficient, skilled beyond imagining, I-went-to-Carnegie-Mellon kind of dazzling where they can do anything you ask them and more, but they’re strangely cold, like they’re so busy pushing their talent out into the world that they can’t take anything in; or the other version is they walk on stage and somehow you know them, you can’t take your eyes off them, they’re drawing from some deep well of truth that you’ve never seen before, butRead More »