In the past 10 years, he said, there have been only four musical scores that have engaged his interest: Adam Guettel’s “Light in the Piazza” and “Floyd Collins” David Yazbek’s “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels” and Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty’s “Once on This Island.” Brown talks fast and doesn’t shy from opinions, particularly when it comes to music. Lanky and dark haired with a jittery but forthright manner, Mr. Thank goodness I’ve channeled it into my work, I guess.”

I’m not an out-of-control person, but I can access in my work very easily a feeling of real fury. “I’ve never been particularly good at explaining or even understanding what this sort of rage is that is so accessible to me. “It’s the same angst that comes out in all my stuff,” Mr. His score is full of hormonally fueled rock songs and melodic, Billy Joel-esque ballads about early-teenage concerns like the meaning of friendship, the cliquish strata of junior high school and the terrors of French kissing, but it is especially notable for its focus on the burning earnestness of youthful feelings. Brown wrote the music and lyrics for “13,” working with Dan Elish and Robert Horn, who wrote the book. He comes on very strong, but if you can get past that, it really doesn’t matter anymore. “His social graces are not his best thing,” said the playwright Alfred Uhry, who wrote the book for “Parade.” “He’s got his own light that he sees the world with, and I’ve seen him be highhanded with people. Brown’s mind again these days, for it is the subject of “13.” The title refers to the age of the musical’s protagonist, Evan Goldman, a smart, smart-alecky, self-absorbed New York bar mitzvah boy scaling the heights of his postpubescent junior high school social set when his parents divorce and he undergoes a startling reversal: His mother moves with him from the Upper West Side of Manhattan to a small town in Indiana.

Jacobs Theater in Manhattan, where his new show, “13,” opens on Broadway on Sunday. Brown said over dinner near the Bernard B. “It was horrible, really traumatic and not fun, and it took me the better part of 15 years to recover,” Mr. He has written scores for shows about adult subjects like anti-Semitism and lynching (“Parade”), and the dissolution of a marriage (“The Last Five Years”).īut in a recent interview he made it clear that he remembered the acute alienation he felt as the newcomer in fourth grade. Her son is now a 38-year-old lyricist and composer with a Tony Award to his credit he’s married (for the second time) with a young daughter and a faculty position at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.

13 by jason robert brown