Alice Ripley Joins Jason Robert Brown at Birdland on Monday!

[Caruso]

Posted: 9/7/06 at 3:00pm

Jim Caruso’s Cast Party and TheaterMania.com are proud to present the Tony Award-winning composer/performer Jason Robert Brown at Birdland on Monday, September 11 at 7pm. He and his band, The Caucasian Rhythm Kings, will be joined by Broadway's Alice Ripley and jazz singer Kate McGarry. This concert is part of “Broadway at Birdland,” an ongoing series of events featuring top Broadway stars and songwriters at the legendary club (315 West 44th Street, NYC). There is a $35 cover and $10 food/drink minimum.

Jason Robert Brown has been hailed as “one of Broadway's smartest and most sophisticated songwriters since Stephen Sondheim” (Philadelphia Inquirer), and his “extraordinary, jubilant theater music “ (Chicago Tribune) has been heard all over the world, whether in one of his musicals or in his own incendiary live performances. The New York Times refers to Jason as “a leading member of a new generation of composers who embody high hopes for the American musical.” Jason is the composer and lyricist of the musical, 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. Jason won a 1999 Tony Award for his score to Parade, a musical written with Alfred Uhry and directed by Harold Prince, which premiered at Lincoln Center Theatre in December 1998, and subsequently won both the Drama Desk and New York Drama Critics' Circle Awards for Best New Musical. Parade was also presented on a national tour in 2000, which Jason conducted. His first musical, Songs for a New World, a theatrical song cycle directed by Daisy Prince, played Off-Broadway at the WPA Theatre in the fall of 1995, and has since been seen in more than two hundred productions around the world. Jason is the winner of 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 Audra McDonald, Betty Buckley, Karen Akers, Renée Fleming, Philip Quast, Jon Hendricks and many others.

Jason's first solo album, “Wearing Someone Else's Clothes,” featuring his band The Caucasian Rhythm Kings, is available from Sh-K-Boom Records. His collaboration with singer Lauren Kennedy, “Songs of Jason Robert Brown,” is available on PS Classics. Jason's piano sonata, “Mr. Broadway” was commissioned and premiered by Anthony De Mare at Carnegie Hall, and he is writing a string quartet for Ethel, to be premiered in 2006. His next theater project, 13, a musical comedy written with Dan Elish, is in development at the Los Angeles Center Theatre Group. Jason is also the composer of the incidental music for 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. Jason currently teaches musical theater performance and composition at the University of Southern California. For more information, please visit www.JasonRobertBrown.com

Who: Jason Robert Brown and The Caucasian Rhythm Kings
When: Monday, September 11 at 7pm
Where: Birdland, 315 West 44 Street, NYC
Cover: $35 plus $10 food/drink minimum
Call: 212-581-3080

[All_For_Laura]

Posted: 9/7/06 at 5:22pm

Wish I could see Alice, but at least I will be at her concert on oct 21. Can't wait to hear reviews from this.

[Phantom2]

Posted: 9/7/06 at 10:49pm

Alice is so great!