The JRB Weblog

FROM THE FRIENDLY SKIES

Mon, 24 Mar 2008 23:10:38 -0800

What's new, Buenos Aires? I'm on a flight from New York to Los Angeles, the eighth cross-country flight I've taken so far in 2008. While I don't much enjoy the flying, this time in the air tends to be mercifully free of distractions. Generally, I've spent that time literally staring into space, just grateful to have my mind clear for a couple of hours; but a bunch of readers have actually written me vaguely threatening letters, taking me to task for not updating this blog, so I thought I'd take a minute and hip you to what's been going on since January lest things get ugly in cyberspace.

It's been long enough since I last wrote that most of the things to which I alluded in my "Blind Items" entry in January have finally been publicized. I'll take the opportunity now to clarify.

As has been announced elsewhere, "13" is doing a pre-Broadway run at the Norma Terris Theater at Goodspeed, in Chester CT, starting May 9. The show is substantially different, in every respect, from the version produced in Los Angeles last year. First of all, just in terms of the writing itself, we've replaced more than half of the songs, re-focussed the story, added a half-hour of running time (and with it, an intermission), and probably changed every single line of the book except for four really good jokes. Paradoxically, the show is longer because it's leaner and tighter, and there is now a much straighter line from the beginning to the end. A lesson I learned this year with both "13" and the London revision of Parade is that it's all too easy to let a secondary character hijack the show. I know we solved it in Parade by cutting down Britt Craig's role; I think we've now solved it in "13".

But apart from the rewriting, there are lots of other changes at "13". Most importantly, we have a new director, Jeremy Sams, who has been invaluable both in his ability to cut the fat away from the story and in his understanding of the way music functions in the show. The fact that Jeremy is a formidable musician in his own right doesn't hurt. In fact, Jeremy is a terrifying polymath; a quick look at his résumé shows that he has directed successful plays and musicals on Broadway and the West End, as well as having written film scores, lyrics and books of musicals, and translations and adaptations of classic and obscure plays (from several different languages, all of which he speaks fluently). Dan and I are convinced that in the event of some horrible catastrophe, Jeremy is perfectly equipped to take over any and all jobs on the show, ours included. (Mercifully, he's a lousy actor, and I'm sure his dancing is perfectly execrable, so the kids needn't feel threatened.)

Our choreographer is Christopher Gattelli, whose work is represented in New York not just by Altar Boyz but by two equally dazzling Broadway revivals this year, Sunday in the Park with George and South Pacific. Our set and costume designer also worked on Sunday, the masterful David Farley. We have an absolutely first-class lighting designer, Tony Award-winner Brian MacDevitt; a terrifically gifted sound designer, Jon Weston; and our musical director is none other than Tom Kitt, whose own show (the thrilling Next To Normal) just closed after a powerful production at Second Stage. Going into rehearsal knowing that this team is supporting us is a tremendously reassuring, even empowering, experience.

None of that would matter if we didn't have the talent onstage to bring this show to life, and I'm over the moon about the cast and band that we hired. Assembling the cast took a long time, and the final group that's going into rehearsal in two weeks comes from all over the country – New York and the tri-state area, of course, but also Los Angeles, Texas, and Florida – and while some of the kids have résumés longer than mine, others have never done a professional production before.

The band is an equally amazing group, and the band audition day was the most fun I've had in a long time; sixty-five awesomely gifted teenagers showed up and made glorious music together for seven hours. The hardest part was figuring out who to send home; all of the grownups in the room felt that we could have randomly picked five kids at any given time and ended up with a superb band. Needless to say, the five that made it to the end are exceptional. I know that kid musicians are not as used to the arbitrary and bizarre process of auditioning as kid actors are, so I wanted to take this space to thank all the musicians for coming out and playing so beautifully and rolling with the experience. Having a "kid band" is a huge experiment for a Broadway musical, but I know it's going to pay off handsomely.

So that's "13", which, as you can imagine, has been taking up the overwhelming majority of my time. But there are some other things going on worth noting.

Last week, Lauren Kennedy and I took to the stage at Birdland for a concert performance of The Last Five Years with the original New York orchestra (thoroughly terrifying pictures available here, and don't say I didn't warn you). Tickets sold out in three hours, and when we added a second show, that sold out within an hour. Neither Lauren nor I could have anticipated the kind of excitement that this event generated. As it was, neither of us was performing under optimal conditions – I'd been swamped with "13" auditions and pre-production and hadn't sung in public for months, and Lauren had just gotten off a plane from England the day before after doing two sold-out concerts at the Menier Chocolate Factory. Maybe the fact that we were both shellshocked accounts for how intensely emotional the concerts were; or maybe it was the fact that we hadn't done the show together since 2003; or maybe it's just a ridiculously emotional show. Whatever the reason, I walked off the stage at the end of the show feeling both triumphant and that I had just been run over by a Hummer. Lauren and the band all did sterling work, and I was honored and truly moved by their commitment to what remains an intensely personal piece.

Meanwhile, the Kennedy Center announced the forthcoming premiere of a new project I'm working on, an adaptation of E.B. White's classic children's book The Trumpet of the Swan for narrator and orchestra, conceived and adapted by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Marsha Norman. It will be something like Peter and the Wolf crossed with Appalachian Spring, if you can imagine that; it's a wonderful and liberating challenge for me to be able just to write music without having to put lyrics on top of it. More news about this as things progress.

And on a totally different front, the people at Laura Geringer Books have been keeping busy with my work. In August, they're publishing a novel Dan and I wrote based on "13"; and later this year, a children's picture book adapted from "The Schmuel Song" is coming out, with some unbelievable artwork by the incredible Mary GrandPré. So come holiday time, I'll be able to walk into my neighborhood Borders and see two of my own books for sale! Now that is an unexpected turn in this crazy career of mine.

There's other news too, but we just started our descent into LAX, so I'm wrapping this up. Rehearsals for Goodspeed start on April 7, so I'll be on the East Coast for a while, but I will have to jump back to California for two concerts in May (one at Pepperdine, one at Citrus College) as part of the Festival of New American Musicals. I hope to see you on one side of the country or the other soon! (Or perhaps I'll meet you on a 727 somewhere over the Midwest. I'll be the one staring into space.)

As your reward for getting through this entire megilla, here's a little music. As I noted above, we've cut a lot of the songs that were in the Los Angeles production of "13". The unkindest cut of all was "Being A Geek," which is a song I have been doing in my concerts for a couple of years now and which I love deeply. In the song, Evan (whose parents are in the midst of a titanic divorce) tries to explain to his rabbi in Indiana why it's so important to be popular. When we recorded the score in L.A., we got to preserve this heartfelt performance by Ricky Ashley, the boys of the cast, and the entire amazing band. Enjoy!

"Being A Geek"
written for "13" (2007)
Music and lyrics by Jason Robert Brown
Ricky Ashley: Evan
Tyler Mann: Rabbi
Seth Zibalese, Christian Vandal, Ellington Ratliff, Ryan Ogburn: Backup geeks
JRB: piano
Charlie Rosen: keyboards
Molly Bernstein: lead guitar
Chris Raymond: rhythm guitar
Nehemiah Williams: electric bass
Jamie Eblen: drums
David O: musical director
Craig Wolynez: band director
Recorded and mixed by Jeffrey Lesser at the Record Plant, Los Angeles, February 24 & 25, 2007 (Engineer: Eddie DeLena)

SOUND BLOG #11: THE LOST MUSICAL, Part 2

Wed, 30 Jan 2008 15:55:08 -0800

(The first part of this epic can be read here.)

I've been avoiding finishing this story, it occurs to me, because I can't assign blame as easily as I'd like. I think I've learned over these last twelve years that some projects just aren't going to play out well, and The Moneyman was ultimately one of those. Nonetheless, I've been holding a massive grudge for a long time and it's weird writing it down and feeling it dissipate.

According to my notes, I wrote the first song for what was then called The Predator's Ball on January 18, 1996, and I wrote the Finale on April 27. For most of those three months, I was essentially writing in a vacuum. Karole had given me the script but had told me to treat it "as a guide," so I freely jettisoned entire sections and characters, trying my best to preserve what I assumed Karole's intentions to be. She, meanwhile, was mostly in Italy, trying to tame the ridiculous bureaucracy she had inherited. (In addition to choreographing the piece for MaggioDanza, Karole had been named the artistic director of the company, a job I can't imagine she really wanted.)

I would fax her the new sections of the script when I could, but showing her the music was more of a challenge. Most of what I was writing wasn't playable on the piano, and the only way I could record anything was on a little Sony portable cassette recorder that I carried around with me, so every couple of weeks, I'd sing and scream and bang into the tiny microphone and then ship the resulting tape off to Italy. Inevitably, she'd fax me back saying she had notes or ideas or wanted me to restore something, but it was very hard to communicate in any collaborative way. Whenever Karole was actually in the States, she was running around doing fundraising for her premiere Italian season, and so we'd steal an hour here and there if we could find a piano, but those meetings were awkward and tense; I could tell that she was genuinely happy with a lot, maybe even most, of the work I was doing, but it was equally clear that she was not enjoying having to fight about her "vision" with someone she considered (at best) her employee.

What built up, therefore, was an amazing array of passive-aggressive gestures, for which I was just as responsible as she was. Let's say I cut something in the script. I'd call Karole to tell her I was going to cut it. She wouldn't return my call for four days because she didn't want to have to fight about it. Finally, she'd call with some lame excuse and, after pretending she didn't even remember what I'd called about in the first place, she'd ask me to restore the section I wanted to cut. I'd assume we were having a collaborative dialogue and try to explain why I thought the piece would be better off without that bit. She'd shut down the conversation by saying "I don't want to do a musical comedy," and say the section had to be restored. (Musical comedy was Karole's euphemism for "corny" and "commercial". She used it like a cudgel every time she didn't like something of mine, even when it wasn't remotely appropriate to the conversation at hand.) I'd pretend to agree, then I'd move on and "forget" to deal with it, knowing that we didn't have enough time to keep going backwards. She'd then send a new draft of the script with that section not only restored but expanded. I would let her calls go to the answering machine for a week. And so on. Neither of us was behaving particularly responsibly, but I reasoned that I didn't really have any choice; I had to write some version of something from one end to the other or there wouldn't be anything to present in Florence. I decided that the premiere in Italy would be a draft, a first shot, and an opportunity for me and Karole to look at what we had created and determine how best to proceed from there. Surely Karole saw it that way too, right? How could we possibly expect to create a polished finished product together when we weren't even in the same country?

Once Act I had been written, at the end of March, I set up a recording session. Karole actually came to the studio, and for once we had a real collaboration. She had good ears for what I was doing, and would ask me to extend certain sections or cut others, and occasionally I'd see her in the corner twitching or tapping, as though her limbs were just about to explode outward. The music was exciting and the band played it beautifully, and Karole and I both left the session energized and excited for the work ahead.

Unfortunately, she had to get back to Italy to start rehearsal. I had another month left to get the score finished, and it became immediately clear that I was more or less on my own; Karole was a continent away working fourteen-hour days, and whatever conflicts we might have about the second act would have to be resolved when I got to Italy for the final week of rehearsals before the premiere. Meanwhile, we had hired six New York actors who were going to be featured in the piece in Italy, and so I had to rehearse them at the same time I was writing the rest of the piece.

Oh, also: at the end of May, a week before I had to go to Italy, I would be having the very first reading of a new show I had been working on with Alfred Uhry and Hal Prince. So it's possible that I got a little distracted.

In Part 3, la merda hits il ventilatore.

Two very different pieces from the score:

Michael Milken, financial wunderkind, wants a job at Drexel, which is not the sexiest white-shoe Wall Street firm but rather a scrappy underdog where Milken believes he'll have more influence. Perhaps someone out there with an actual interest in finance will correct me, but I believe a "fallen angel" is a term for a stock that is considerably undervalued or underperforming, and here we decided that Milken would use that term to lobby Fred Joseph (the head of the firm) for a job by saying he recognized Drexel as an underperforming asset. (Are you bored to death?) I thought, since we were positing Milken as some kind of savior, that a gospel-style piece would be fun. So here's Milken, with a choir of backup Milkens, selling himself to the firm.

I met Sal Spicola when we both played in Billy Porter's band. Turned out Sal had been on the road as Joe Walsh's sax player for years, and then he was the "solo saxophone" in Miss Saigon for the ENTIRE RUN. I loved his playing then, I still love it now, and when I put together the band for these recording sessions, I knew Sal had to be a big featured part of it. Check out his deeply funky alto playing on this track.

"Reborn (The Fallen Angel)"
from The Moneyman (1996)
Music and lyrics by Jason Robert Brown
JRB: piano, vocals
Kevin Kuhn: electric guitar
Randy Landau: electric bass
Sal Spicola: alto sax
Tom Partington: drums
Robert McEwan: congas and percussion
Recorded and mixed by Jeffrey Lesser
Instruments recorded at RPM Studios, NY, NY, 5/1/96 (Engineer: Suzanne Dyer)
Vocals recorded at Warehouse Recording Studio, NY, NY, 9/17/96 (Engineer: Billy Eric)

And now for something completely different: the trading floor at the New York Stock Exchange at the beginning of Milken's tenure. Every time you hear that big ringing bell, that signified a major trade having been made, and the choreography made clear that Milken was more and more at the center of those big trades.

I wanted the music to reflect the aggressive and testosterone-heavy atmosphere of the trading floor in the late 1970's. The whole dancing company would be men in suits, and I thought it would be appropriate if the music were very primal. Basically, this entire section is made up of only three chords (each paired with a specific bass note), introduced one at a time and gradually interacting (it's actually almost entirely serial and twelve-tone, which are two things that I don't often associate with my own work). This is as minimal as anything I've ever written, and feels in some ways like a nightmare tap dance co-written by Milton Babbitt and Frank Zappa. (Two other things I don't often associate with my own work.)

The featured musician on this track is Tom Partington, who played drums for me on Songs for a New World, Parade, and about ten thousand other projects until I decided to stop using drummers altogether. Tom is a sensational colorist, and you'll hear here how much fun he has playing against and around the programmed track. (Incidentally, there are some hiccups here and there in the time because we recorded this in one frantic take. If ProTools had been around back then, this thing would be smooth as buttah.)

"Milken On The Floor"
from The Moneyman (1996)
Music and lyrics by Jason Robert Brown
JRB: piano, synthesizer programming
Kevin Kuhn: acoustic and electric guitars
Randy Landau: electric bass
Sal Spicola: bass clarinet
Tom Partington: drums
Robert McEwan: xylophone
Mia Wu: violin
Recorded and mixed by Jeffrey Lesser
Instruments recorded at RPM Studios, NY, NY, 5/1/96 (Engineer: Suzanne Dyer)
Vocals recorded at Warehouse Recording Studio, NY, NY, 9/17/96 (Engineer: Billy Eric)

I'll conclude this story in a couple of weeks. Now back to writing "13"!

13 AMAZING KIDS

Thu, 24 Jan 2008 20:43:07 -0800

Standing (l to r): Kathryn Foley (Kendra); Elizabeth Gillies (Lucy); Hannah Freeman (Patrice); Evan Daves (Simon); Malcolm Morano (Brett); Eamon Foley (Richie); Danielle Freed (Molly); Sascha Peralta-Ramos (Cassie); Ariana Grande (Charlotte); JJ Singleton (Malcolm); Alex Greenzeig (Eddie); Aaron Simon Gross (Archie); On the floor: Douglas Fabian (Evan). Photo courtesy Vanessa Brown

We spent two weeks in January reading the newest draft of "13" at Ripley-Grier Studios in Manhattan with a wonderful group of actors. I had so much fun with the cast that I just wanted to let you see them all together. This is the fourth time we've cast the show (we did a New York reading in September 2004, the workshop in Los Angeles, the production at the Mark Taper Forum, and now this one), and we're going into more casting for Goodspeed almost immediately, but I feel so much gratitude to every performer who's given their time to our show. "13" keeps getting better because the actors keep teaching us what we're doing wrong and what we're doing right. Thanks to these thirteen awesome performers pictured above, and all the other "13" alumni!

BLIND ITEMS

Wed, 23 Jan 2008 14:38:59 -0800

You've been asking lots of good questions, so I've been sending emails, calling, dropping by unannounced, anything I can do to get some confirmation of the rumors I'm hearing about what I'm doing in 2008. Unfortunately, I can't get me to return a phone call, and I haven't written myself back. No one else is willing to talk on the record either, so the stories below will just have to be considered unsubstantiated gossip until such time as I can corner myself and get me to 'fess up.

"13": Well, if word on the street is to be believed, there's a whole mess of excitement going on with this new show. I'm hearing that there's a new director, Jeremy Sams, who's brought on board a whole slate of new designers and an exciting new choreographer (could it be the guy from that Christian boy-band musical? No one's talking!). A reading was just held in New York (I snuck in and saw the amazing cast), and word is that the show will be opening at a regional theater in the Northeast this spring prior to a Broadway bow in the fall!

Honeymoon In Vegas: A top-secret reading of this new show by me and Andrew Bergman took place last July in Manhattan, starring Norbert Leo Butz, Lauren Kennedy and Terrence Mann. Our spies were there, and they report it was a smash hit. A major Broadway producer is said to be negotiating even now for the rights to present the show on Broadway in 2009! Is it true? Only I know for sure, and I can't be reached for comment!

JRB in Concert: Sure, there are two concert dates for the Caucasian Rhythm Kings listed in May as part of the Festival of New American Musicals, but otherwise, seems like JRB's gone into hiding. My sources hear different: apparently, I will be doing a concert at Birdland on March 17. No one at the club will confirm or deny the story! When I bumped into me in the bathroom this morning, I refused to discuss the matter at all. Suspicious! What am I hiding?

Parade Returns to the U.S.: Surely after all the excitement caused by Rob Ashford's thrilling production of Parade at London's Donmar Warehouse, U.S. audiences can expect this groundbreaking show to make its way across the pond. Though a representative from my office issued a terse "We have no statement at this time," I'm hearing that a major American regional theater will be bringing that production to their stage in 2009. I'm said to be very excited about this new development, but repeated inquiries went unanswered!

Kennedy Center Project: The Internet's been tingling with rumors that I'm writing a new concert piece with Pulitzer-winning playwright Marsha Norman to be premiered this Christmas at the Kennedy Center. But is it adapted from a legendary and beloved children's book, or is it an oratorio based on the memoirs of Lance Bass? Them lips are sealed! With those two crazy authors, it's sure to be controversial!

Whatever happens, it sure sounds like an exciting year for me! Since I have to follow JRB around the country, it'd be great if I could get my calendar straightened out! Let's hope someone shows up soon who can set the record straight!

A NEW 'PARADE' RECORDING

Sat, 15 Dec 2007 14:02:04 -0800

It hadn't occurred to me that anyone would offer to do another cast album for Parade. I figured, the 1998 recording is still in print, it sounds unbelievably good, and, given the kind of doldrums in which the recording industry finds itself these days, I'm amazed that anyone records musical theatre at all anymore. So with all that in mind, I couldn't imagine that a version of the show with a reduced orchestra and cast with no stars that was playing a limited run in a theater with less than two hundred seats would attract the attention of any record company.

Apparently, I was wrong. Just before press night at the Donmar, I was called to a meeting to discuss a possible cast album with John Craig, the president of First Night Records, a company dedicated solely to recording musicals which carries in its catalogue the original British recordings of Les Misérables, Miss Saigon and Blood Brothers, all of which must have sold very nicely over the years.

I was very excited about doing the album for three reasons. First, the cast at the Donmar were astonishing, both as singers and actors, and I wanted to be able to preserve and relive those performances. Second, David Cullen wrote an absolutely gorgeous set of new orchestrations that completely reimagined the sound of the show. And thirdly, there were several new songs and fragments that I had written and I planned to include those in the published version, so it would be great for theater companies putting on the show to have this album as a reference.

Jeffrey Lesser has produced every album of my work since Songs for a New World, and I was delighted to find out he was available and interested to do this recording, even though it would mean he had to fly over to London for three frantic days in between sessions for The Wonder Pets. Once Jeffrey was on board, I realized that we had an opportunity to do something very different and special with this album.

The director of my high school plays was a big Gilbert and Sullivan freak, and he turned me on to all the D'Oyly Carte recordings from the fifties. What I liked best about those recordings was the fact that they included all the dialogue. Don't ask me why that mattered to me, the dialogue in Gilbert and Sullivan isn't remotely interesting, but I felt like those albums respected the work by including the libretti and therefore they made me respect the work too. At Finkelstein Memorial Library, there were a couple of spoken-word recordings of complete plays as well – I fondly remember a Glass Menagerie with Montgomery Clift and Julie Harris, and Pygmalion with Michael Redgrave – and I eagerly devoured those. Then I discovered the rarest subgroup of all, Broadway musicals recorded with their books intact. There weren't (and aren't) many; offhand, I can only think of three: The Most Happy Fella, Cyrano (a musical version of the show from 1973 starring Christopher Plummer), and – most important to me – the 1973 Chelsea Theatre production of Candide directed by Hal Prince. I remember those albums viscerally; even though Cyrano wasn't very good, I fondly recall the A&M label on the individual LP's and the joy of following along with the lyrics printed in the gatefold. I played Candide until I wore through the grooves. I checked it out from the library so often that they might as well have taken it out of the circulating collection.

So what I proposed for the Donmar Parade album was a return to the style of those albums: record every word and every note and treat it like a radio play, an immersive experience. If you wanted to hear your favorite lynching musical with a big orchestra and chorus, there was already a recording that did that. But if you wanted to hear how the show functioned, how it all worked together, dialogue and lyrics and music and orchestration, this would be that document.

Jeffrey actually hunted down the Candide LP's on GEMM (a very valuable resource if you're looking for second-hand and out-of-print recordings), and I sent him my Sweeney Todd CD's. Those two gave him a good idea of the template. Then we set up the sessions: I annotated a copy of the script with blocking for the actors so they knew which microphones to go to at different points in the scripts and songs (there were only eight mics for fifteen actors), and we divided the show into eight sections which would be run in their entirety, two takes each. I couldn't get back to London for the sessions, but Tom Murray, the musical director, sent me reports. Apparently, it was quite a scene. But the minute I heard the tapes, I knew it had been worth it.

After the recording in London, the session tapes were sent to me in Los Angeles, and a wonderful ProTools editor named Jon Baker went through all six hours of material with me, picking the best takes and sewing them all together into a coherent piece. Then we sent those edits to Jeffrey in New York, who mixed them all in between his Wonder Pets commitments, mixing Andréa Burns's album and recording Xanadu. Finally, the album was mastered in New York and sent back to London for pressing. We compressed the schedule as tightly as possible because First Night was desperate to have the album out before the show closed at the Donmar. (Didn't make it, as it turns out. But we all certainly moved fast!)

But hey: the album's out now, and it's totally everything I wanted it to be. It's not as effects-heavy as the Candide or Sweeney albums, but it's a very intimate and visceral experience. I thought the dialogue might be tough to listen to in the car, but it turns out to be a lot of fun; you just get on this ride and it doesn't stop! And more importantly, the cast sound magnificent. You'd never know listening to the album that they were in the middle of an eight-show week. They sound invigorated and invested and entirely at the top of their game. The musicians also clearly enjoyed putting this score down for posterity and they play their hearts out. I'm very proud of the album, and I think it reflects exactly what we wanted to accomplish at the Donmar: not just a reduction of the show, but a version of the show that worked like chamber music, where everyone in the cast and orchestra had to work off of each other to make the piece come to life.

Furthermore, there's a booklet with all the lyrics and a lot of very swell photos from the show, and even a little bonus DVD with interviews of me and Alfred Uhry and Rob Ashford, as well as our designer, Christopher Oram, and the artistic director of the Donmar, Michael Grandage. A very sexy package altogether.

So perhaps you might find it to be a good Chanukah present for the show-tune queen in your life? Even if that person is you? The First Night folk would prefer that you get it directly from their site: First Night Records. But if you're US-based, you might find it considerably less expensive to go through Footlight Records or Amazon's marketplace. Just don't download it for free someplace. First of all, you'll miss out on the groovy booklet. Secondly, it makes it entirely unlikely that anyone will ever do an album this extravagant in the future.

Enjoy the album, and Happy Holidays to you all!

"I WANNA AUDITION FOR '13', DAMMIT!"

Tue, 06 Nov 2007 14:44:14 -0800

[Hail, fine people. This entry is old and has now been superseded by another entry. If you want more information about auditioning for "13", then go hither and follow the instructions therein.]

You've heard about my new show, 13. You've heard rumbles that there's going to be a Broadway production. You've listened to the songs on my website. You've read the incredible reviews from the LA production. You're between 11 and 17 years old, or you're the parent of an extraordinarily talented 11-through-17-year-old. You think this show is everything you've ever dreamed of and you want to arrange an audition.

Great!

I would love to tell you more details about our production schedule, our creative team, our audition process, all of it. But I can't tell you anything. Why? Because our producer employs seven very large men with truncheons for the sole purpose of keeping me from shooting off my mouth before he's ready to announce anything. And he's apparently not yet ready to announce anything.

BUT!

If you have a legitimate question about casting (particularly if you were one of the kids we called back earlier this year from the summer camp auditions), our casting director has thrown out a lifeline.

Mark Simon – beloved by all, feared by many – is in charge of casting 13, and he has agreed to field whatever phone calls come his way about auditions for the show. He won't answer emails, but he will answer phone calls (or at least return them). So, this is his office phone number:

Redacted. Sorry. Too late.

It's very generous of Mark to take this on, so be nice to him.

I'll add a small personal caveat, and I hope I don't sound too harsh about this: whenever I tell anyone about this show, the first thing they ask about is the parents. "Oh my God," they say, "you must have some good stories about stage parents!" Actually, I say, we don't. And the reason we don't is that the minute a parent gets out of line, we take their child out of consideration. Since we're going to be stuck with the parent if we cast the child, we don't want to take the chance of being imprisoned with unpleasant or inappropriate people for the length of a contract (or even for the length of a rehearsal process). So if you suspect that you're even a little bit of Mama Rose, take your Paxil before you call, and don't forget that, in this particular instance, you actually are reflecting on your teenager. Okay?

That's the news, y'all. I'll be back with another blog soon!

All best,
Jason Robert Brown

REVIVAL

Sun, 07 Oct 2007 11:49:41 -0800

To compare the ecstatic critical reception of the Donmar production of Parade that just opened to the considerably more reserved response nine years ago, you might think we'd started from scratch and overhauled the entire show. In fact, it's pretty much the same piece it always was, except for the new happy ending where Leo and Mary tap dance into Heaven together.

I'm kidding, I'm kidding, it's a samba.

Truly, though, if you only know Parade through the original cast album, you'll maybe notice two or three changes. For those of you who've actually done the show, or have a photographic recall of the time you saw it, the show is really about 80-85% the same, but you'll notice many of the differences, and I think you'll agree with me that they're all for the better. Here's a basic summary of the changes we made, and why we made them:

1. It used to be an epic, now it's a chamber piece. If we had done nothing to the show but agreed to let the Donmar cut down the size of the cast and orchestra, that alone would have been a substantial revision. I was hired by Hal Prince to write "an American opera," and Alfred and Hal and I deliberately made the choice that Parade should be big. We opened at Lincoln Center with a cast of thirty-six and an orchestra of twenty. Because of the size of the Donmar (only 260 seats), there was no way to recreate the size of that production, and so we reduced the cast to fifteen and the orchestra to nine. (Even at those numbers, it's the biggest show the Donmar have ever done.) Therefore, everything about the show is tighter, sharper, smaller, more aggressive. I'm not sure that always works in the show's favor, but much of the time it certainly does. Inevitably, the focus of the show changed, and the most obvious respect in which the dynamic shifted is that the only two actors who don't double or triple other parts are the actors playing Leo and Lucille. Therefore, we recognize them always as "other," as "different." Similarly, the importance of other characters diminished because they were being doubled and tripled: the actor who plays Governor Slaton also plays Britt Craig, for example, which makes you watch both of those characters differently. And which led us to...

2. Britt Craig is not the star of the show. When we started working on Parade in 1994, we made an outline that differed in many respects from the final production, not least of which was that Britt Craig, the reporter who broke the Leo Frank story, served as a narrator and the audience's stand-in. We began writing the show by following the outline, which had a big introductory number for Britt called "Big News". As we went on writing, Britt became less and less important to the storytelling, but we had given him such a big fabulous introduction that we felt obliged to keep him in the forefront of the narrative. This became particularly problematic in Act Two, where there really was nothing for him to do other than occasionally tell us about the way the rest of the world was reacting to the case. All along, I kept saying that the problem was that we hadn't given Britt Craig enough to do after such a big introduction. In fact, the problem was the opposite: we shouldn't have given Britt Craig such a big introduction because he just wasn't important enough. So when Alfred and I sat down this spring to reassess the show, we decided to just cut "Big News" and let Britt Craig assume his natural tertiary position in the narrative. I've watched this production eight or nine times, and I've never missed it. Luckily, the song is preserved (with Evan Pappas's marvelous performance and a truly awesome orchestration) on the original cast album.

3. Dorsey needed some help in Act Two. I always loved Act One because it set up such a grand panorama of characters and swung them into motion in what I thought was a very elegant way, but I felt like Act Two focussed so tightly on Leo and Lucille that we lost some of that panorama. (Audiences seemed to respond exactly the opposite way: they'd seem confused and overwhelmed throughout the first act, but sit riveted and engaged during the second.) As we trimmed down the show and tried to draw straighter lines for each of the characters, we realized that we did a great job in Act One of setting up Hugh Dorsey, the district attorney, but he disappeared in Act Two, and we missed him. Furthermore, we had a whole song given to Judge Roan, a character who nobody cared about and most people probably didn't recognize. So we converted "Letter to the Governor" into an entirely new piece that would point up Dorsey's political ambition and explain the undercurrent of fury that blows up during "Where Will You Stand When The Flood Comes?". It's now a great duet for the Judge and Dorsey called "The Glory." In order to write the song, however, Alfred and I did have to change a bit of history (not for the first time in the creation of this piece): according to the books, Judge Roan did in fact write a letter on his deathbed to the Governor questioning the Frank verdict, and that letter convinced Slaton to re-open the case. According to our show in this new version, the Judge thinks it's a mistake for Slaton to get mixed up in the Frank business, and he grooms Dorsey as a potential successor.

4. Goodbye Newt, Hello Minnie. All that doubling and tripling of characters had some wonderful effects on the play, but sometimes it worked against us. We had only one actor (the wonderful Shaun Escoffery) playing the three black men in the show, Jim Conley, Newt Lee and Riley, the Governor's driver. What we discovered during the first readthrough was that Jim Conley overwhelmed everything else: when Shaun had to switch from Conley back to Newt, it was always a letdown for the audience to watch this actor subdue all of the charisma we'd just seen. At the same time, we were severely underutilizing an enormous asset: Malinda Parris, who plays the role of Angela, maid to the Slatons. Angela really only exists to sing "A Rumblin' and a Rollin'", but it was obvious Malinda could do much more than we were asking of her. So Alfred and I decided it was finally time to let Minnie McKnight take the stage. Minnie was the domestic who worked for Leo and Lucille Frank, and she had an interesting part in the case (she was coerced into signing an affadavit that was certainly partially responsible for Leo's indictment); we also enjoyed the dynamics that would come from having an intimate member of the household testify against Leo. So we replaced all of Newt's testimony in the trial and his reprise in Act Two with a new piece for Minnie McKnight. And now we love having Minnie in the show – I can't imagine that she wasn't there all along.

5. Fiddlin' John, we hardly knew ye. Fiddlin' John Carson is considered by some to be the first "country music" performer, but he's important to the Leo Frank story because he wrote a song called "The Ballad of Little Mary Phagan" (you can listen to it here, but I'll be amazed if you make it through more than a minute or so) which he performed on the steps of the courthouse as Leo was sentenced to death. People sang it for years afterward, and Southerners of a certain generation still remember Fiddlin' John. However, as far as Parade was concerned, he was just one more goddamn person for the audience to keep track of, and so we decided that time could be better spent on a character who actually mattered to the plot: Tom Watson. So I wrote a new song called "Hammer Of Justice" for Watson to sing at the start of the trial, which replaces "People of Atlanta" and all of its reprises. It's a really cool song, too.

6. The top of the second act. Again. Britt Craig's pretty much out of the picture, so we couldn't start the act with him. Instead, Alfred wrote a lovely scene for Governor Slaton and his wife Sallie which sets them up as important people to watch in Act Two, and I underscored the scene with an a cappella chorale led by Tom Watson. Then the servants come in to clean up the Slatons' breakfast, and they go right into "A Rumblin' and a Rollin'." (We had to change that song a bit because it's now a duet instead of a quartet.) All told, it's the first time we've all been happy with the way the second act starts. Which is good, because we're not revising this fucking show anymore.

You'll be able to hear all these changes soon, because First Night Records is producing a new cast album for the show, which will be recorded on October 18 & 19 in London. I'm really excited about that, because it will give people a chance to hear the spectacular performances of this British cast as well as David Cullen's magnificent new orchestrations. The cast album will also be a very important tool for people who want to produce the show, because starting in January 2008, the only version of Parade that will be available for license is this new one; we are withdrawing the earlier version, though we may make "Big News" available separately for those companies who have a Britt Craig that they really want to show off. Don Sebesky and I are also going to revise the original orchestrations so that you can do the show with the small band or the large one.

I hope you'll get a chance to see the Donmar production, because it's a really well-thought-out, gorgeously staged and beautifully cast version of the show, but I also want to say that I loved the original production just as much even though it was very different. I think some people will always resist a serious musical; you can read it in some of the reviews, that idea that it's not appropriate to set this story to music. Obviously, I consider that a ridiculous response to this piece – either you're moved by it or you're not, but I tell stories with music, and this is the story we all decided to tell. It will always be a controversial show, and I imagine I'll be defending it for the rest of my life, but there was nothing more satisfying than walking through the lobby at the Donmar several days after we opened and hearing audience members telling each other how moved, how involved, how surprised they were by the story being told, and how excited they were by the way we told it.

ASK JRB IN SEPTEMBER '07

Sun, 02 Sep 2007 16:08:34 -0800

Chris Goss writes:

I am currently at the beginning of my career as a television writer. You spoke at my college several years back, California State University, Fullerton, and I found a tremendous amount of honesty in how you addressed both the performers and the audience.

My question pertains to how success has changed you as an artist. As a young writer my goal is to achieve the seemingly impossible: actually get paid a wage to write something that more than my friends and family will read, watch and ultimately be affected by. That drive often layers directly into my creativity and passion to sit behind my keyboard, or open a blank pad of paper. Do you find that with success, fame and financial stability it becomes more difficult for you to churn out your material? On top of that, do you ever find that you are overwhelmed by what "they" – fans, executives, your own family - want in your attempt to live up to material written during a totally different time in your life? With success comes change. Do you find that to be true in how and what you write?

JRB takes a deep breath and says:

I'm often taken aback at how long I've been doing this, and I am amazed that I've stuck it out this long. But since I was at least fourteen, I have been single-mindedly devoted to the dream of being a professional writer, and it turns out that that's exactly what I have become. Everything else I'm about to say pales before that. I have the unbelievable good fortune to do the thing that I'm most passionate about.

Of course I approach my work differently than I did when I was in high school, and there are positives and negatives to that. The most significant difference is that when I was a teenager I made it a goal to write a song every week, and most of the time I did. Even when I first got to New York, I was cranking out material all the time – if I met a singer I liked, I wrote her a song; if someone was doing a concert of young writers and was accepting submissions, I wrote a song; if they weren't accepting submissions, I wrote a song anyway. Cabarets? Weddings? Auditions? Whatever anyone asked for, I wrote it, and on top of that I wrote songs for my own shows and my own concerts.

Thus far, thirty-four weeks into 2007, I've written fourteen songs. Ten of them were written for the second act of Honeymoon In Vegas (three of which were cut almost immediately after I wrote them). If it hadn't been for that show, I wouldn't have written much of anything this year. Writing has really become a job for me. It's still a lot of fun, I don't mean to suggest that it's drudgery, but the whole sense of exploring my voice, discovering my art, bursting to life, that's all gone now.

Which, if you're a romantic, might sound horrible. But in fact, it's great. What's disappeared from my writing in the last four or five years is the empty grandstanding and showing off that informs so much of my earlier work. I'm not embarrassed by my old songs – in fact, I loved playing Songs for a New World at Strathmore earlier this year and rediscovering that material – but I'm very conscious of the effort. You can hear me, in virtually every bar and every lyric, working to let everyone know I was on my game. And now when I listen to young writers, I can hear it in their work: "Listen to me! I'm good! I deserve to be heard!"

Listen to Sondheim's lyrics in West Side Story; they're dazzling, but they're effortful. Contrast that with Sunday in the Park With George, where Sondheim is so effortlessly in command of his craft that you barely even notice that the songs rhyme. I'm obviously not on that level, but if I compare Songs for a New World to The Last Five Years, I can hear the difference immediately. And 13 and Honeymoon In Vegas are even more assured, more comfortable.

The danger is that things get too comfortable, and I forget to challenge myself, or I fall back on certain tricks because I know how well they've worked in other songs. I think I've gotten to a place where my work has a clearly identifiable voice, but I have to be careful not to let that voice become the only one I know how to use.

It's also scary knowing that so many artists did their best work when they were much younger than I am now. Paul McCartney was only twenty-five years old when Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band was released; I can't even begin to wrap my head around the idea of writing such mature and accomplished material at that age, but it's possible that history will look much more kindly on the Jason Robert Brown who wrote "King of the World" and "Stars and the Moon" than on the writer I've become and that I'm, frankly, much prouder of. All of my songwriting heroes had their biggest hits fairly early on in their careers, and it's complicated to determine whether that represents their best work or not: Joni Mitchell, Paul Simon, Elton John, Stevie Wonder. Luckily, in the theater, there seems to be more room for a composer to grow, but it's certainly not guaranteed to happen.

It may be that all that showing off and grandstanding is what makes some art explode off of the wallpaper. Maybe my voice was never clearer than when it was unadulterated by my so-called "professionalism" and "technique." To be sure, I'd never write "She Cries" now the way I wrote it when I was twenty years old, but whether or not that's a good thing is a question I find impossible to answer.

My writing has to do a lot of things these days, and chief among them is feeding my family (or, more accurately, paying my mortgage). It's really weird for me to think that I make enough money from the songs I write to have a nice house in Los Angeles and two cars and a dog and an assistant and a nanny, but it's true. But when I made that transition from Dreamer to Businessman, there was a trade-off. I used to have Things I Wanted To Say; now I have to balance that with the knowledge of what people are ready to hear. An artist isn't supposed to admit that, I'm supposed to be entirely removed from commercial considerations, but l'm too old for that shit. I can't be alone on the mountaintop at this point in my life. My daughter and my wife (and my dog and my assistant) need me, and they need the income that my work provides.

Does that make it harder for me to write? No, in fact, it's the exact opposite: I don't spend time chasing rainbows these days, I don't spend hours in rapt contemplation of some Undefined New Sound, I've got shows to write. And while I remain one of the world's master procrastinators, I love it when the shows start going the way I want them to.

Ultimately, the process is still the same: something in my head is trying to sing, and I have to let it out. All this other stuff is just commentary. At the end of the day, regardless of the pressure and regardless of the past, I get to lay my hands on the keys, open my mouth and my heart, and let it fly.

NOTES FROM LONDON

Sat, 25 Aug 2007 17:00:44 -0800

An interviewer actually chided me the other day for not updating my blog more often. I pointed out to him that I was a little busy rewriting Parade, but that genuinely seemed not to satisfy him.

The first interview Alfred and I did together in London was a disaster. The interviewer started by implying that we were particularly fortunate to get another chance to do Parade because it wasn't very good on Broadway. Things went downhill from there.

But my strange encounters with the press aside, it's been very exciting revisiting this show, especially working at the Donmar, which is a thrillingly supportive and creative place to be exploring. Rob Ashford is doing wonderful and unexpected things with the space and with the actors, and Alfred and I have responded by rewriting big chunks of the show to further clarify and illuminate the Leo Frank story. I couldn't be happier with the cast; my musical director Tom Murray is bringing out gorgeous, hidden textures in the score; and David Cullen has begun sending in his orchestrations, which I can already see are bursting with invention and inspiration.

Still, this is a bittersweet experience, because the original production of Parade is imprinted so fiercely on my consciousness, and the fact that it was not greeted with the warmth and plaudits that I felt (and still feel) it deserved is brought back to me all the more resonantly every time I hear this dialogue and these songs. In one sense, yes, this does feel like a victory lap, a vindication of the show; in another, it feels like I've revived my baby only to drown it again. I wouldn't be me if I didn't see both of those sides of this opportunity. Ultimately, I just don't like feeling defensive about my work, and I think that the relative failure of the Broadway production gives people a greater justification than usual to be wary of the show. Hopefully, whatever their attitude going in, the evidence of this production will persuade them. No matter what, I know we have the right team; there could not be a group of people better equipped to introduce this show to London.

I will be doing a concert here, I'm pleased finally to be able to say. I'll send out a newsletter next week with all the details, but it will definitely be happening on September 30, and I already know several wonderful singers who'll be joining me. I'm trying to figure out if I can afford to bring my band over from New York – I really hope I can because the concerts are so much more fun for me when they're around.

I've seen a couple of shows on my off nights here, and I am as always simply amazed by the quality and depth of the ensemble acting in this city. It's something I've just never witnessed in the States, that sense that everyone on stage is doing the exact same show and doing it beautifully. It's a subtle thing, but it's part of why going to the theater in London is such a joy for me. Even when the shows aren't all that great, there is a unity and a consistency in the acting ensemble that is thrilling to watch. Also, I love the ice cream at intermission.

That notwithstanding, the West End is a mess. I get the sense that nobody producing commercial theatre here has any idea what the audience wants to see. We can complain about Broadway all we want (and I do), but in New York there is a machine in place which guarantees a certain basic level of polish and competence. Not to put too fine a point on it, but there's no such guarantee here. You pays your money, you takes your chances. And at these exchange rates, it's a lot of money. Compared to the rest of London, shows are much more reasonably priced than they are in New York; but compared to New York, they cost twice as much. I saw Billy Elliott last night and it cost me $120.

I've been turning down a lot of concerts lately because the strain of being away from my family is wearing me down. Thank God my wife and daughter are coming in a week to stay with me here in London, because I've had just about all I can stand of being alone in unfamiliar hotels and apartments this year. So if it seems as though I'm not performing as often, that's a big part of the reason.

I'll talk some more about "13" in the next month. The first chunk of contracts just got signed, which means that now we can really start moving forward with our plans to take over the world. Dan and I have some very exciting revisions we're working on, and we got really inspired seeing some kids at Stagedoor Manor and French Woods last month. Meanwhile, we're scrambling to finish the novel in the next month (since I don't have anything else going on) so it can be published in time for the Broadway opening of the show.

It's the day off for the company tomorrow, but I've got lots of work to do, writing new underscore, re-conceiving a section in the second act, proofreading orchestrations, so I better get some sleep. More later. Cheerio!

SOUND BLOG #10: THE LOST MUSICAL, Part 1

Sat, 04 Aug 2007 07:27:37 -0800

In any composer's official biography, by which I mean the self-written essay which is included in the Playbill or inside the press kit or on the website, it is customary to include a list of upcoming projects, and starting in 1996, my bio always mentioned something called The Moneyman or The Moneyman Dances or some variation thereof, which was often referred to as “a dance musical.” I would write, in these bios, that a production of The Moneyman was forthcoming in this season or the next, which was always a lie; the show was never optioned for production anywhere. I thought it was an interesting idea, and I had written what I considered to be some great music for it, but I couldn’t get anyone interested.

And so, after eight or nine years, The Moneyman disappeared from my bio, never to return. It is my lost show, one hundred minutes of fully-scored music and lyrics that will never be performed as part of a theatrical production. Everything about The Moneyman had bad karma written all over it, and my life has gotten noticeably better since I stopped attempting to get it produced. And so here, in this and subsequent posts, I shall eulogize it with the love any parent has for a wayward child, and make my peace with its demise.

Jonathan Marc Sherman, the magnificently gifted playwright behind Sophistry and Women and Wallace, travels in far fancier circles than I do, and back in 1995 he was hanging out with a crowd that included the avant-garde choreographer Karole Armitage. Word got around this group, one way or another, that Karole was looking for a musical theater songwriter to add a couple of songs to a ballet she was working on. Sherm had just seen Songs for a New World in its initial production at the WPA Theatre, and he mentioned to Karole that I might be just the writer she was looking for. (Sherm disappears from our narrative at this point, but I thought he’d enjoy this little cameo.)

My collaboration with Karole came to a truly terrible end, so it’s hard for me to be objective about her, and even harder for me to be generous, but when we met, she had already had a substantial and impressive career as the Bad Girl of Ballet, doing classical choreography to punk music and collaborating with a group of modern artists, among whom was the painter David Salle (with whom she had had a long relationship). Much of her notoriety was established during the go-go modern dance scene of the eighties, a scene that came crashing to a halt when a substantial percentage of corporate arts contributions disappeared amidst the savings-and-loan scandal. Karole’s company went belly-up at that time, and this new ballet she was planning in 1995 was going to be her comeback, and in some sense, her revenge on the world of financiers who had both made her dreams possible and then heartlessly dashed them.

Karole had written a scenario entitled The Predator’s Ball, adapted from Connie Bruck’s terrifying exposé of the collapse of the investment firm of Drexel Burnham. The antihero of Bruck’s book, and the center of Karole’s scenario, was the financial savant and junk-bond king Michael Milken. Karole’s ballet intended to tell the story of how Milken’s genius allowed Drexel to become a greedy power-mad monolith, and how his unchecked ego and power ensured its fall, all seen through the eyes of a Greek god named Thyades, who would assume various roles throughout the drama. She had hired a playwright to flesh out her scenario into a full-length script.

(I can’t imagine that the details of Milken’s story will be of great interest to the vast majority of readers here, and I’ve gotten pretty fuzzy on a lot of it in the eleven years since I was actively researching the show, so I’m going to just skip over most of the specifics of the plot. Anyone interested in the rise and fall of Milken is enthusiastically directed to Connie Bruck’s sensationally written book and James B. Stewart’s masterfully detailed Den Of Thieves, and there are certainly any number of other sources that could fill in the history.)

What Karole most wanted from me was one specific song. The beginning of the second act involved Milken moving to Los Angeles and coming to grips with that city’s obsession with appearance by, among other things, buying a toupee. Karole imagined that this would then blossom into a full Vegas-style number with showgirls and tap dancing and chaser lights. I read the scenario and totally understood what Karole wanted with that song; but more importantly, I found myself totally drawn to the story she wanted to tell. Her scenario was pretentious as all get-out, but there was a sort of uncontrolled zaniness and barely-contained rage that was very appealing to me. So I asked Karole, on our second meeting, if she would consider allowing me to write the full score.

At that point, the production was five months away: Karole had been engaged to create the piece on an Italian ballet company called MaggioDanza di Firenze that would open at the historic Teatro Comunale in Florence in June of 1996. Sets were already being designed, dancers had been hired, the machine was sputtering and croaking to life. I wasn’t daunted by the concept of writing a hundred minutes of music in such a short span of time; I thought it was a fun challenge, and since much of the score would be just music (lyrics are by far the most labor-intensive and procrastination-inducing part of my work), I would be able to write much more quickly than my usual pace. Karole took some persuading, but eventually, she decided it was worth a shot. We drew up a budget and set to creating our piece.

Karole made clear to me at those initial meetings that she was very unhappy with the script she had commissioned and encouraged me to use it only as a starting-point. I never met the man who had written it, and she never told him that we were ripping it into little pieces. (Listen closely: a harbinger of disaster.)

As I began restructuring the script, I felt like Karole and I were on the verge of a new hybrid: a dance-musical, not like West Side Story or On The Town where the narrative was still primarily told through dialogue and song, but a show where the language of the dance was inherent in every beat of the structure. The whole aesthetic of the piece would evolve from the movement; instead of the dance emerging from the song, it would be the song that emerged from the dance. It felt phenomenally exciting.

Alas, I never shared my vision of the piece with Karole; I just assumed we were on the same page. As I was soon to discover, we were not.

Story to be continued. Here are two pieces from the “finished” score, one mainly a song and one mainly a dance.

At the end of the first act, Milken packs up his family and moves his division of the firm from the heart of the New York Stock Exchange to Los Angeles, where he had been born and raised. Because New York had long been the financial capital of the US, Milken’s move seemed like madness to most of the financial community. To illustrate this, Karole wanted the scene set like an old Western movie, with Milken the pioneer heading across the country in a horse-drawn wagon. I thought it would be fun to bring on a yodeling cowboy to accompany him on his journey. So here’s me as the yodeling cowboy, me also as Michael Milken, and Lauren Mufson (who was featured in the ballet’s premiere in Florence) as Milken’s wife Lori.

"Coming Home (The Ballad of Michael Milken)"
from The Moneyman (1996)
Music and lyrics by Jason Robert Brown
Jason Robert Brown, Lauren Mufson: vocals
JRB: piano
Kevin Kuhn: acoustic guitar
Randy Landau: upright bass
Tom Partington: drums
Robert McEwan: congas and percussion
Sal Spicola: tambourine
Mia Wu: violin
Recorded and mixed by Jeffrey Lesser
Instruments recorded at RPM Studios, NY,NY, 5/1/96 (Engineer: Suzanne Dyer)
Vocals recorded at Warehouse Recording Studio, NY NY, 9/17/96 (Engineer: Billy Eric)

I used to always do that song in my concerts and it got a great response, but I found that, even though it’s far from the rangiest or most difficult song in my repertoire, it completely wiped me out every time. No matter where I put it in the show, it killed my voice for the rest of the evening. So I stopped doing it, and the world has been sadly bereft of my unexpectedly ass-kicking Jewish yodeling prowess.

In the second act, we see how Milken runs his company: he sits at the center of a large X-shaped desk and can see and hear every part of every transaction going on around him; he controls the high-risk bond division of Drexel Burnham Lambert with incredible efficiency and uncanny strategic impulses. Here, we watch as he wields his power and intelligence (and twenty different phone lines) to engineer the takeover of a company called National Can. (If you are paying attention, you’ll hear Brooks Ashmanskas delivering some dialogue as one of Milken’s dedicated employees.) I love most of this piece, though I’m aware that the first half sounds like warmed-over Steve Reich and the end sounds like a chase scene from an episode of Starsky and Hutch; nonetheless, this was a rare chance for me to write music that was so ambitious and conceptual, and I felt that by tying the Reich-style minimalist thing to a New Orleans funk groove I was really doing something I had never heard before. (I was able to perform this live once, at a concert at the Guggenheim, and it was wicked fun to play.)

"The X-Shaped Desk"
from The Moneyman (1996)
Music and lyrics by Jason Robert Brown
JRB: piano
Kevin Kuhn: electric guitar
Randy Landau: fretless bass
Tom Partington: drums
Robert McEwan: vibraphone and percussion
Sal Spicola: soprano and alto saxophones
Mia Wu: violin
Recorded and mixed by Jeffrey Lesser
Instruments recorded at RPM Studios, NY, NY, 5/28/96 (Engineer: Suzanne Dyer)
Additional recording at Knoop Music, River Edge, NJ, 5/29/96 (Engineer: Manfred Knoop)
Additional engineering and editing by Peter Dowdall

DROPPING IN

Thu, 26 Jul 2007 22:30:26 -0800

Sometimes on long flights, the person sitting next to me will notice that I'm editing music on my computer and ask what sort of music I write or something like that, and after I explain that I write musicals, that person will inevitably ask, "Oh, anything I've heard of?", and I'll smile and say that it's pretty unlikely. But then what often happens is that some other person on the plane, usually in their late teens or early twenties, will nervously come over to my seat and ask me to sign an autograph. At which point, I have to explain to my neighbor that while I am anonymous to the vast majority of the planet Earth, I am in fact really famous to about four hundred people.

I'm not entirely comfortable with my celebrity, in part because it's so unpredictable. If I were being followed all day by paparazzi, I would know that people were watching me and expecting me to be "on," and while I doubt I would like it, I would know how to act. But instead, I get hit by fame sideways – a couple of weeks ago, I was out for lunch with my wife and daughter at a little diner near our house and I heard someone say my name and then, "Well, I'm not going to go bother him when he's out with his family." I was at that moment entertaining my daughter with a Cookie Monster puppet. I won't say it ruined lunch for me, but it made me extremely self-conscious.

I am almost pathologically uncomfortable in social situations, which you wouldn't know from watching me on stage, but if you saw me at a party reading the spines on the bookshelves or sitting on the hood of my car by myself, you'd recognize all the classic signs of a personality disorder. I'm not good in crowds, I'm not good with strangers, I am not easily assimilated. I don't have very many friends (except on Facebook) and I don't have a whole lot of interest in cultivating more of them. Obviously, this complicates my ambitions to be a public figure. In this as in virtually all of my daily interactions, I am a maddeningly contradictory and ambivalent soul.

You may be thinking, at this point, "Wow, it must be some kind of fiesta to be married to you." You'd have to ask Georgia how she handles all of it, but she does occasionally attempt to broaden my social scope, much to my immense discomfort.

We all went on vacation last month to Wrightsville Beach, NC, where Georgia's mom's family was having a big reunion. We had lots of fun at the beach, my daughter got to spend time with her great-grandmother, and I got a great excuse to procrastinate any further writing for Honeymoon In Vegas. It was all going well enough until some of the folks returned from a game of Putt-Putt Golf with the information that they had seen a poster for a production of The Last Five Years that was opening in Wilmington (ten miles away) the very next night, and they had decided we all should go.

Georgia, God bless her, managed to talk the family out of buying twelve tickets for the opening night, even though they must have thought I was strangely ungrateful ("He doesn't want to go see his own show?"). It was instead agreed that we would all stick to our original plan for that night, which was to go have a lovely family dinner in town. (I'm sorry to the company in Wilmington that I thus deprived you of twelve admissions. From what I understand, you were very well sold for the run of the show anyway.)

The next night, our wonderful dinner was over at about nine-fifteen, and Georgia asked me whether the show would still be going on; I replied that they would probably be in the middle of "Nobody Needs To Know." Georgia took this as her cue to grab my hand and drag me five blocks to the theater. She wanted me to meet the actors after their opening night.

Surely some of my discomfort with my limited celebrity is my inability to formulate the correct response to people's impressions of me. Often when people come to the autograph table after one of my concerts, they'll confidently make eye contact and then instantly sputter and giggle and try vainly to collect themselves before apologizing and then wiping tears from their eyes. I never know what to do at these moments: here's me with a Sharpie in my hand and here's this person I don't know having a nervous breakdown. When I entered the theater in Wilmington, as the audience was filing out, I was introduced to the musical director who, upon realizing who I was, began hyperventilating and then grabbed on to my arm with sufficient force that I still had a bruise there four days later.

l to r: Jacki Booth, director; Gray Hawks, "Jamie"; JRB; Heather Dahlberg, "Cathy"; Chiaki Ito, musical director. Thalian Hall, Wilmington NC, June 28, 2007.

The cast and the director came out, everyone was understandably shocked that I was there (and sorry/grateful that I hadn't actually seen the performance), but they were all really sweet and very generous and so genuinely honored to meet me and to be able to tell me what a wonderful experience they were having working on my show. So I smiled and took pictures with them and signed autographs and we all traded stories, and then Georgia and I headed back out into Wilmington and they went off to their opening night party with a truly wild story.

What I couldn't express, what is almost impossible for me ever to express in that situation or pretty much any other, was how profoundly, how deeply moved and grateful I am that people want to bring my work to life. The completely random coincidence that a show of mine should be premiering in the very town in which I'm vacationing with my family seems almost comical, like it should be happening to someone rather more famous and successful than I am.

I want to explain all that to the person next to me on the airplane. I tend to underplay my success because I assume that when people hear I write musicals, they immediately think I'm trivial, or that my work is trivial. And maybe it is. But I'm so proud and so amazed that right now, somewhere in the world, someone is singing one of my songs.

If you bump into me and I seem brusque or superior or aloof or "over it," I don't expect you to forgive me for it or cut me any slack – I've never been all that good at ingratiating myself to the larger world and I can't imagine that I'm going to blossom now that I'm thirty-seven. But I'll take this opportunity right here to thank you for loving what I create. And to you folks in Wilmington, thank you for taking such good care of my work. I think Georgia knew that's what I wanted to tell you. Honestly, Chiaki: I treasure the bruises.

JUNE '07: I'M TURNING 37, YOU'RE ASKING QUESTIONS

Thu, 14 Jun 2007 16:20:07 -0800

It's no big deal to admit this: I have been known to spend hours searching for my name online. I have been known to do this every day. Most days, the rewards are negligible. Some days, however, there's this:

Anyway, back to the Planet Earth.

Or not. As the title of this entry proclaims, I am turning 37 in less than a week. I have absolutely no problems with this; I love being old enough that people think I know what I'm talking about, and I love that I'm still younger than Michael John LaChiusa. Win-win, as they say. Some people, however, apparently think I'm a little older.

Logan Culwell, in only the latest of three hundred emails to me, asks:

I have a composer demo of Smile by Marvin Hamlisch and Howard Ashman. I'm pretty sure one of the guys on it is Howard himself and the other one... I swear... sounds EXACTLY like you do on that Parade demo. Were you ever involved with that show and/or the demo?

JRB, patiently but with tension in his jaw, smiles and says:

Logan, Logan, sweet Logan. Smile opened on Broadway in 1986. I'm going to assume that the demo was made before the show opened. Let's just say 1985. Was I involved with Smile in 1985?

My voice hadn't even changed in 1985, Logan! I was fifteen years old! Elaine Flynn wouldn't have rejected me if I were involved with a big Broadway musical! (Oh, yes, I'm still pissed off about Elaine Flynn, twenty-two years later. I asked her to the prom and she said no, but now I just found out she asked my friend Gene to go with her instead ... and HE'S GAY. Oh, the story never ends.) Let me tell you, if I could have even hung around big Broadway composers when I was fifteen years old, I would have given up Skittles. But no, I kept eating the Skittles and I just had a root canal three days ago. I take back what I said about enjoying getting older. Apparently, I'm just finding new exciting things to be bitter about.

Simone Becque, having too much time on her hands, asks:

I just was noticing how a lot of your songs (especially in Songs For A New World) have a lot of boating / water themes. Do you just like the metaphors (I know I do) or were you ever a big boat/water person?

JRB responds, a little too loudly:

I CAN'T SWIM.

Looking to expand her audition book, Andrea Liacos smiles coyly and writes:

Saw you last week at Birdland with a friend. By far and away one of the most enjoyable cabaret style nights we've had in a LONG time! Kudos! Where, if anywhere, if ever, can I find a copy of the song in the first set - I want to say "One More Thing Than I Can Handle"?

JRB, who always hates to disappoint a fan, sadly utters:

I'm so glad you like that song, it's one of my favorites that I've written, and it's especially fun to play. But it'll be a while before it's "out in the world." I'm hoping to include it in a recording project I'm working on that will perhaps be ready some time next summer. Until then, I'll program it on my concerts as often as I can find someone who can sing it (Benanti did a gorgeous job with it, and I wrote it for the sensational Kate McGarry), so keep coming to the shows; with any luck, you'll be able to hear it there.

Matthew Baughan, still desperately trying to pay off the engagement ring, scrawls:

My fiancée and I can't wait for the Donmar Parade in the autumn, but while you're over here are you planning to throw in some concert dates somewhere? ...and the thought... On 7th July we'll be dancing the foxtrot (if we've learnt it in time) to "Grow Old With Me" for our first dance at our wedding in deepest Hampshire - if you're in the UK that weekend there's a baby grand you'd be so welcome to play!

JRB, who's been listening to Brits doing American accents all week in "Parade" auditions, puts on his best RP and declaims:

Why yes, my boy, I am currently in negotiations with several excellent establishments to perform some concerts whilst I am in what I teasingly call "the Uck." I have to do those concerts because living in London is so unbelievably expensive that I can't afford to come to Parade rehearsals unless I get a little extra dosh. I'll let the website know as soon as those concerts are scheduled (pronounced "shed-yooled"). And while I'm chuffed to be invited to your forthcoming nuptials, I must respectfully decline, both because I won't be in the Uck yet and because if I said yes to you, Ryan Moody would beat me with a hammer. He's probably still mad at me for that entry anyway.

Brian Perry, pouring salt in old wounds, asks:

My disappointment with not being able to make it out to DC for the Songs concert is bigger than you know. I travel all over to see you live and see your shows and it just didn’t work out. Any luck in securing that financing to record the show?

Quietly, with a single tear descending from his eye, JRB responds:

No.

And finally...

A. John Porcaro asks, while at intermission:

Hey there! I’m currently in the Boston production of Parade and having a great time! I have a question about something that has become a favorite moment among the ensemble: in the section going into the Trial – is there any hidden significance to the references to "Jimmy" and his apparent affinity for windows?

JRB, wracking his brain to remember why he did anything ten years ago, writes:

Congratulations in Boston! I've heard great things about that production, and I wish I could get out there, if for no other reason than to support Joe Delgado, an incredible musician and a great pal.

Those of you who haven't actually performed in Parade will have no idea what A. John is referring to, because it's buried fairly deep in some very heavy contrapuntal writing. When I was writing those crowd scenes (and there are many of them in Parade), I was very conscious of how Sondheim used the ensemble in "God That's Good" at the beginning of Act II of Sweeney Todd. If you look through the score of that number, you'll see that for all the chaos that seems to be happening, there are several stories being very clearly told. It doesn't really matter if the audience gets all of it, but it certainly helps the actors if they have something specific to play, rather than "Merry Villager Eating Pie Made From Humans." So whenever I had to write those big crowd scenes, I used that number as a model; at the very least, I always aim to give the actors something they can hang on to. So within the Trial sequence, I knew that two of the actors (eventually I think we had Melanie Vaughan and Randy Redd) would be a mother and a teenage boy, and the teenage boy would be peering in through the courthouse windows from outside. (This really happened. The courtroom was so hot that the windows were open during the trial, and people on the street would lean in and yell at Leo Frank or whoever else was on the stand.) The boy is named "Jimmy" as a special tribute to one of my heroes, legendary billiard genius the "Whirlwind" Jimmy White. I totally made that up, but I hope Jimmy White looks at his webstats and sees a big bump coming from this site and is like, "What the hell?"

That's that, then. Happy Birthday to me, and to all of you out there who wish you could have a birthday in June. (Which kind of sucks: I was always the youngest person in class, even before I skipped fourth grade.)

SOUND BLOG #9: THE "PARADE" HOT SPOT

Wed, 23 May 2007 15:10:59 -0800

I've spent the last four days writing the opening number to Honeymoon In Vegas. You would think that at this point in the process, three years after we started working on the show, we'd have the opening taken care of. That would be nice. In fact, this represents either the fourth or fifth completely different crack I've taken at the opening, not to mention all the little revisions and tweaks I've put in to those versions along the way. I think we've finally got it now. I'm really happy with it. But the opening has thus identified itself as our Hot Spot.

Every show I've worked on has a Hot Spot, one song that fights you and spits at you and resists "landing." If you look through the discard piles of all my scores, what you'll usually find is a bunch of half-written ideas and motifs, and then several fully finished songs that were all written for the exact same spot in the show. There is nothing harder for me than writing the same song twice, never mind five or six times, and yet I've had to go through that process at least once with every score I've written.

With Songs for a New World, it was the opening, which went through at least four versions before settling on the one that's on the cast album now. It makes sense that that would be the Hot Spot since there was so much riding on that number: it has to set up an entire show and let us know who we're watching and what we're about to see. I know there was one version Andréa loved that we tried in Toronto, but it was too literal – what is now the bridge ("a house in the Hills, a job on the Coast," etc.) basically dragged out for four minutes – and it just didn't work. (If you follow the measure numbers in the vocal score, you can see exactly where the old version gets picked up and carried to the end.)

In "13", our Hot Spot was the football number, which was called "Little Ball" through three separate drafts until it found its shape as "Angry Boy." Of course, 13 still has one more draft to go, so that song may yet undergo further surgery, but I hope not, particularly since I haven't the least interest in football even on my best day.

The Last Five Years tripped me up at the third song in the show. The original version was called "What's Wrong With Him?" and in it, Cathy talked about the couples' therapy she and Jamie were enduring at the hands of a vaguely sadistic narcoleptic shrink on the Upper East Side. It was really funny, but it kind of only worked for the first verse, and then there was nowhere to go with it. Three drafts later, it became "See I'm Smiling."

But the show with the most Hot Spots of all was Parade, not least because Hal was sometimes on a completely different wavelength than Alfred and I were, and therefore he'd ask me to rewrite songs that I thought were perfectly fine already. That was not the case with the opening of Act Two, however, which never worked, not in the reading, not in the workshop, not on Broadway, and not on the tour. Each of those iterations of the show had a completely different way of starting Act Two, and each one was a flop. And now, as Alfred and I are revisiting the material in preparation for the production at the Donmar in the fall, we're looking at yet another approach.

The two versions I've included below will go some distance in demonstrating the trouble we had.

Hal's overall concept for the opening of the second act was that we would go back to the Memorial Day Parade one year later, only this time, all the floats in the parade would be metaphorical representations of aspects of the Leo Frank case. We also had two main plot points we needed to deal with, which may or may not have had anything to do with Hal's concept. So we tried to cram everything in to one song, and as you can see from the title of my first draft, we were not exactly successful: "I Have Something To Say/Special To The New York Herald!"

The first issue we had to cover was Leo's emergence as the hero of his own story. For the whole first act, he's been very passive, but we get the sense at the end of his trial that he's changed, he's opened up emotionally. We wanted to follow up on that, and so we invented this moment where he blows up at his sentencing and demands to be heard and recognized as an innocent man. We all expected it to be this thrillingly liberating moment, and I wrote a big ringing song to cover it. I never quite understood the dramaturgy of it, though – why would Leo be allowed to bluster and yell for this whole period of time in a courtroom, particularly after he's just been convicted of murder? Wouldn't the judge have called the bailiff to drag him off? Wouldn't his defense attorney have stepped in? Ultimately, the moment was false; in real life, Leo never blew up at anyone anywhere, and this number felt melodramatic and artificial. I love the music and it was a kick to sing it, but it made no sense for this character to sing this song at this point in the show.

The other issue we needed to dramatize was the way the Frank case had begun to seep into public consciousness beyond the city of Atlanta. In 1913, Leo Frank was a massive cause célèbre throughout the entire country, one of the first "Trials of the Century," and that was part of our attraction to the story in the first place, so we wanted to use this number to show the way people outside the South perceived the case. Britt Craig (the newspaper reporter) is our narrator here, explaining how his dispatches are being picked up in other papers across the country, which are represented as different floats in the parade. Then one of the floats turns out to be a group of Northerners (Yankees, as it were) who mock the Southerners for their backward ways. Even writing it down, I'm embarrassed by that bit of Brechtian "dialectic theatre" – we hadn't done anything like it anywhere else in the show, and it just seemed to me that no matter how artfully I wrote it, it would be arch and cold. Hal was really excited about it, though, so I took a shot. I hated it then, I hate it now, I'm glad it got cut. The rest of the song sure is a lot of fun!

As for the dreadful "nursery rhymes" that start and end the number, those were my idea, and I'm sorry. In real life, children did make up all sorts of gruesome rhymes about Leo and Mary Phagan, but there was undoubtedly a more artful way to dramatize that than my clunky and over-the-top bits of doggerel.

"I Have Something To Say/Special to the New York Herald!" written for Parade (1998)
Music and lyrics by Jason Robert Brown
JRB: piano and lead vocals
Tom Partington: drums and percussion
Anastasia Barzee, Jenny Giering, Norm Lewis, Michael McElroy: ensemble vocals
Recorded and mixed at Quad Recording Studios, NY NY, July 1996

Oh well. On to the next draft.

We changed Leo's outburst from a song to a scene, and then to a shorter scene, until it was finally just a ten-line exchange with his lawyer in the jail cell. That was the end of "I Have Something To Say."

Now that Leo was quieted down, having Britt Craig report on his "outburst" didn't make sense, so I changed the song to something called "It Goes On and On."

For the workshop, we went back to this idea of a metaphorical parade, and since nobody liked my version of "Dixie" from Hell, I was told to try again, but this time from the point of view of Southerners who didn't like these Yankees messing in their business. The song was called "Look At Dem Yankees!" You can hear the melody in the cakewalk at the end of the first act, but to the extent that I have any control over these things, that's all you'll ever hear of it – it was truly an awful song. However, when we watched it in the workshop, we realized something that led us to one of my favorite songs in the show.

There were four black actors in the onstage cast, and two of them were essentially ensemble members – Riley (the Governor's driver) and Angela, a serving girl. They were directed always to be floating around the edges, being generally (and, historically speaking, accurately) invisible, but in fact, every time they stepped on stage, we as audience members were drawn to them, hoping they would get involved somehow. After the workshop was finished, Hal asked us what we could do to give voice to those characters, and in response, I wrote "A Rumblin' and a Rollin'."

On Broadway, Act Two still opened with the metaphorical parade, but we (thank God!) dropped "Look At Dem Yankees!" and instead went right into "A Rumblin' and a Rollin'." (There was, in fact, another chunk of "It Goes On And On" that came after "Rumblin'," which had some really cool chord progressions, but it's not preserved anywhere.) When we made the cast album, we included "It Goes On And On," but we had to cut it when the CD was running too long. This is the first time this material has been released (the cast never heard it, the record label never heard it) – those of you with sophisticated editing skills can now splice this into your Parade cast album and you'll have an extra-special-deluxe-groovy edition. (As proof of how wedded I can be to a demonstrably terrible idea, you'll hear that the horrible nursery rhymes are back, but they actually weren't in the show on Broadway, I just put them on the album to cover a transition that was done with dialogue on stage.)

"It Goes On And On" from Parade (1998)
Music and lyrics by Jason Robert Brown
Orchestration by Don Sebesky and Jason Robert Brown
Conducted by Eric Stern
Don Chastain: Judge Roan
Evan Pappas: Britt Craig
Brooke Sunny Moriber, Abbi Hutcherson, Emily Klein, Megan McGinniss: nursery rhyme girls
Rick Heckman, Ed Matthew, Chuck Wilson, Mark Thrasher: woodwinds
John David Smith, Jill Williamson: French horns
Terry Szor, Alex Holton: trumpets
Vernon Post: trombone
Dean Thomas: percussion
Tom Partington: drums
JRB: piano
Jack Cavari: acoustic guitar
Rick Dolan, Karen Milne, Mia Wu: violin
Sarah Carter, Chungsun Kim: cello
Ron Raffio: tuba/contrabass
Henry Aronson: associate conductor
John Miller: music coordinator
Recorded and mixed by Jeffrey Lesser at Clinton Recording Studios (Ed Rak, engineer), NY NY, March 1, 1999

Oh well. When we did the tour, we decided the whole metaphorical parade was a bust, and all anyone cared about was "A Rumblin' and a Rollin'." So we cut "It Goes On And On," and the second act now begins with Britt Craig singing four lines to establish the bare minimum of plot and then we jump right into Riley and Angela. And it works much better.

But the principal problem with all of the versions of these songs is that I think, having now done this for a while, that songs are a lousy way to get exposition across to an audience. The lyrics in all of Britt Craig's songs are dense to the point of bursting, filled with all kinds of important information about what's happening to Leo and the city of Atlanta, and the end result is that they just sound like laundry lists. I would agree with anyone who says the lyrics in "It Goes On And On" are bad, but I defy anyone to do a better job. Indictments and arrests aren't the kinds of thing people like to sing about. When people sing, it should be an emotional release. When I have to write a song that just tells information, I feel like I'm wasting valuable music. It took me a while to figure that out, but it's a good lesson to have learned. Many of the cuts I'm making for the London production of Parade involve getting rid of those clunky, expositional lyrics. And I hope, once that's done, we'll figure out the perfect way to start the second act. We've been trying for eleven years, after all.

[This posting is an ideal opportunity to send a loving shout-out to Evan Pappas, who is slowly recovering from an absolutely horrifying car accident earlier this year. Evan, if you're reading this, know that I am thinking of you and wishing you nothing but the safest, speediest recovery. You are much missed.]

PLAYING THE BIG ROOM

Fri, 18 May 2007 21:04:33 -0800

I've played a couple of really cool places in my time. The first time I played Carnegie Hall was in 1992, when I was 22 years old and accompanying the Tonics (you can hear it here, and there's even an adorable picture of me hiding in the mass of people on the front cover), and that was an overwhelming experience, especially since it was then broadcast on public television. I've played there another five or six times since then, often with the New York Pops, and it's always thrilling to be in the middle of that kind of history.

I played Walt Disney Concert Hall in 2004 as part of a concert with the Los Angeles Master Chorale, and that was particularly cool because the hall was new and I got to bring the Caucasian Rhythm Kings with me. In terms of pure acoustical experiences, Disney Hall ranks at the top of the big halls I've played – even though they were still trying to figure out the amplification system, the sound that surrounded us and came back at us while we were playing was the most intimately enveloping power that I've ever had in a room that big.

Benaroya Hall was great this past winter when I conducted the Seattle Symphony with Pizzarelli, and I had a fabulous time at Esplanade Hall in Singapore when I conducted a Broadway pops concert there.

But this week at Strathmore was very different and really special, because it was the first time I've done my own show in such a big hall. And obviously, Songs for a New World is a very important show to me. Not to mention that the hall is absolutely gorgeous and designed to be extraordinarily acoustically versatile, which suits that show perfectly.

l to r: JRB, Gary Sieger (obscured), Tituss Burgess, Brian Dunne, Shawn Galvin, Brian d'Arcy James, Randy Landau (obscured), Alice Ripley and Laura Griffith in Songs for a New World at the Strathmore Music Center, May 16, 2007. (Photo by Margot I. Schulman)

You can read what other people thought about it here, but what I can tell you is how fulfilling an evening it was for me personally. I haven't played Songs for a New World as a show, a straight-ahead theater piece with four people and no narration, for probably ten years now, and it was amazing to realize how differently it felt to play it and at the same time how familiar it all was. I surprised myself by being able to play the entire thing completely from memory, and that really enabled me to connect to the material viscerally in a way I hadn't expected.

I can't imagine that there's been a cast as strong as this one since the very first production at the WPA in 1995, and every person delivered above and beyond what I could have expected. It's a brutally hard score to perform because every actor has to alternate between big star-power solo numbers and very complicated and nuanced ensemble work, but all four of these cast members delivered, and delivered off book, which was even more impressive. Most impressive of all was Laura Griffith, who took over from Laura Benanti seven days before the first performance and sailed beautifully through both performances as though she were born to sing this material. (As for Benanti: in the event you missed the announcement, she had to bail out because of a very important screen test in Hollywood – she had an incredible opportunity and we sent her off with nothing but love and best wishes.)

All four of these actors took real ownership of the songs, and brought exquisite musicality and theatrical instinct to this sometimes-immature material. It was particularly satisfying to hear Brian d'Arcy James sing "She Cries" because we actually intended Brian to do the show twelve years ago, and he not only fulfilled everything I would have hoped for then, he brought those twelve years of experience and life to the table and elevated the songs well past what either of us could have done in 1995. Alice Ripley, who I've really only come to know in the last year, was a revelation; I honestly don't think there is a more difficult role than Woman 2 in the entire musical theatre canon, and Alice was able to inhabit each of the four monster solos with deep individuality and humanity, and then she dug in to the backup singing like she'd spent her life wanting to be one of the Supremes. Then there's Tituss Burgess, who I hadn't really even heard when we hired him. The thing about Man 1 is that it was built on Billy Porter's voice, and Billy had a very unusual range – the part is essentially written for a male alto, and it has proven the undoing of many an otherwise fine cast. On top of the ridiculously difficult vocal requirements, the acting is really intense, and considering he has to sing like a girl, it's hard to find someone who can convincingly play a schoolyard basketball star. So when my wife recommended Tituss to me, I knew she understood how serious the requirements were. Needless to say, from the very first rehearsal, Tituss was perfect for the role. He could sing it, comfortably, musically, beautifully, and he acted it with enormous confidence and compassion. I was deeply lucky to get this cast together. So was the audience.

And getting to play with this band was a privilege. I've been working with Randy Landau since the first production of Songs twelve years ago, and while he's always played well for me, he's grown into such a nuanced and instinctive interpreter of my work that I can't conceive of not using him. Brian Dunne is a drummer I first saw playing with Gary a couple of years ago – his only experience as a theater musician was playing Hot Feet last summer, so I was a little nervous about how he'd deal with the very theatrical requirements of this show, but he slammed it, he nailed it, he was a joy to play with. And considering his main gig for the last couple of years has been with the Average White Band, it's not at all surprising how funky and groovy he made the songs. There was a local percussionist brought on board named Shawn Galvin; he was recommended to us by the Signature's music director, Jon Kalbfleisch, and he was a dream. And finally, I can't describe the pleasure of playing with Gary Sieger – there wasn't a guitar part in the show originally, but after hearing what Gary brought to the music, I wouldn't do the show without it now.

On Monday, I found out that a very important person in my life had passed away. Pat McDowell was the accompanist for my choir in junior high school, and then she was the choir director for my first two years in high school before she headed off to the Philippines with her husband, who had just been appointed the superintendent of the American schools there. In the time she was at Ramapo Senior High School, she set the best possible musical example for me by being someone who was relentlessly inquisitive and passionate about music, someone who had very specific taste and knew how to defend it. Pat exposed me to a lot of great things and gave me a lot of room to learn and make mistakes and grow as a leader, as an arranger, as a pianist, as a person. It may seem like a lot to have given me in two years of high school, but I was ready for a mentor, and more than anyone else in my life, Pat was that for me.

One story: she asked me to accompany the choir for a program, but she insisted on putting a mirror on the piano because she said I needed to see myself while I was playing. Until then, I had no idea that I stuck my tongue out the entire time. She didn't cure me, but she made me aware of it, and I've gotten a lot better in the twenty years since then.

And another: I was in her office at school once doing my homework, and I saw that she had started writing an arrangement of a song called "Cousin Mary." It was a Coltrane song, and in trying to find a recording of this weird thing, I came across an album by Lambert, Hendricks & Bavan. Because of that recording, I fell in love with the work of Jon Hendricks, and I learned ten million things about vocal arranging from his work. When I finally got to work with him eight years ago on the score for Kimberly Akimbo, I felt a straight line going right back to Pat McDowell. I felt that same line all this week playing at Strathmore with these great singers and this magnificent band.

So I dedicated these performances in Bethesda to Pat McDowell's memory, because I couldn't have gotten there – or much of anywhere else, really – without her. Every note I played felt like a gift shared between the two of us, there in that beautiful hall.

And I tried not to stick out my tongue.

CORAM BOY

Mon, 14 May 2007 16:23:04 -0800

I saw three shows this week while I was in New York. Two of them received reviews of such overblown ecstasy that one would have expected to burst into spontaneous orgasm the minute the curtain rose. The other one got tepid reviews and is having trouble finding an audience. Guess which one I thought was the best?

I'd heard about Coram Boy when I was in London last year; friends were raving about it when it was playing at the National. When I'd heard it was coming to New York, I expressed more than a little skepticism that it would find its audience. Without having seen it, I assumed it was very heavy and very British.

In fact, it's an absolute delight from one end to the other, and I can't imagine what's going on that there is so much resistance to it from the theatrical community.

Coram Boy is, to put it plainly, a thrilling dramatic experience stuffed to the brim with so much inspired invention and theatricality that it exposes most of the claptrap currently suffocating Broadway for the calculated, half-assed, numbingly competent flotsam that it is. You will not find anywhere in New York another production that is so convinced of the magic of live theater, or one that is so convincing. The direction by Melly Still is nothing short of brilliant, one magnificent image after another. And the cast could not be bettered. The story (adapted from Jamila Gavin's novel by Helen Edmundson) is gripping, exciting, and ultimately enormously moving.

I sat in the theater transfixed for the entire two and a half hours. And at the end of the first act, I looked at my friend, and I said, "This is awesome!" I could not, and cannot, imagine what anyone could find objectionable or unworthy of praise. It's a first-rate experience.

So I re-read Isherwood's review in the Times, trying to figure out what on Earth the problem is. Because I'm not actually one of those people who reflexively thinks that critics are stupid. I don't disagree with the Times critics most of the time; even Brantley, who's tone-deaf, generally comes to the same conclusions I do when he talks about non-musical pieces, though he is (believe it or not) much easier on many things than I am. The fact that the New York Times has never positively reviewed any of my shows is one of those things that has caused me on occasion to doubt my own talent. Until now.

As far as I can tell by reading Isherwood's review, the problem is this: Coram Boy is not Copenhagen. Nor is it The Coast of Utopia, Hamlet or The Master Builders. Of course, it doesn't claim to be. It's a cracking good melodrama, directed and performed to a fare-thee-well. It is not an intellectual exercise. It is not a philosophical treatise. It's just the most fun I've had in the theater in ages. And not stupid fun, like many other shows that Isherwood praises, but sharp, beautifully detailed and entirely compelling fun. This is apparently not enough. For some reason, I get the sense reading the review that this deeply felt and marvelously realized epic is not worth your time because it lacks the nuanced psychological depth of Death of a Salesman. I'm mystified by this.

It's not like Isherwood's the only person who's less than entranced by Coram Boy. For the entire week I was in New York, I didn't meet anyone who hadn't heard that it was sort of a mess. None of those people had actually seen the show, however. And my mother, who's a tough critic and who does not always share my tastes, saw the show and thought it was absolutely sensational.

So this entry is a corrective. Let it be spread far and wide. I preach the gospel of Coram Boy, because it is the kind of theater I love best in the world; committed, inventive, smart, professional, emotional, accessible, innovative. I'm out of superlatives, but I'd happily invent more. There are few things on Broadway that are worth the price of a ticket; I think Coram Boy is unquestionably one of them.

UPDATE: And of course, in keeping with my typical gift for understanding the desires of the theatergoing public, that party's over. I highly recommend seeing it before it closes, and I look very much forward to whatever the creators come up with next.