Jason Robert Brown

Click here for Charles McNulty’s photo essay on the best theatre in California in 2009. And included in the list, this blurb about Parade: The Donmar Warehouse’s scaled-down version of Jason Robert Brown and Alfred Uhry’s 1998 musical about the execution of injustice done to Leo Frank, a Jewish factory manager dubiously convicted of the rape and murder of a teenage employee, featured a top-notch cast led by T.R. Knight and Lara Pulver. The material is admittedly very stark for a musical, but Brown’s Tony-winning score lent an astonishing degree of moral nuance and color. On to 2010!

It’s a special time of year, and the folks at Sheet Music Direct have teamed up with me and Sh-K-Boom Records to offer a special last-minute holiday digital promotion! Last month, Sh-K-Boom released a new version of the Original Cast Album to “13”, featuring the entire Broadway score, two previously unreleased JRB demos, nine karaoke tracks, and – the most exciting part, as far as I’m concerned – two songs that have been added to the show in its new licensed version. Those two songs, “Being A Geek” and a revised version of “Opportunity”, were both newly recorded by theRead More »

In the summer of 2002, I had a meeting with a producer about writing the score for a new musical based on a beloved cartoon character from the 1930’s. In a dénouement that will be no surprise to regular readers of this blog, it didn’t work out as expected. The original rights-holder of this cartoon character had approval of the entire creative team, so before I could be officially hired, I was asked to write two songs that might fit in the show. In order to get paid to write those two songs, I signed an agreement stating that, inRead More »

Christopher Isherwood’s review here. His review for the original production (for Variety) can be found here. October 14, 2009 THEATER REVIEW | ‘PARADE’ Sorrow Over an Anti-Semitic Miscarriage of Justice, Rendered in Sotto Voce By CHARLES ISHERWOOD LOS ANGELES — As one of the bed-hopping interns in the hospital soap opera “Grey’s Anatomy,” T. R. Knight was both nebbishy and adorable, a sad-sack elf who still managed to get the girls, despite the fierce competition from his more square-jawed, bedroom-eyed colleagues. Onstage as Leo Frank, the Jewish factory superintendent wrongly accused of murdering a teenage girl in the musical “Parade,”Read More »

Les Spindle’s review here. Parade (Theater Review) By Les Spindle, October 05, 2009 05:25 ET Bottom Line: Catch it before it passes by. This brilliant musical by Alfred Uhry and Jason Robert Brown eloquently dramatizes a real-life tragic miscarriage of justice that occurred in 1913 in Atlanta: the false conviction and ultimate mob lynching of Jewish factory superintendent Leo Frank, accused of murdering 13-year-old Mary Phagan. The Mark Taper Forum’s triumphant staging feels like a long-delayed vindication of a separate injustice: the inexplicable obscurity of this watershed musical, which evokes the rapturous sweep of grand opera. Although it deservedly wonRead More »