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…
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 …
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…
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…
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…
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, …
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…
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…
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…
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 …
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…
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…
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 RaÅ
The post THE PRINCE OF BROADWAY appeared first on Jason Robert Brown.
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…
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…
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 …
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Here's how it works: At about four in the afternoon on a relentlessly rainy late winter day, your doorbell rings and you open the front door so your dog can jump on whoever has just arrived,…