Jason Robert Brown

Musical fireworks last night at SubCulture, with an amazing group of musicians, all bringing exceptional new colors to my work and all of us pushing each other to new and sometimes really weird places. When Gary, Randy and I started playing trio shows together in 2002, those shows were heavily reliant on a lot of soloing and stretching out; we don’t usually do that kind of work anymore, but I thought last night would be a good time to go “back to basics”, so we revived our original arrangement of “She Cries” (you can hear us playing it in oneRead More »

I could not have known when I scheduled this week’s concert in Huntsville, Alabama, that we would be in the middle of a roller-coaster ride through ten historic days in this nation’s history, starting with the unspeakable horror of last week’s shooting in Charleston and ending, in what would have been unimaginable even five years ago, with the exhilarating affirmation from the Supreme Court that gay marriage is legal across the entire United States. But that triumphant ending was yet to come when I did my concert at the Von Braun Center on Thursday night, and what was most onRead More »

This weekend marked my third trip to Portland, Oregon to visit the fantastic folks at Staged!PDX. I first came to town in June 2010 when they did a wonderful production of Songs for a New World at the Milagro Theater, and then Shoshana Bean and I returned in January 2012 for a sensational night at the First Congregational Church (and I got to watch a rehearsal of their great production of 13). So now, after three and a half years, I’m back again, and delighted to see the company on such solid footing, and doing all kinds of exciting workRead More »

Ooh, I haven’t done one of these in a while! Jason Marks writes: Getting ready to musically direct 13 this fall, and just had callbacks last night. We had lots of terrific kids who are great actors and most who are fairly strong singers. However, the role of Evan Goldman is proving to be a tricky one to cast because of young voices, puberty and wide ranges. What exactly is Evan’s voice type? Should the boy who plays him have a voice that has already dropped? In listening to the original cast recording, the original boy almost seems to beRead More »

I am profoundly grateful for the music-making I’ve been able to do in the past six months: the SubCulture concerts, the Parade concert at Avery Fisher Hall in Feburary, the Trumpet of the Swan performances in Germany in March, and of course the run of Honeymoon In Vegas on Broadway earlier this year. Last night at the Royal Festival Hall felt like a wonderful culmination of this amazing period of time. I haven’t been back to London since the NYMT production of 13 in the West End in 2012. In the years since, I’ve had two shows open on Broadway,Read More »