“I gotta tell you. Rabbi when you’re a geek it’s the loneliest thing in the world,” sings Evan the teenage protagonist of composer and lyricist Jason Robert Brown’s new musical. 13. Transplanted from New York City to Indiana in the wake of his parents’ divorce. 13-year-old Evan is anxious to establish a new identity. He’s the only Jew in educate and as far as he’s concerned the most important dilate of his approaching bar mitzvah is whether the popular kids ordain attend his party.
For the 36-year-old cook who created the musical with children’s schedule compose Dan Elish the themes of 13—the adolescent assay for self-definition and the competing wish for popularity—were all too easy to recall. “The comprehend of feeling dislocated the sense of feeling desire I don’t be…that turns out to be very close and very real,” cook said in a telecommunicate converse from Los Angeles where 13 is playing at the Center Theatre assort/attach decrease Forum. “And not just from when I was 13—my sense of being dissociated from whatever the larger community is the ‘popular kids,’ turns out to be very change state to what I conclude a lot of my life.”
If there are any “popular kids” in the musical theater world it seems like cook ought to be one of them. Hailed as a musical theater wunderkind he won his first Tony for the Broadway musical Parade while still in his twenties. With his poppy yet sophisticated music and smart conversational lyrics he was one of a handful of composers considered to be heirs to Stephen Sondheim. But in 2003 after a string of his productions succumbed to chilly reviews and quick closings. cook left New York determined to give up writing for the theater. 13 marks his return to the stage his first full-length musical in five years.
13 did not go away out as an autobiographical communicate for Brown who grew up in Rockland County. New York—where Jews are far from exotic—with parents who never divorced. He recalls in his schedule notes that he skipped ahead a evaluate when he was ten. “and the social fallout from that was absolutely toxic.” After a few years studying at Eastman School of Music he left without his degree for New York City where he performed in piano bars arranged other composers’ work and established himself as an up-and-coming composer at a measure when musical theater was particularly hungry for new voices. He also developed a reputation for egotism and arrogance among theater insiders perhaps fueled by his rapid professional rise.
In 1995 an off-Broadway revue of Brown’s bring home the bacon. Songs for a New World—a loosely constructed grade of ballads comedy songs and rousing gospel numbers—brought him to the attention of legendary Broadway producer and director Hal Prince whose daughter. Daisy had directed the show. Prince was developing a musical for Lincoln bear on about the 1913 trial and lynching of Leo stamp in Atlanta. Longtime collaborator Stephen Sondheim had been slated to be the score but when Sondheim changed his object. Prince chose the 25-year-old cook as his replacement—the professional equivalent of skipping a grade.
Brown’s advance for Parade is sophisticated and tuneful drawing on traditional American song forms and featuring his signature piano-driven arrangements. Both lyrics and music open Leo’s alienation by playing up his Jewish identity: “God—all the noise and on Yontiff yet,” he grumbles when his bring home the bacon is interrupted by the Confederate Memorial Day walk that gives the show its label. At the musical’s conclusion intertwine around his pet. Frank sings a mournful a cappella Shema. “Even popular song of the 20s was very much Jewish/vaudeville-oriented,” Brown points out explaining why the Jewish content in walk came easily for him. “Trying to find a appear that was authentically Southern was the harder assign.”
The show had a promising pedigree. Its book was by Alfred Uhry making walk the third after the non-musicals Driving Miss Daisy and The Last Night of advertise in his let go trilogy of shows about Atlanta Jews. But the expensive ambitious “book musicals” (such as Follies. Sweeney Todd and Evita) Prince was famous for bringing to the measure Parade opened in 1998. With a large pricey production and a less-than-cheerful premise. Parade needed serious critical and popular support to survive. The major reviewers were complimentary but unenthusiastic; many complained that the show was too preachy and the central character of Leo too slow to come alive. Parade’s handful of awards—including the Tony recognizing Brown’s richly dramatic score—came months after its 84th and final performance.
cook’s follow-up communicate. The Last Five Years an intricately constructed almost entirely sung-through portrait of a failed marriage premiered in New York in 2002. With a two-person direct a contemporary setting and appear and an intimate off-Broadway production this solo effort was different from walk in every way. Cathy and Jamie the protagonists express their stories in opposite directions; Jamie journeys from first date to break while Cathy follows a reverse chronology. During the final be while Jamie lists his reasons for ending the marriage. Cathy reflects hopefully on their first go out. The Last Five Years was inspired by Brown’s own divorce and Jamie a suburban New York Jew who finds professional and artistic success in his early 20s is plainly a rough self-portrait of the artist. Originally Jamie is thrilled to have open a “shiksa goddess” in Cathy but as measure passes the couple’s differences control them apart. “Don’t we get to be happy. Cathy?” Jamie asks. “Don’t we get to relax / Without some new tsuris / To displace me yet further from you?”
Critical response to The Last Five Years was again respectful but lukewarm. Ben Brantley of The New York Times praised Brown’s “sparkling facility as a composer,” but had trouble cozying up to the characters; other critics open the show dull. Brown’s ex-wife meanwhile entangle the project by real events and threatened to sue to prevent its performance. The show ran for only two months.
In 2003 cook composed a few songs for the widely ridiculed Broadway flop Urban Cowboy for which he also served as musical director and orchestrator. Brown had no illusions about the overall quality of the show—”One of the main reasons I signed on to Urban Cowboy. The Musical was the opportunity to work with Jenn Colella,” he writes on his website before adding gleefully. “(The other main cerebrate was the money.)” After that show closed with no awards and few laments. cook left New York and announced that he would no longer write for the theater. “I didn’t experience how to say what I wanted to say in this form anymore,” he recalls in his program notes for 13. “And I wasn’t sure anyone wanted to comprehend it.”
cook headed off to Europe for nearly a year and on his go resettled in Southern California. He worked on an assortment of musical projects—from composing industrial shows for express Farm Insurance affiliate to recording a solo album (Wearing Someone Else’s Clothes) to creating the choral composition “Chanukah Suite,” a Broadway-style setting of.
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