Wednesday, May 13, 2020
I've found it punishingly hard to write music during these last nine weeks (nine weeks!), but I did manage to do this, a tribute to the great Bucky Pizzarelli and all the extraordinary jazz …
SOURCE: Jason Robert Brown at 02:24PM[SHARE]Friday, May 1, 2020
First we canceled the March show. We had planned a really beautiful show with Ashley Perez Flanagan, Zonya Love Johnson and Marcus Paul James for March 16, but then the social distancing ord…
SOURCE: Jason Robert Brown at 12:06AM[SHARE]Thursday, April 30, 2020
It's not my fault if Shawn Colvin wants to put up songs on Facebook for me to accompany.
SOURCE: YouTube at 08:32PM[SHARE]I'm a huge fan of Shawn Colvin, she's an amazing singer, distinctive and exquisitely musical down to every inhale, and she's a monster guitar player with the best right hand on the circuit, …
SOURCE: Jason Robert Brown at 03:35PM[SHARE]Thursday, April 23, 2020
Monday night, April 27, at 8 PM EST, I'm proud to host the first online show of the JRB SubCulture Residency, featuring maybe the two greatest singers on the planet Earth: my muse and inspir…
SOURCE: Jason Robert Brown at 11:43PM[SHARE]Monday, April 13, 2020
The great Mike Titlebaum, director of jazz studies at Ithaca, joins me for a typically restrained arrangement of the Beatles's "When I'm Sixty-Four" in isolation, also featuring Mike's overz…
SOURCE: YouTube at 08:32PM[SHARE]JRB & Georgia Stitt and the abominable snowman.
SOURCE: YouTube at 08:32PM[SHARE]Quarantine does strange things to people. In this case, it compelled my old college buddy Mike Titlebaum (now the Director of Jazz Studies at Ithaca College) to reach out to me and ask if I …
SOURCE: Jason Robert Brown at 03:25PM[SHARE]Wednesday, April 8, 2020
I have a friend who lives in Beijing, and by the time of the TADA! gala, he and his family had already been in lockdown for over a month. I remember not being able to imagine what that was l…
SOURCE: Jason Robert Brown at 10:51AM[SHARE]Thursday, April 2, 2020
Back in those long ago days when we could all still get together and make music and celebrate, Georgia and I were honored by our favorite youth theater company, TADA!, with a gala at Tribeca…
SOURCE: Jason Robert Brown at 10:15AM[SHARE]Wednesday, March 4, 2020
Back in the early 90s, when all the musicals seemed to be Cameron Mackintosh spectacles from across the ocean, every tenor in the musical theater tried to sound like an old British rock star…
SOURCE: Jason Robert Brown at 04:59PM[SHARE]Monday, February 17, 2020
In September of 2004, my friend Dan Elish and I did a private reading of the first twenty pages or so of a new musical we were working on called 13. We filled a room with thirteen kids, …
SOURCE: Jason Robert Brown at 02:03PM[SHARE]Thursday, February 13, 2020
A gloomy, rainy Monday night in the middle of winter in a small college town in Eastern Pennsylvania turned into a wonderful chance to make some music, tell some stories, and listen to one o…
SOURCE: Jason Robert Brown at 08:09AM[SHARE]Tuesday, February 11, 2020
Betty Buckley and I have been circling each other for over a quarter-century, always saying how much we love each other's work and how much we'd love to collaborate, but never knowing exactl…
SOURCE: Jason Robert Brown at 07:47PM[SHARE]Monday, January 20, 2020
I can't predict how 2020 is going to go, but I can tell you one thing: I was more than ready to be done with 2019. Show #56 of the SubCulture Residency was designed to start the year off rig…
SOURCE: Jason Robert Brown at 12:12AM[SHARE]Tuesday, December 17, 2019
Yesterday, December 16, I was the musical director of a memorial for my mentor, the legendary director and producer Hal Prince, at the Majestic Theater on Broadway, where The Phantom of the …
SOURCE: Jason Robert Brown at 10:31PM[SHARE]Tuesday, October 29, 2019
Audition story #1: On January 9, 2006, we had our first auditions for a workshop production of 13 at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles. A girl named Sara Niemietz came in " I had previousl…
SOURCE: Jason Robert Brown at 03:19PM[SHARE]Wednesday, October 23, 2019
Monday, September 16, 2019
In the summer of 1984, I signed up to be in the Rock Band program at French Woods. Every other kid in Rock Band that summer was a guitarist or a drummer; no one ever knew what to do with a k…
SOURCE: Jason Robert Brown at 06:48PM[SHARE]Monday, August 19, 2019
It feels like a cliché to write about a performer's "passion," such an overused word, and yet I can't think of any other way to discuss the experience of putting this show together with Ra…
SOURCE: Jason Robert Brown at 02:01AM[SHARE]Wednesday, July 31, 2019
Monday, July 29, 2019
Last night I went to Lincoln Center to see Grace McLean's thrilling musical, "In The Green." I have been a fan of Grace's for years, and she was my guest at a particularly wild SubCulture co…
SOURCE: Jason Robert Brown at 04:08PM[SHARE]Tuesday, July 23, 2019
I started writing Parade twenty-five years ago, in 1994, and today I happened to be doing some work in my storage unit when I found a couple of really fun pieces of history from that show. T…
SOURCE: Jason Robert Brown at 10:26PM[SHARE]Monday, July 1, 2019
Paul Mow had a dream of building a theater in the newly-revitalized Arts District of Benton Harbor/St. Joseph, Michigan, and as usual for Paul, he pushed and pushed and made it come true. I …
SOURCE: Jason Robert Brown at 06:44PM[SHARE]Sunday, June 2, 2019
Three years ago, I got a call from Michael McElroy of Broadway Inspirational Voices, asking me if I would participate in an outreach that BIV was doing with the Ronald McDonald House. I said…
SOURCE: Jason Robert Brown at 01:05AM[SHARE]Tuesday, May 28, 2019
What is the recipe for a Wayne Brady? You need a pound of generosity and, like, a ton of charm, and then fourteen gallons of talent, open up a can of fearlessness, and sprinkle at least four…
SOURCE: Jason Robert Brown at 10:11PM[SHARE]Thursday, May 16, 2019
Man, oh man, do I love Doris Day's singing. It's elegant but earthy, with her rich creamy voice that burrows deep into the chords and finds the perfect place to nestle, cozying up against th…
SOURCE: Jason Robert Brown at 11:02PM[SHARE]Friday, April 26, 2019
Let's be honest: some people sing better than others. And some people sing better than pretty much anyone. And one of those people is Alysha Umphress. I've been waiting for the chance to sin…
SOURCE: Jason Robert Brown at 03:56PM[SHARE]2019 marks the 50th anniversary of the American College Theater Festival, and I was honored to be asked to be the keynote entertainer at the Kennedy Center (in the same theater where I condu…
SOURCE: Jason Robert Brown at 01:28PM[SHARE]Tuesday, April 2, 2019
There is truly nothing more thrilling more me than stepping on to the stage of a historic theater and getting to add my own music to all the glorious sounds that preceded me. As I've now don…
SOURCE: Jason Robert Brown at 08:02PM[SHARE]Sunday, March 24, 2019
A wonderful return to St. Louis after four years, to play at the beautiful Grandel in front of an amazing audience (including Broadway legend and STL native Ken Page!) " and featuring a grea…
SOURCE: Jason Robert Brown at 11:16AM[SHARE]Loading more stories…
