Arts & Culture
Piano man Jason Robert Brown serenades crowd in UW-SP’s studio theater
The Pointer
skrez305@uwsp.edu
“I’ll never be a knight in armor with a sword in hand, or a kamikaze fighter,” Jason Robert Brown sang this Tuesday, Nov. 18, as he began his encore after an almost- full theater gave him a standing ovation.
Brown is a composer, performer, professor, conductor, arranger and more, and he’s just thirty-eight years old.
Brown has composed Broadway and other shows such as the currently running “Thirteen,” “The Next Ten Minutes,” “Parade,” “Songs For a New World” and more.
A piano, a guitar and a bass sat on stage waiting to be played.
As Brown took to the stage and began playing his first song of the night, Matthew Lucas, a University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point freshman, said, “life is complete.”
Brown played selections from the musicals he had composed, a musical adaptation of the film he’s currently working on, “Honeymoon in Vegas,” and tracks off of his solo album, “Wearing Someone Else’s Clothes.”
With no drum or percussion, Brown improvised and stomped his feet with a beat as he played piano. “His sheet music is insane... it’s so hard,” Lucas said, waiting before the show.
At one point in the evening, Brown crossed his wrists, one over the other, and continued to play. With only a few musical and lyrical mishaps, the show seemed to go on as planned.
In his closing thank you’s, Brown commented that this Wisconsin performance would be the last in the state for a while and that he would be returning to a place that had weather you could actually live in.
Though he attended school in Rochester, N.Y., a place with a similar climate to Wisconsin, he currently lives in Los Angeles, Cal. where he teaches musical theater performance and composition at the University of Southern California.
