Lea Salonga, Gavin Creel, Vanessa Williams, Brian d'Arcy James & More Set for MISCAST24

MCC Theater has revealed that Miscast24 will take place on Monday April 15, 2024 at the Hammerstein Ballroom. The evening will honor Tony Award winner Jason Robert Brown (MCC’s The Connector, Parade) and MCC Youth Company alum Nicole Suazo. 

Miscast24 will feature performances by Gavin Creel (MCC’s Walk on Through, Hello, Dolly!), Brian d’Arcy James (Days of Wine and Roses, Into the Woods), Tyne Daly (Gypsy, Doubt), Ingrid Michaelson (singer/songwriter, The Notebook), Lauren Patten (Death and Other Details, Jagged Little Pill),  Michaela Jaé Rodriguez(“Pose,” “Loot”), Leslie Rodriguez Kritzer (Spamalot, Beetlejuice), Anika Noni Rose (Uncle Vanya, The Princess and the Frog), Lea Salonga (Here Lies Love, Once on This Island), Ryan Vasquez (MCC’s Walk on Through, The Notebook), Vanessa Williams (Miscast23 honoree, POTUS), and Joy Woods (The Notebook, Little Shop of Horrors). And more to be announced! Will Van Dyke will serve as Musical Director.

Miscast is one of the most anticipated and exciting theater events in New York each year. This spring, the biggest stars of stage and screen will take to the stage atHammerstein Ballroom, performing songs from roles in which they would not traditionally be cast.

Watch Joy Woods' performance from MISCAST23 HERE! 

Tables and sponsorship packages are available now by calling Vinny Martini, Associate Director of Development, at (212) 727-7722 x 205. Show-only priority booking for MCC Patrons is now open. Show-only Subscriber booking opens on January 31 at noon ET. Show-only public on sale begins February 1 at noon ET. All tickets will be available for purchase at www.mcctheater.org/miscast. 

To receive exclusive updates about Miscast24 and to learn more about the event, sign up at www.mcctheater.org/miscast. Additional benefits can be accessed through ticket and sponsorship packages. For more information, visit the website or e-mail vmartini@mcctheater.org.

Funds raised from Miscast24 help MCC Theater produce exciting new work Off-Broadway and support its Youth Company and in-school partnerships that serve New York City public high school students, as well as MCC’s literary development work with emerging playwrights.

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, his debut song cycle Songs for a New World, and the seminal Parade, recently on Broadway in a spectacular Tony Award-winning revival directed by Michael Arden, for which he won the 1999 Tony Award for Best Score.

Jason Robert Brown's music 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.  Jason’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 Yearswas 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 Theatre 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 Jason 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 acclaimed 2023 Broadway production starring Ben Platt and Micaela Diamond. Jason collaborated with comedy legend Billy Crystal, Amanda Green, Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel on a Broadway musical of Mr. Saturday Night.  Jason 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.

Jason’s current show, a chamber musical created with Daisy Prince and Jonathan Marc Sherman called The Connector, opens in January 2024 at MCC Theater. Future projects include an adaptation of Lilian Lee’s Farewell My Concubine, created with Kenneth Lin and Moisés Kaufman; and Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, a new musical written with Taylor Mac based on John Berendt’s book and directed by Rob Ashford. Jason 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.  Jason’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, Jason has performed concerts around the world.  For six years, his monthly sold-out performances at New York’s SubCulture featured many of the music and theater world’s most extraordinary performers, including a sold-out concert at Town Hall with Stephen Sondheim. His newest collection, “Coming From Inside the House,” featuring Ariana Grande and Shoshana Bean, commemorates the final SubCulture concert, recorded remotely during the pandemic. His previous albums, “How We React and How We Recover” and “Wearing Someone Else’s Clothes” are available from Ghostlight/Sh-K-Boom Records. Jason’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. Jason 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.”  Jason 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, Jason 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 Theatre. Jason orchestrated Andrew Lippa’sjohn and jen, Off-Broadway at Lamb’s Theatre.  Additionally, Jason served as the orchestrator and arranger of Charles Strouse and Lee Adams’s score for a proposed musical of “Star Wars.”  Jason has conducted and created arrangements and orchestrations for Liza Minnelli, John Pizzarelli, and Michael Feinstein, among many others.

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

NICOLE SUAZO

is so honored to be this years’ Miscast Youth Company Alum honoree! Having grown up in the Bronx and gone to a high school with no arts program, it wasn’t until joining the MCC Youth Company in 2014 that she discovered both her personal and artistic voice. Nicole spent her first year in the Playwriting Lab and the following year participating in both the Performance Lab (performed in Uncensored 2016) and the Ambassador program (until 2019), where she was MCC's first Production Ambassador (Ride the Cyclone). In 2019, Nicole became the first YC Alum full-time staff member at MCC, working with the organization until Spring 2020. In 2021, Nicole was given the opportunity to pursue Company Management and made her Broadway debut with Chicken & Biscuits. Her other Broadway credits include Macbeth, Dear Evan Hansen, and most recently, Some Like It Hot. When not working on Broadway, Nicole continues to perform, audition, and work on her screenplay. Nicole is full of immense gratitude to be where she is on her career journey, and credits it to all of the amazing people she met during her time at MCC.

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