Jason Robert Brown
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Jason Robert Brown won a Tony Award for Best Original Score for the 1999 musical Parade, which received a lavish production at Lincoln Center directed by Harold Prince. Three years later, he won Drama Desk Awards for Outstanding Music and Lyrics for The Last Five Years, a chamber musical lovingly produced off-Broadway with future Tony winner Norbert Leo Butz and Sherie Rene Scott as its stars. Then Brown retreated from the theatre for four years, moving first to a small town in Italy and then to Los Angeles to teach at the University of Southern California. What happened to this musical theatre prodigy? Simply put, he got burnt out, dispirited by the lack of critical and commercial success in the high-pressure world of New York theatre (Parade ran for barely three months, The Last Five Years for two months, and his first show, Songs for a New World, lasted just a month in 1995). But Brown’s sabbatical is over now, which is good news for theatre fans. The Last Five Years receives more than 100 productions a year, and he’s got two new musicals (13 and Honeymoon in Vegas) in development. And in addition to performing his own songs in cabaret, Brown has engineered a profitable sideline writing music for the last four State Farm Insurance Company industrial shows. Popping in to London to check on rehearsals of the U.K. premiere of The Last Five Years at Menier Chocolate Factory, he pauses for a burger lunch, talks about what the show means to him now—and mulls the difficulties of maintaining a theatrical career.
You’ve become a regular visitor to London in the last few years .
I was surprised to realise how often I show up here; my passport betrays the number of times I wander into this country. I hadn’t ever been here until the Bridewell did that production of Songs for a New World, but once I came I decided apparently not to leave.
You’ve also called Italy home for a while. Why?
Why wouldn’t you? It’s Italy! After The Last Five Years closed, I made a decision that I wasn’t going to write for the theatre anymore. That was a decision that held for three years, and I’m happy with both having made that decision and having made another one to ultimately go back and write something when I felt that I really wanted to. And so we moved to Italy initially to get out of New York. I was tired of New York. I was tired of the theatre. I was tired of everything. I was burnt out a bit, and I made no secret of it. We moved to a tiny little town, not Rome. It was important to me not to be in the middle of everything for a while, and for seven months I wasn’t, and I was thrilled about it. But then it was time to pay some bills. And my wife wasn’t as ready to retire as I was, and I got an offer to teach at USC, so that’s where I’ve been for the last year and a half, out in Southern California and teaching in Los Angeles. That’s been great and wonderful, and a whole bunch of other things have happened in the meanwhile, but Italy is still there to remind me that that’s where I aim to be. I’ve not been back for over a year now, which is a shame, but I hope to get back soon. We have an apartment we share with people who are never there. There is a general sense in the environment there that it’s OK to be an artist, in a way that it doesn’t feel in the States. In the States, it’s OK to be a star, but to be an artist is to be looked down on with suspicion: “What exactly is it that you do?” In Italy it’s a noble tradition. I felt keenly in Italy that there’s a respect for a musician that was beyond anything I was conscious of feeling in the U.S.
So you came back to the U.S. to be a teacher—was that a conscious choice?
I love doing it. My mother is a teacher, so it’s in my blood. Obviously, if I had been making enough money as a composer, I wouldn’t have decided to retire in the first place, but I was not successful at it in the way that everyone thought I was supposed to be successful at it. I got tired of defending myself at that level, and I still am. I want to write what I want to write, and I don’t want to have to feel that if I’m not doing that, I must be a failure. It has to be said that I’m not very prolific and I don’t want to be. Someone like Michael John LaChiusa can make a living by being a writer since he writes so many shows. I just don’t think that I have as many ideas as he does, and I don’t want to push my voice to the point where I am a self-parody. I think there’s a real danger for me in overwriting or writing myself out.
Damian Humbley & Lara Pulver
in The Last Five Years
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And teaching allows you to stay involved in the theater without the pressure involved in writing a show?
Yes, I found that instead of having to write something that I didn’t want to write, I could just teach. I teach a number of different courses. Mostly I teach acting for singers or singing for actors and also a course on creating musical theatre for directors or book writers or composers or lyricists; it deals with a lot of process and discussing structure and purpose. This semester we created a 40-minute musical, which I hadn’t thought I’d be able to get to yet. I thought that would be several years down the line in the curriculum. But we just jumped in and did it.
There’s no substitute for the experience of simply getting a show up. In the age of the compilation musical, there are very few outlets now for original musicals.
I don’t know what the problem is. I spend a lot of time pontificating about it. I think it’s a numerical issue. The problem is that every original show has so much pressure on it to be brilliant. Not every movie has pressure on it to be good. There’s a lot of shit that comes out at any given time. But in the theatre it takes so long to get a show up that you don’t really have that option of failing. Rodgers and Hart wrote a lot of terrible shows. People aren’t sitting and waiting desperately for a revival of Too Many Girls. They were allowed to write junk. And if you can’t get stuff up, then there’s no way to develop your voice. I’ve done it somehow, but it certainly wasn’t easy. I saw a show in New York recently that was written by two young writers, and it wasn’t very good, but I thought that there’s potential for them to be good. They just have to keep writing shows. But this may be the last we hear of them for the next four years while they’re putting toget