Jason Robert Brown Will Workshop New Musical THE CONNECTOR at Princeton This Fall

Composer Jason Robert Brown, best known for The Last Five Years and The Bridges of Madison County, will be workshopping a new musical called The Connector at Princeton University this fall.

Students will work with Brown, as well as the playwright Jonathan Marc Sherman and the director Daisy Prince, to present two readings of the show at McCarter Theatre Center at the end of the semester.

The musical is about an aspiring writer, Ethan Dobson, who has his first article published by The Connector, a magazine with a storied history. As Ethan strives to be part of the magazine's legacy, he navigates editors with god complexes, fact checkers with vendettas, proofreaders, lawyers, and the challenges of his own history.

Jason Robert Brown is a composer, lyricist, conductor, arranger, orchestrator, director and performer. Jason's score for The Bridges of Madison County, a musical adapted with Marsha Norman from the bestselling novel, directed by Bartlett Sher and starring Kelli O'Hara and Steven Pasquale, received two Tony Awards (for Best Score and Orchestrations). 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 began its life in Los Angeles in 2007 and opened on Broadway in 2008 (and was subsequently directed by the composer for its West End premiere in 2012); 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; Parade, written with Alfred Uhryand directed by Harold Prince, which premiered at Lincoln Center Theatre in 1998, and subsequently won both the Drama Desk and New York Drama Critics' Circle Awards for Best New Musical, as well as garnering Jason the Tony Award for Original Score; Honeymoon In Vegas, based on Andrew Bergman's film, which opened on Broadway in 2015 following a triumphant production at Paper Mill Playhouse; and Songs for a New World, a theatrical song cycle directed by Daisy Prince, which played Off-Broadway in 1995, and has since been seen in hundreds of productions around the world.