Jason Robert Brown

  There are several stories in this picture, beyond the obvious one of a piano-playing songwriter standing onstage at Radio City Music Hall with one of his greatest inspirations. But this is the story that is most important to me: Carol Klein grew up in the late forties and early fifties in a brick, two-family house in Sheepshead Bay. Her upstairs neighbors were the Browns, Irving and Chickie, who had three kids, Michael, Terri and Stuart. Carol was a year older than Stuart, but he always remembered her and her little brother, Richard, who had been born deaf and severelyRead More »

Back in March, I ended up with a nasty respiratory infection that laid me out for two weeks, and one of the consequences was that I had to cancel my concert and masterclass with PRiMA Theatre at the last minute.  Fortunately for all, the gang in Lancaster was able to reschedule, and so I took a train up to the heart of Pennsylvania Dutch country to make some music at the Trust Performing Arts Center. First I worked with six fantastic performers on their material; you can read about that here in an article from Lancaster Online. The concert wasRead More »

Wonderful news just announced: Parade will return to New York City for the first time since 1999, in a concert version with full orchestra and 200-voice choir at Avery Fisher Hall, on February 16, 2015. (And I’ll be conducting!) Once the news came out this morning, my Facebook exploded with reminiscences of the original production and tour, and I was reminded of the following story, which is an illustration of the dangers of hiring one of your best friends to go on tour with you. Parade went on a brief but wonderful national tour in 2000.  I conducted and IRead More »

Well, it was bound to happen; after an unbelievably horrible winter of storms and cold, and then a frantic month of running around conducting, teaching and singing, my voice finally gave out, on the very morning of a concert that was part of my semester teaching at Harvard University.  (It got bad enough that I actually had to cancel a concert two days later in Lancaster PA – that concert has now been rescheduled for June 22.) The students had put a lot of hard work into the concert, and we’d sold out the theater, so I knocked back asRead More »