BWW Interviews: Jason Robert Brown, On His Solo Show, BRIDGES, L5Y And More!

Daisy Wheeller

You've played many London venues but this is your first time filling the Festival Hall. What can we expect? Will there be any special guests and will we hear any new material that a British audience might not have heard yet?

What's really different about this is just that when you have such a big beautiful hall I figured you should fill it with beautiful music, so we have a 20-piece orchestra and we have an extraordinary group of singers. We're going to do a lot of material that has never been done in England because I haven't been back to do a concert there in four or five years now. So there will be songs from "Bridges of Madison County," and "Honeymoon in Vegas," and also some new stuff that I'm working on and there will also be songs from all of the other shows like "Songs for a New World," "Parade," "The Last Five Years," and "13." So I'm excited about all of that and it's a real thrill to cover all the music that I think represents me in a very large room.

In terms of special guests, first of all there's Cynthia Erivo, who's a force of nature, and Willemijn Verkaik...and there's no one that sings like her! There are a lot of singers who are new to me such as Oliver Tompsett and Matt Henry, and getting to work with them is the part that's really exciting. I've got Caroline Sheen coming to sing as well and I think to myself that these are top-rank singers all taking part in this extraordinary event so I feel very lucky to have that kind of singer around me. I'm grateful to have anybody singing my songs but to have people of that calibre is pretty special.

After much anticipation, "The Last Five Years" has finally come to UK cinemas, how did you find the experience of transferring a musical that's so dear to you to the big screen?

I thought it was very beautiful and what I still think is how I'm amazed that it still exists. I'm amazed that there is a movie of that show and that movie is so beautiful and true to what I was trying to do. I've never been able to have any kind of objective thoughts about it; I sit in the theatre and the music starts and I think, "Oh my God, I wrote that!" And Anna Kendrick's there and she's singing my song and I think, "How did this happen?" So that is really my basic reaction to "The Last Five Years" movie.

I had an experience a couple of weeks ago when I saw my nine-year-old daughter performing on stage for the first time and I had the same response which was "I can't have a critical reaction to this, I have no idea whether any of it's any good, I just can't believe that that thing that I've created is up there and I'm immensely proud and utterly mystified."

Your score for Parade is quite cinematic - are there any plans to turn this into a film also?

I'm always open to anybody who wants to do it and I would love to see it happen but to my knowledge nobody has yet made me the offer.

Your most recent shows Bridges of Madison County and Honeymoon in Vegas haven't come to our side of the pond yet...

We are sneakily planning a "Bridges of Madison County," production in London hopefully in the next couple of years but I am not only not at liberty to provide any details but I actually don't have any more details really! "Honeymoon in Vegas" is still so fresh we are still trying to work out what to do with it but I certainly hope it would come to London and think it would be a great show out there!

Having heard the music for "Honeymoon," it has got a very different feel to your other shows; what inspired this project?

Actually if you ask my really close friends they would say that "Honeymoon" is more me than anything else I've written. All of my shows explore some different part of me that I've wanted to get out in the world and I think they all sound very different in their way. But for me it was that I wanted to write that big band Cy Coleman sound and just to write a show that would really swing so I loved doing it and it all felt very much like me, but I guess people don't know that I've got that particular side to me. It's so much about what you can do when you let a bunch of live musicians interact with each other and honestly that in ultimately the way that my work emerges, I think about what kind of music I want to make and how I can make that different from yesterday's and what I want things to sound like i.e. what world do I live in. I wanted to live in a big swinging brassy world so that's what we built!

Lots of people have tried to pinpoint your music to a certain bracket; who is it that has influenced your work?

I grew up in the 70s and I hear in my own stuff a lot of what I grew up listening to, which is to say I hear a lot of Billy Joel, Paul McCartney, Carole King, Joni Mitchell and Stevie Wonder. I also really love the symphonic stuff that Bernstein and Copland were writing and the minimalists that came out such as Steve Rice and Philip Glass. It's a real cliché but there's good music and then there's not good music and good music inspires me and so I don't really spend a lot of time worrying about genre. When I have to write for characters it's more important to know what those characters sound like than to know what I sound like and so I'll spend a lot of my time listening to what a character sounds like and how that person sings. That is most clear to me with Bridges of Madison County: those characters all seem so specifically defined by their backgrounds musically; you can tell where they grew up, what they listened to and where they came from...but that's also true of all my shows.

If you had to pick one song from your repertoire that you are most proud of what would it be?

First of all it will change in eight minutes but in this particular 10 minutes that you got me I would probably say that the opening of Bridges of Madison County, "To Build a Home," feels very much like a summation of everything I've ever wanted to do. It does so much dramatically, lyrically and musically and I'm very proud of that one.

The new A-List cast for the St James' anniversary production of Songs for a New World has just been announced and looks so exciting; will you be involved in this production?

I have nothing to do with it! I saw that cast and I thought, "Jeez! Now I'm mad that I don't get to do it!" I was thrilled when I saw that list.

Are you working on any new shows at the moment?

I am. I'm sitting here looking at my piano and there are four folders that each include a show that I have started working on so hopefully within the next five years all of that stuff will have made its way into the world one way or another.

Jason Robert Brown plays the Royal Festival Hall on Tuesday May 26.

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