Photo credit: Joe Mazza/BraveLux

Jason Robert Brown is the ultimate multi-hyphenate—an equally skilled composer, lyricist, conductor, arranger, orchestrator, director, and performer—best known for his dazzling scores to several of the most renowned musicals of our time, including the generation-defining The Last Five Years (revived on Broadway in 2025 with Nick Jonas and Adrienne Warren); his debut song cycle Songs for a New World; and the seminal Parade, winner of the 1999 Tony Award for Best Score and the 2023 Tony for Best Revival of a Musical.

Brown has been hailed as “one of Broadway’s smartest and most sophisticated songwriters since Stephen Sondheim” (Philadelphia Inquirer), and his “extraordinary, jubilant theater 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. Brown’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). 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. His 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 Theater 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 Brown 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. Parade 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 Los Angeles; and the second, Michael Arden’s Tony-winning 2023 Broadway production starring Ben Platt and Micaela Diamond. In 2022, Brown 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. Brown 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.

Brown is the winner of the 2018 Louis Auchincloss Prize, the 2002 Kleban Award for Outstanding Lyrics, and the 1996 Gilman & Gonzalez-Falla Foundation Award for Musical Theatre. Brown’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, Brown 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. For six years, his monthly performances at New York’s SubCulture featured many of the music and theater world’s most extraordinary performers, including a star-studded concert at Town Hall with Stephen Sondheim, which can be heard on the Concord release Jason Robert Brown and Stephen Sondheim: Live in Concert. His previous collection, Coming from Inside the House, featuring Ariana Grande and Shoshana Bean, commemorates the final SubCulture concert, recorded remotely during the pandemic. His other albums, How We React and How We Recover and Wearing Someone Else’s Clothes are available from Ghostlight/Sh-K-Boom Records. Brown’s 2012 concert with Anika Noni Rose was broadcast on PBS, and he was the featured soloist for an episode of BBC Radio’s long-running Friday Night Is Music Night, broadcast live from the London Palladium and featuring the BBC Concert Orchestra. His collaboration with singer Lauren Kennedy, Songs of Jason Robert Brown, is available on PS Classics. Brown is also the composer of the incidental music for the Broadway revival of You Can’t Take It with You, David Lindsay-Abaire’s Kimberly Akimbo and Fuddy Meers, and Kenneth Lonergan’s The Waverly Gallery, and he was a Tony Award nominee for his contributions to the score of Urban Cowboy the Musical. He has also contributed music to the hit Nickelodeon television series The Wonder Pets, as well as Sesame Street. Brown spent ten years teaching at the USC School of Dramatic Arts and has also taught at Harvard University, Princeton University, and Emerson College.

For the musical Prince of Broadway, a celebration of the career of his mentor Harold Prince, Brown was the musical supervisor and arranger. Other New York credits as conductor and arranger include Urban Cowboy the Musical on Broadway; Dinah Was, Off-Broadway and on national tour; When Pigs Fly off-Broadway; William Finn’s A New Brain at Lincoln Center Theater; the 1992 tribute to Stephen Sondheim at Carnegie Hall (recorded by RCA Victor); Yoko Ono’s New York Rock at the WPA Theatre; and Michael John LaChiusa’s The Petrified Prince at the Public Theater. Brown orchestrated Andrew Lippa’s john and jen, Off-Broadway at Lamb’s Theatre. Additionally, Brown served as the orchestrator and arranger of Charles Strouse and Lee Adams’s score for a proposed musical of Star Wars. Brown has conducted and created arrangements and orchestrations for Liza Minnelli, John Pizzarelli, and Michael Feinstein, among many others.

Brown studied composition at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, NY, with Samuel Adler, Christopher Rouse, and Joseph Schwantner. He lives with his wife, composer Georgia Stitt, and their daughters in Nyack, NY. Brown is a proud member of the Dramatists Guild and the American Federation of Musicians Local 802. www.jasonrobertbrown.com.