Jason Robert Brown

Some nights we get to make music, some nights we get to make magic. My wonderful friend/greatest singer in the known universe Shoshana Bean came back to the SubCulture Residency for her third time, and lo and behold, miracles happened. I love “Being A Geek” but I rarely perform it because it’s exhausting on my much-abused vocal cords; it was a real thrill to hear Shoshana dig into it – I don’t think I’ve ever heard it sung by a woman before! She also joined me on “All The Wasted Time,” which she said had been a dream of hersRead More »

I have spent this week at John Kilgore’s studio in midtown, with my treasured collaborator Jeffrey Lesser, recording the band tracks for what will be (eventually!) my second solo album. It is the longest sustained period of music-making I’ve had in quite some time, and it was challenging and terrifying and always glorious and wonderful and the most fun thing. Some of us were discussing today how the kind of reckless bravado you need when you’re in your twenties in order to stake a claim as a New York musician can seem unimaginable once you’re in your forties and beyondRead More »

Betsy has told me often that when she was a child, growing up in the wilds of California, she happened to watch the broadcast of the 1999 Tony Awards and became mesmerized by this performance: So often did she watch her videotape of Brent and Carolee that it became ingrained in every fiber of her being. She didn’t know much what this show Parade was, but she knew that, in ways she only dimly understood, she WAS Leo Frank. And Lucille, actually. And so it was that a mere eighteen years later, that little girl from California stood on theRead More »

Marsha Norman and I had just opened The Trumpet of the Swan at the Kennedy Center, and the reviews that morning were the best either of us have ever gotten in our entire careers. More importantly, we’d had a great time working together – we seemed to be in sync about what the piece wanted to be, in terms of the characters, the pacing, the overall tone of the storytelling. So I asked Marsha if we could do a real musical together, and she happily agreed. My first instinct was that I wanted to write something really romantic – afterRead More »

On Saturday night at SubCulture, you had raging violin solos, killer guitar playing, a Broadway hunk singing his heart out, a countertenor, a mandolin solo, and world-class tap dancing. Let’s face it, if there was anything you wanted to see at that show that you didn’t get to see, you just don’t want to see the right things. Noah Racey and I have been bumping into each other for years, and I’m such a huge fan of his dancing and his talent that we always end up saying, “We have to do something together!” But then we never do. Until!Read More »