Museum of the City of New York to Honor Jason Robert Brown with Auchincloss Prize

Jason Robert Brown will be honored with The Museum of the City of New York 2018 Louis Auchincloss Prize on Wednesday, November 14, 2018. The prize is presented to writers and artists whose work is inspired by and enhances the five boroughs of New York City. Disciplines include literature, architecture, art, music, playwriting, and photography. The Prize honors Louis Auchincloss (1917-2010) for his many years of service to the Museum of the City of New York as well as for his literary contributions that established him as one of the leading American novelists of the 20th and 21st centuries. Auchincloss accepted the first Prize himself in 2007. Past recipients include Tony Kushner, Wynton Marsalis, Gloria Steinem, Whoopi Goldberg, Stephen Sondheim, Sheldon Harnick, Ada Louise Huxtable, and Louis Auchincloss.

The gala will take place at the Museum of the City of New York on November 14 at 6:30pm. In honoring Brown, the program will feature highlights from the Museum's extensive Theater Collection, which contains over 190,000 objects documenting theatrical performance in New York City from 1785 to present day. The award presentation will also include a special performance by Jason Robert Brown, featuring Betsy Wolfe and Norm Lewis. Wolfe starred as Cordelia in the recent Broadway revival of Falsettos and as Cathy Hiatt in The Last Five Years. Norm Lewis made musical theater history as the first African-American actor to perform the title role in Broadway's long-running Phantom of the Opera and has also starred in Broadway productions of Les Miserables, Chicago, Sondheim on Sondheim, and Porgy and Bess.

Brown is a composer, lyricist, conductor, arranger, orchestrator, director, and performer. His epochal Off-Broadway musical The Last Five Years was cited as one of Time Magazine's 10 Best of 2001 and became a film starring Anna Kendrick and Jeremy Jordan. He has won three Tony Awards, one for his first Broadway musical Parade, and two for The Bridges of Madison County, as well as Drama Desk, New York Drama Critics' Circle, and Outer Critics Circle awards and nominations for his works on and Off-Broadway. He is also the winner of the Kleban Award for Outstanding Lyrics and the Gilman & Gonzalez-Falla Foundation Award for Musical Theatre. Other works include 13, Honeymoon in Vegas, an orchestral adaptation of E.B. White's The Trumpet Swan, and the piano sonata Mr. Broadway. His 1995 theatrical song cycle Songs for a New World received a major revival at New York's City Center last summer.

He has composed incidental music for a number of Broadway plays and was nominated for Tony Award for his contributions to the score of Urban Cowboy the Musical. He contributed music to the hit Nickelodeon television series The Wonder Pets, as well as to Sesame Street. His extraordinary versatility as a musical director, conductor, orchestrator, and arranger have been called upon for works by William Finn, Yoko Ono, Charles Strouse and Lee Adams, Andrew Lippa, and Michael John LaChiusa, and performers Liza Minnelli, John Pizzarelli, and many others. Brown served as musical supervisor and arranger for Prince of Broadway, a celebration of the career of Harold Prince.

As a soloist, or with his band The Caucasian Rhythm Kings, Brown performs in sold-out concerts around the world. His album Wearing Someone Else's Clothes was one of Amazon.com's best of 2005 and his new collection How We React and How We Recover was released in June 2018.

Brown spent ten years teaching at the USC School of Dramatic Arts, and has also taught at Harvard University and Emerson College. This fall he began teaching at Princeton University.

About the Museum of the City of New York

The Museum of the City of New York fosters understanding of the distinctive nature of urban life in the world's most influential metropolis. It engages visitors by celebrating, documenting, and interpreting the city's past, present, and future. To connect with the Museum on social media, follow us on Instagram and Twitter at @MuseumofCityNY and visit our Facebook page at Facebook.com/MuseumofCityNY. For more information please visit www.mcny.org.

Photo Credit: Walter McBride / WM Photos