Jason Robert Brown

2005-09-04
The Baltimore Sun
J. Wynn Rousuck

Bounding onto the small stage at Georgetown’s Blues Alley, lanky Jason Robert Brown takes command of the piano and whoops out the lyrics, “I started smiling./It’s not my style,” with the gusto of a rock musician – which he is.

A fortnight later, over the phone from his home in Los Angeles, Brown discusses musical theater with the insights of an insider – which he also is.

A 1999 Tony Award winner for the score of Parade, Brown recently released his first solo album, Wearing Someone Else’s Clothes, and is currently touring with his band, the Caucasian Rhythm Kings.

His two-person musical, The Last Five Years – chosen one of the 10 best shows of 2001 by Time magazine – opens at Everyman Theatre Friday. And on Oct. 16 and 17, he and the Rhythm Kings will give two concert performances at the theater.

“Jason’s music cuts to the quick of the emotional truth. Every song is a scene unto itself, almost a little play really. … It captures a moment in time with a sort of emotional snapshot that is so recognizable, so real and so multi-layered,” says Vincent M. Lancisi, Everyman’s artistic director and the director of The Last Five Years. “I have rarely come across a composer who produced music as honest and driven as Jason.”

Brown is part of a select group of musical theater composers – others include Adam Guettel, Michael John LaChiusa and Jeanine Tesori – who are often described as the successors of Stephen Sondheim.

But though Brown won a Tony for his first, and only, Broadway show, he harbors some ambivalence toward the Great White Way – and, for that matter, toward just about everything. As he sees it, that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

“I sort of live my life with a built-in level of ambiguity,” he acknowledges. “I’m 35 and have never been as pretty as a lot of rock stars. Like: ‘I want it; I don’t want it.’ The same goes with being a big Broadway composer. … That ambivalence forces me to do idiosyncratic work, forces me to do work that is interesting to me. It informs a lot of choices I make.”

Forward, backward
Fortunately, Brown is talented enough to move easily from one stage to another. The Last Five Years is a perfect example. The show was his response to the failure of Parade. Although Parade had the cachet of a libretto by Alfred Uhry (Driving Miss Daisy) and direction by the legendary Harold Prince, the true-life tale of a 1915 Georgia lynching closed after 84 performances.

“Parade was an exhausting, long slog of a show to write,” Brown says. “It involved so many people and a big cast, which meant there wasn’t much chance of getting it done much after that. I said, ‘This theater thing is for the nuts. I’m not going to do that.'”

Instead, he decided to create a song cycle that was intended for two singers and a symphony orchestra. The more he wrote, however, the more the piece seemed destined for the stage. “I do what I do, and what I do is I write for the theater,” he admits.

His subject was a five-year relationship between an aspiring novelist and a budding actress. But he added a twist. The man’s story is told from start to finish; the woman’s, from finish to start. The songs are all solos, with the exception of one duet, which they sing at their wedding, in the middle of the show.

“I wanted to tell a not-complicated story about two people who fall in love and then fall out of it. If you tell it in chronological order, you’re always going to know what happens next. In trying to find a way to counteract that, I came up with the idea that she could go backward and he could go forward. The minute I started writing it, I felt it was the exact right idea,” he says, adding that this conceit also works thematically. “The metaphor of the piece is quite clear – people who cannot connect.”

The Last Five Years (which stars Betsy Morgan and Josh Davis at Everyman) has had more than 200 productions in the United States and in foreign countries ranging from Italy to Korea. But its New York debut was rocky. Commissioned by Lincoln Center, the chamber musical was supposed to move there after making its world premiere in Chicago in May 2001.

Then Brown’s ex-wife, an actress named Theresa O’Neill, threatened legal action, claiming the piece came too close to real life. Brown made some changes (disclosing them, he says, would violate the settlement). In March 2002, The Last Five Years opened at off-Broadway’s Minetta Lane Theatre.

Touring with band
Brown’s rock-singing career is a direct offshoot of that New York production. The composer played piano in the show’s pit orchestra, and when the run ended, he recalls, “I said to the band, ‘Why don’t we keep doing this?'”

Together with guitarist Gary Sieger and bassist Randy Landau, he tested the waters in Los Angeles before moving on to New York. They are now on a tour that will take them, after Baltimore, to cities including Boston, San Antonio, Kansas City and London.

The band’s name, the Caucasian Rhythm Kings, was actually coined years earlier, when Brown was invited to perform at a birthday party for Harold Prince. Prince’s wife asked how she should announce the band, and Brown says, “In a moment of crazed jocularity, I said, ‘Call us the Caucasian Rhythm Kings.'” The name stuck.

Lancisi, who attended Brown’s New York performance with the Caucasian Rhythm Kings in June, says: “I felt he left a piece of himself on stage – like somehow that performance actually cost him. Not only was he exhausted when I was talking to him afterward, but I watched his passion sort of bleed on stage.”

For Brown, that passion almost always begins with a song title. He sits at the piano singing the title over and over while he works out the melody. “I like to be able to encapsulate a song in a phrase, then I know what the song is about. What I like to know when I’m sitting down is the central idea,” he says, explaining that he doesn’t always keep the initial title. As influences, he lists Paul Simon, Billy Joel, Sondheim, Leonard Bernstein, even King Crimson.

‘Was always creating’
Brown has been composing songs from the time his fingers first hit the keyboard. Growing up in Ossining, N.Y., he began badgering his parents to get him a piano from age 6 or 7. Finally, they moved his grandfather’s old piano into the house. “Literally, it showed up and I sat down and I started playing,” Brown says.

“He was just playing music he liked hearing in his mind. He was always naturally creating,” says his father, Stuart, who is retired from the decorative bathroom fixture business.

His son’s sense of humor surfaced early as well. “His first recital, Jason didn’t really practice, but when he got up to play piano he did like a Victor Borge routine – he turned the sheet music upside down; he fell off the piano seat; he did everything funny,” his father recalls.

Brown’s resistance to sticking to his lessons continued after he entered the prestigious Eastman School of Music in Rochester, N.Y. “I hated it. I was not built for academia,” he says bluntly. “It’s not that I wasn’t learning anything, but Eastman was a very conservative school. I knew then what I know now – that I wanted to do everything.”

He dropped out after two years, then spent a year teaching at a performing arts school in Miami before moving to New York. He was working in a piano bar when a patron admired one of his songs. She turned out to be Daisy Prince, Harold’s daughter. That led to Brown’s first show, a revue titled Songs for a New World, which Daisy Prince directed. A few years later, Harold Prince hired him to write the score of Parade, after Sondheim turned down the job.

Despite winning Brown a Tony, Parade was not a door-opening big break. “Broadway is really the home of the commercial theater and Parade was not a commercial success. I think people didn’t think of me – ‘Oh, that’s the guy you go to to write your next Broadway show,’ ” he says.

The next five years
The show did open another door, however. When Parade went on tour, Brown served as its music director. His assistant was a composer named Georgia Stitt. They were married two years ago and are expecting their first child – a daughter – l
ater this month.

The baby isn’t Brown’s only forthcoming production. He’s also working on two new musicals – 13, which he describes as “a zany, real comedy” with a cast of thirteen 13-year-olds, and a stage adaptation of the movie Honeymoon in Vegas.

In addition, HarperCollins is turning one of the songs from The Last Five Years – “The Schmuel Song,” a musical fable about a tailor – into a children’s book to be illustrated by Harry Potter artist Mary GrandPre. And, two days a week, Brown teaches composition and acting at the University of Southern California.

So where does the creator of The Last Five Years see himself in the next five years? “I’ve been finding a lot of joy in my life in the last five years that had not existed before. Up until I was in my 30s, I was a very driven, very negative presence,” Brown says.

“I’m sort of very happy right now. I’m not outrageously ambitious. I’ve got shows I’m writing that I want to see come to life, and songs I’m writing that I want to see come to life, and babies that I’m waiting to see come to life. I’m sort of not asking much of the world right now. I spent a lot of time clawing and scraping. I feel very comfortable being able to write.”

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