Jason Robert Brown

One of my kids’ camp counselors needed to interview a composer for her school, so I got volunteered. I ended up kind of liking what I had to say, so I thought I’d post it here in case it gives a little inspiration. Q: What is your background as a composer? A: I started off wanting to play the piano when I was seven years old. My parents found an old piano and I immediately sat down and started making noise. Making my own music seemed like much more fun than playing what was on the page, so I startedRead More »

Not that long ago, I did 30 to 40 concerts a year, traveling all over the country, racking up frequent flier miles and staying in weird hotels and eating a lot of late dinners by myself. This year, I did three. (Not counting one performance this summer at my old sleepaway camp.) But I guess if you’re only going to do three, they should all be as special as these shows were to me. After a year of not performing, and the loss of my artistic home at SubCulture, I was so grateful for the chance to make music withRead More »

THE JRB HOLIDAY GIFT GUIDE 2021 It’s holiday time!  Let’s fling our masks aside with joyous abandon and celebrate (as long as you’ve got a second mask on underneath). Over here at JRBHQ, I’m celebrating a bunch of exciting things: My new Broadway show, MR. SATURDAY NIGHT, starring the extraordinary Billy Crystal, begins previews at the Nederlander Theater on March 1 and opens March 31. All the information you need is right here at this site, and I’m so excited to have a show on Broadway again! On December 11, I’m back at New York’s FEINSTEIN’S/54 BELOW for another wonderfulRead More »

Four hundred and seventy-four days. I did a show in Los Angeles on March 9, 2020, and I didn’t perform in front of a live audience again for four hundred and seventy-four days. I was in Toronto in the middle of May, doing pre-production work on the movie of 13, when Jennifer Ashley Tepper at 54 Below sent an email asking if I would be among the first acts to reopen their venue once New York State allowed them to have live audiences again.  I hesitated.  Did I have the vocal chops to get through a whole concert anymore? Would anyone comeRead More »

This morning – nineteen years after I first wrote down a list of characters including “Evan Goldman” and “Archie” and “Patrice”; eighteen years after Dan Elish and I started writing a show about those characters; thirteen years after that show premiered on Broadway and begat a novel published by HarperCollins, nine years after that show premiered on the West End, after over a thousand productions at junior high schools and middle schools, Jewish community centers, summer camps, youth theaters, concert halls in Japan, opera houses in Germany, and Korean worship centers, and after Robert Horn and I wrote a draftRead More »