Jason Robert Brown

Jason Robert Brown is an American musical theatre composer, lyricist, playwright, and book writer born on June 20, 1970, in Ossining, New York. A recipient of three Tony Awards, Brown has built a career spanning composition, orchestration, performance, and teaching, with credits that include some of the most discussed works in contemporary musical theatre.

Brown grew up in the suburbs of New York City and spent two years at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York, where he roomed with vocalist Christopher Mooney. During summers he attended the French Woods Festival of the Performing Arts in Hancock, New York. He has cited Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street and Sunday in the Park with George as his two greatest influences, noting that without them he would have pursued a rock career modeled on Billy Joel. He began his professional life in New York City working as an arranger, conductor, and pianist, contributing to productions such as William Finn's A New Brain and performing at nightclubs and piano bars throughout the city.

His first major New York production was Songs for a New World, an off-Broadway revue directed by Daisy Prince, daughter of director and producer Hal Prince. The show featured the then-25-year-old Brown's pop-rock-inflected compositions, and the song "Stars and the Moon" from that production has since become a widely performed cabaret standard. Brown subsequently met Hal Prince, who hired him to write the score for Parade, a Broadway musical based on the trial and lynching of Leo Frank, with a book by Alfred Uhry and direction by Prince. Financing the cast recording proved difficult after producer Livent withdrew following mixed reviews and RCA Victor initially followed suit; Brown ultimately assembled funding from multiple sources including Lincoln Center, producer Scott Rudin, the Gilman and Gonzalez-Falla Foundation, and RCA itself, which contributed $25,000. Parade earned Brown the 1999 Tony Award for Best Original Musical Score.

His third major show, The Last Five Years, reunited him with director Daisy Prince. Brown wrote both the book and the songs for the two-person musical, which was inspired by his own first marriage, to Theresa O'Neill. The show presents a relationship's arc from two opposing chronological perspectives: the male character's narrative moves forward from the couple's beginning through marriage, infidelity, and divorce, while the female character's narrative moves backward from the relationship's end to its start, with the two characters meeting only at the midpoint during the wedding sequence. The original Chicago cast featured Norbert Leo Butz and Lauren Kennedy, while Sherie Rene Scott joined Butz for the New York run. Though the show ran only two months off-Broadway and received mixed critical notices, Brown earned two Drama Desk Awards for music and lyrics, and the production has since become a frequently staged piece in regional and community theatres. A film adaptation starring Anna Kendrick and Jeremy Jordan was released in February 2015.

Brown also contributed songs to the Broadway musical Urban Cowboy, a production that had been denied use of the Clint Black catalog. He had previously worked as an orchestrator with director Phillip Oesterman on the off-Broadway musical New York Rock, and Oesterman brought him in to assist with Urban Cowboy; after Oesterman died, director Lonny Price replaced him and collaborated with Brown on additional songs. The show was nominated, alongside thirty other composers, for the 2003 Tony Award for Best Musical Score, ultimately losing to Hairspray.

Brown's musical 13, oriented toward a tween audience, premiered at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles on January 7, 2007, before opening on Broadway on October 5, 2008, at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre, where it ran until January 4, 2009. A film adaptation titled 13: The Musical was released in August 2022. In June 2005, Brown released a solo album called Wearing Someone Else's Clothes, and in December of that year his Chanukah Suite received its world premiere in two performances by the Los Angeles Master Chorale at the Walt Disney Concert Hall.

The Bridges of Madison County, a musical adaptation of Robert James Waller's 1992 novel with a book by Marsha Norman, premiered at the Williamstown Theatre Festival on August 1, 2013, directed by Bartlett Sher with Elena Shaddow and Steven Pasquale in the leading roles. The production opened on Broadway on February 27, 2014, at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre, starring Kelli O'Hara, and closed on May 18, 2014. The show earned Brown two additional Tony Awards: Best Original Score Written for the Theatre and Best Orchestrations, both in 2014. Brown appeared on Broadway himself in 2016, adding performance to his list of theatrical contributions. He also wrote the music for the 2022 Broadway musical Mr. Saturday Night, with lyrics by Amanda Green and a book by Billy Crystal, Lowell Ganz, and Babaloo Mandel, receiving a Tony Award nomination for Best Score that year.

Beyond composition, Brown teaches musical theatre performance and composition at the University of Southern California and performs his own work as a singer and pianist, sometimes accompanied by his band, the Caucasian Rhythm Kings, featuring Gary Sieger on guitar and Randy Landau on bass. As of 2020, he was developing musical adaptations of Farewell My Concubine and Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. Since 2003, Brown has been married to composer Georgia Stitt; together they have two daughters.