Saturday, September 6 @ 7:00 p.m.
SONGS AND STORIES:
An Evening with Tony Award-Winner Jason Robert Brown
Three-time Tony Award-winning composer/lyricist Jason Robert Brown is best-known for his dazzling scores to several of the most-renowned musicals of our time, including the generation-defining The Last Five Years (which recently ran on Broadway with Nick Jonas and Adrienne Warren); his debut song cycle Songs for a New World; the seminal Parade, winner of the 1999 Tony Award for Best Score and the 2023 Tony for Best Revival of a Musical; and The Connector. He makes a rare West Coast appearance in this solo evening of soul-stirring songs and stories about his influences, his career, and his unique and deeply passionate perspective on the American experience – a blend of personal storytelling and musical brilliance. Jason’s concerts have graced stages from the London Palladium to Carnegie Hall and Town Hall in New York. He has been the recipient of three Tony Awards, Drama Desk Awards, N.Y. Drama Critics’ Circle and Outer Critics’ Circle Awards. The VIP Experience includes a post-show reception in The Rose Room with Jason, and a complimentary CD (which he will be happy to sign/personalize).
Reviews
“Jason Robert Brown, SUPERSTAR! The performance sold out in 7 minutes…He writes intimate, searing and personal songs…a CHARISMATIC, COMMANDING and DEMANDING performer who draws you into his world. Brown can own a stage.” – The Stage.Co.UK
“Please, let there never be a time that he stops performing himself, because his work as an entertainer also makes the world a happier, better, more artistically fulfilled place. The gentleman is dope. He is a DELIGHT. He is a downright pleasure to watch and to listen to.” – Broadway World
“Jason Robert Brown is a BRILLIANT composer. With every number performed, he redefines the possibility of how a melody and lyrics can work in unison to create a song.” – Onstage Pittsburgh
More about Jason
Jason Robert Brown is the ultimate multi-hyphenate – an equally skilled composer, lyricist, conductor, arranger, orchestrator, director and performer. Jason has been hailed as “one of Broadway’s smartest and most sophisticated songwriters since Stephen Sondheim” (Philadelphia Inquirer), and his “extraordinary, jubilant theatre music” (Chicago Tribune) has been heard all over the world, whether in one of the hundreds of productions of his musicals every year or in his own incendiary live performances. Jason’s score for The Bridges of Madison County, a musical adapted with Marsha Norman from the bestselling novel, received two Tony Awards (for Best Score and Orchestrations). The tour starred Ventura native Andrew Samonsky. Honeymoon in Vegas, based on Andrew Bergman’s film, opened on Broadway in 2015 following a triumphant production at Paper Mill Playhouse. A film version of his epochal Off-Broadway musical The Last Five Years was released in 2015, starring Anna Kendrick and Jeremy Jordan and directed by Richard LaGravenese.
Jason’s major musicals as composer and lyricist include: 13, written with Robert Horn and Dan Elish, which opened on Broadway on 2008 and became a celebrated Netflix musical in 2022; The Last Five Years, which was cited as one of Time Magazine’s 10 Best of 2001 and won Drama Desk Awards for Best Music and Best Lyrics (and was later directed by the composer in its record-breaking Off-Broadway run at Second Stage Theatre in 2013); Parade, written with Alfred Uhry and directed by Harold Prince, which won both the Drama Desk and New York Drama Critics’ Circle Awards for Best New Musical, as well as garnering Jason the Tony Award for Original Score; and Songs for a New World, a theatrical song cycle directed by Daisy Prince, which has since been seen in hundreds of productions around the world since its 1995 Off-Broadway debut, including a celebrated revival at New York’s City Center in the summer of 2018 and a thrilling environmental production at Rubicon Theatre on the West Coast. Parade, now receiving rave reviews on tour, was also the subject of two major revivals: the first, directed by Rob Ashford, at London’s Donmar Warehouse and then at the Mark Taper Forum in L.A.; and the second, Michael Arden’s Tony-winning 2023 Broadway production starring Ben Platt and Micaela Diamond. In 2022, Jason collaborated with comedy legend Billy Crystal on a Broadway musical of Mr. Saturday Night with lyrics by Amanda Green and a book by Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel. Jason conducted his orchestral adaptation of E.B. White’s novel The Trumpet of the Swan with the National Symphony Orchestra and recorded the score for PS Classics. Last year saw the premieres of two new JRB shows: The Connector, created with Jonathan Marc Sherman and Daisy Prince, which completed a triumphant run at New York’s MCC Theater; and Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, written with Taylor Mac based on John Berendt’s book and directed by Rob Ashford, currently in preparation for its Broadway premiere after playing at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre last summer.
Jason’s songs, including the cabaret standard “Stars and the Moon,” have been performed and recorded by Ariana Grande, Jennifer Nettles, Brandi Carlile, Audra McDonald, Kristin Chenoweth, Billy Porter, Betty Buckley, Renée Fleming, Jon Hendricks, and many others.
As a soloist or with his band, Jason has performed concerts around the world, including his solo debut at Carnegie Hall in 2024 and a sold-out performance at the London Palladium with Cynthia Erivo.