Jason Robert Brown

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 »

For the majority of this residency, I’ve been focusing on writing and performing tracks for my new album, but since that album is now all but finished (fingers crossed), I thought it was time to look at some material that I haven’t played in a long time and see how it feels. I wrote “Hear My Song” in 1991 – I was an entirely different human being, and I wouldn’t have known back then how to imagine the life I have now; so what does a song that I wrote when I was 21, or 31, or even 41, meanRead More »

The first time I recall meeting Stephen Schwartz was at a party at Daisy Prince’s apartment, before I had ever gotten any of my shows produced and long before anyone other than Daisy knew who I was. At a certain point in the party, most of the folks had wandered off to the dessert table in the other room, and Stephen was at the piano with only three or four people around him while he sang songs from Pippin and Godspell and told stories. I was staring at a bookcase (this is the sort of thing I do at partiesRead More »

The good folks at Brigham Young University (namely Jeff Martin) got wind of the SubCulture concert that Kelli and I did together last January, and asked if we would come and do it in their gorgeous deJong Concert Hall to finish the BYUArts season. Thus it was that I got to fulfill my lifelong dream of spending the third night of Chanukah in Provo, Utah. Eight hundred folks came out to share our evening of music-making, which included a suite of songs from The Bridges of Madison County; Kelli’s first time singing “Still Hurting” since 2001, when we offered herRead More »