I've been musing the last few days on JRB, since the concepts of success and failure fascinate me.
He's 40. It's unlikely he'll ever be more successful than he is now. Not impossible, just unlikely.
How successful is he now? He's had two shows on Broadway; one in a non-profit house which won a Tony for Best Musical and Best Score but closed very quickly, the other an utter financial disaster. He had some music inserted into the score of a third Broadway show which was also a financial disaster. He's written two Off-Broadway shows; one ran 12 performances, one ran 2 months. He has never had a song on the Top 100 pop charts. Some of his work receives regional and amateur productions.
He has done some incidental music for a few plays, and has worked as a musician and arranger on a few shows.
In spite of this lack of financial success, he has received good press, and has admirers.
But how many people outside his fan base know his name? And how many people can we say are fans? His Facebook fan page has 8,942 names. Maybe we can round up to 10,000?
I find it interesting that he, with David Yazbeck, Michael Jon LaChiusa, Adam Guettel, Ricky Ian Gordon, Frank Wildhorn (others?) are the most prolific of music theatre writers in the 30-50 age range. And yet none of them has achieved the financial success in the theatre of Kander & Ebb, Sondheim, Porter, Berlin, Bock & Harnick, Jerry Herman, etc. (Wildhorn has money from a handful of pop songs, right?)
I'm not sure where this musing leads, except I can understand how he could be unhappy enough to focus on teenagers who copy his songs without giving him the $4. I wonder if Sondheim would care about stray copies of "Losing My Mind" being passed around? If Fred Ebb asked people not to Xerox "Don't Tell Mama?" It's probably easier to overlook these things when your work has bought you two homes and lifetime security.
And then there are the even lesser known writers (Lowdermilk & Kerrigan, for instance) who happily give their work away for free, knowing that it's the best way to build a wider reputation. But is Brown beyond that stage, trapped in a limbo of being not famous and not unknown at the same time?
That must be rough.
Updated On: 7/1/10 at 12:46 PM
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