Jason Robert Brown is, as far as Broadway goes, the classic wunderkind. After a brief time working as an arranger and conductor, he burst onto the scene as a songwriter with the now iconic song cycle Songs For a New World in 1995, when Brown was just 25 years old. That led to suddenly being paired with the likes of Alfred Uhry and Harold Prince, writing the score of 1998's Parade. And since then, he's kept musical theatre fans in rapture with musicals like The Last Five Years, Bridges of Madison County, and The Connector.

Right now, he's preparing for a December 6 concert at The Angel Nyack in Nyack, New York. The event, a fundraiser for immigrant-led grassroots organization Proyecto Faro and their work to make America more hospitable to immigrants, will feature Brown playing and singing some of his old work alongside songs from his newer and still in-development projects, like the Broadway-bound Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (which he's co-writing with playwright Taylor Mac) and Less (a collaboration with Doug Wright). And he's bringing some fancy friends along, too: Broadway favorites Sierra Boggess, Joy Woods, and Grace McLean.

That's not the only concert Brown has coming up this month. On December 15, Brown will conduct a reunion concert for his Broadway musical The Bridges of Madison County—featuring original cast members Kelli O'Hara and Stephen Pasquale.

Playbill recently caught up with Brown to get the details about his in-development musicals, plus what we can expect from his upcoming hometown concert. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

Let’s talk about Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. How did the try-out in Chicago go? What did you learn?
Jason Robert Brown: Chicago was fantastic. What was really important about Chicago is we were trying to do something crazy. We wanted to do a Taylor Mac musical, as opposed to your basic musical adaptation that happens to have a book by Taylor Mac. We wanted to let Taylor as a voice run the show, because it’s such a distinctive voice, and it’s such a special thing to be able to have a musical that they want to write. That was always going to be kind of revelatory and also a little bit bananas. What I loved about Chicago was it was totally bananas, totally revelatory. 

Now we figure out exactly how we want to move this thing to a Broadway theatre where people have to pay $7,000 to get a second seat in the last row. That has been the work for the last year, picking where the best ideas are and figuring out how to amplify and support those ideas and still let it feel as crazy and delightfully Taylor Mac as it was in Chicago. As with all of my shows, I feel like my voice is going to come through. There’s not a whole lot I need to worry about with that. What’s really fun in this case is to collaborate. Always my feeling, when I get to collaborate with other playwrights, is how do I support what they do with my craziness. When I’m working with Marsha Norman, it’s obviously going to be different than when I’m working with Taylor Mac, and it’s obviously going to be very different than when I’m working with Andrew Bergman, or Robert Horn—all of those voices are very different voices. Taylor’s vision is just really… it’s exciting. It’s invigorating to work with somebody who’s always got some new way to take on, basically, theatre.

The last we heard was coming to Broadway in 2025—but I’m guessing that’s no longer true?
No I can definitively say it’s not coming to Broadway in 2025. Nobody’s going to yell at me for saying that. Broadway is a real estate business, and we’re just waiting on the real estate people to decide that they’re going to bless us today and give us a theatre. And we’ll be ready.

You also never seem to be far away from your older work. You just did Songs for a New World again in London, and of course Parade just finished its tour and Last Five Years just made its long-awaited Broadway debut last season. What is it like returning to things you wrote in your youth?
I end up being, sort of, two people when I’m doing it. The first is me, the guy who’s now 55, having to interpret this material. I can’t entirely look at it as mine. And then there’s another me, which is the me who wrote it, who remembers why I wrote that syllable or why I chose that chord. It can be very strange to get in touch with that guy. There are times where I’m like, "Why would you have made that choice 30 years ago? Why on earth did you decide to do that?" And other times I’m really surprised, in a good way, by what I might have done a long time ago. 

I end up collaborating with myself. Like any collaboration, that has moments of transcendence and moments of, like, I don’t know what the fuck we’re doing but we’ll get someplace. I think there’s a lot of that material that I’ve outgrown, and I’m forced to re-engage with it. And when I re-engage with it, I have to with who I am now. It’s not about re-writing it. If you’re a classical musician and you’re taking on Mozart, your point isn’t to re-write Mozart. But how do I make this alive for me? What do I have to say about this now?

I think too, people like you that were writing when you were so young, there is a magic-ness to that youth, to not knowing everything you now know from your storied career. Which of those is most powerful to you?
Why not both? What I always say is that nobody told me when I was 25 to take it easy and not write every idea that came to me. I didn’t know that you only get so many ideas. I still feel like I’m writing the same things that I wrote when I was in my 20s. I have to really contort them into different shapes now, and I have to bread them and fry them in different ways. If I had known when I was 24 to watch out—putting 14 different ideas into one song, it could have been 14 separate songs if you just took it easy… I think that’s what young person energy as a writer really is, this thing of “this is everything I know how to do.” And as you get older, it really is about the most distilled version of those things, much more intricately. 

[The Connector co-writer Jonathan Marc] Sherman always says, “You’ve got one story. Everybody has one story that they tell, and we just figure out different ways to tell it.” So you tell it very differently when it’s a new story to you and when it’s a story you’ve been telling for a long time.

How did this concert come to be for you?
We moved here during the pandemic—we had to get out of the city. I grew up around here, in Monsey. But you want to have a tie to your community, and we really didn’t. We were still sort of New York people who just happened to live here. I was trying find my way into that, and found Proyecto Faro through someone I went to high school with. I looked at their programs. I saw what was happening in the country, the way that immigrants are being so aggressively demonized. I thought, anything I can do would be a good idea. So I’ll do anything. I’ve got Sierra Boggess, and Joy Woods, and Grace McLean to join me. What makes a community good is everybody stepping in together and doing their part for it. This felt like my piece of bringing a community together and making something beautiful happen. And I get to make music, which makes me happy.

What does it mean to you to get to use your talents for things like this?
I have always placed this sort of philanthropic work highly among what I do. I think a lot of Broadway artists do, because the minute I walked into New York, I got drafted into doing things for Broadway Cares / Equity Fights AIDS. This idea that you’re supposed to be giving back to the community is ingrained in a lot of Broadway artists from the minute we arrive—anything we can do to help, let’s go do. I’ve had Cynthia [Erivo] and Joshua [Henry] come in to do The Last Five Years for the Brady Campaign. We did a lot of work about gun control. This summer, we did a concert for the Committee to Protect Journalists. Broadway is a pretty affluent community, so it’s great to be able to funnel some of that into places that need it. The really rich people in this country aren’t doing anything to help the people that need it, so it’s on us. In this case, I think of all the extraordinary immigrants that I’ve gotten to work with, people who come to this country to be artists. It’s been a privilege for me to work with those people and to have them support me. I want to support them back.

What can we expect from the performance?
We’ve got Sierra, who I think is just… in spite of the fact that she’s always starring in something, I think she’s an underrated gift, one of the great singing actors that we have. She’ll be doing stuff from my shows. And Joy and I just did Songs For a New World in London, so she’s going to do some of that stuff, and some things from Last Five Years. I always bring a lot of stuff from my shows and my albums. I’ve got an incredible band that’s really versatile, and we go to a lot of crazy and fun places. There’s certainly a focus on social justice, but that shows up a lot in my work anyway. It’s going to be a groove party, because that’s the way I like to spend my time, and I feel a good way to spend an evening. I’m not going to beat everyone over the head with why we’re there, because we know. It’ll be time to celebrate each other and celebrate the community, a big party that’ll break your heart over and over again. 

I think if I could summarize every piece I’ve ever written, that’s what it would be: a big party that breaks your heart every now and then.

Will we hear things from upcoming projects?
Absolutely. There’s a bunch of stuff from Less, which is the show I’m writing with Doug Wright, based on Andrew Sean Greer’s novel. And there’s a bunch of stuff from Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. I tend to prefer leaning into my recent work anyway, just because it’s the stuff that’s closest to me when I’m performing. The older stuff tends to go to the other singers, and I stick to the newer stuff. But with the Bridges of Madison County concert coming up, I’m also in that head, so we’ll be doing a bunch of stuff from Bridges.

For tickets to the December 6 event or to make a donation to Proyecto Faro, visit ProyectoFaroRockland.org.