Jason Robert Brown

Many shades of Brown all delight Oct. 17, 2006. 06:56 AM RICHARD OUZOUNIAN THEATRE CRITIC The phrase “triple threat” has become so overused in show-business circles that it’s great to encounter someone who truly deserves it. Jason Robert Brown rocked the walls of the Glenn Gould Studio last night with a performance so filled with energy, guts and emotion that to say the near-capacity audience was blown away would be an understatement. Brown is the composer-lyricist of such first-rate musicals as The Last Five Years and Parade, but he’s also a pianist of rare skill and a vocalist who possessesRead More »

[As always, you can get this newsletter delivered straight to your mailbox if you subscribe using the handy-dandy box on the home page of this site.] I shouldn’t be noticing the changing of the leaves or the chill in the air, I shouldn’t be aware of the sharp edge on the wind, I should be happily oblivious to all of that because I live in Los Angeles where the seasons never really change, but instead I am unexpectedly here in New York, so I get the ambiguous joy of watching autumn coming in, and I get to sit at aRead More »

I get a lot of requests for clarifications in the texts and scores of my shows, and more rarely I get e-mails asking for changes in a lyric or a key, but every once in a while, I get a letter like the one below, one which suggests an improvement for one of my shows and permission to implement it. I don’t generally have time to respond to most of these letters (these requests are supposed to be directed to MTI, who can handle most of them with boilerplate responses), but occasionally I feel obliged to get directly involved. ARead More »

Oh, I suspect there are many things in the world that can be blamed on Larry Blank, but only some of them are musical, and this is the story of one of those things. I made Larry’s acquaintance through our lawyer, Mark Sendroff, when I asked Mark for some recommendations for orchestrators. (Larry has done several charts over the years for my State Farm shows, and he is also an extraordinarily gifted conductor.) Larry and I had a good time hanging out, I think we probably had some form of mutual respect based on the fact that at some pointRead More »

So far, every aspect of casting “13” has come with a phalanx of caveats. Casting the workshop was difficult because, we were told, many kids’ agents wouldn’t submit their clients for a theatrical workshop during “pilot season,” not surprising when a talented (or at least telegenic) kid can make more money in one day of work on even a mediocre sitcom than that kid would make over the course of the entire six-week workshop process. Furthermore, many of the junior high schools and high schools that have strong drama programs wouldn’t let their kids audition for us because it wouldRead More »