New Jason Robert Brown CD To Be Launched With Concerts at El Portal Theatre

Jason Robert Brown, the composer-lyricist of such works as Parade, The Last 5 Years, and Songs for a New World, will give two performances of a concert with his band The Caucasian Rhythm Kings at the El Portal Theatre in North Hollywood, California to mark the release of his new CD Wearing Someone Else’s Clothes. The concert, featuring songs from the album, will be performed on Friday and Saturday, June 10 and 11, at 8pm.

Hailed by the Philadelphia Inquirer as the “smartest and most sophisticated Broadway songwriter since Stephen Sondheim,” Brown — who currently has the musicals 13 and Honeymoon in Vegas in development — returns to El Portal after performing an impromptu, late-night concert there on March 12 to standing ovations.

“When we were doing The Last 5 Years in New York,” says Brown, “I had the greatest band in the entire world; I loved playing with them so much that I would show up at the theater an hour early and just jam with them. When the show was closing, I was depressed for a number of reasons, but one of the major ones was that I wouldn’t get to play with the band again, so I asked the guitarist and the bass player if we could maybe go and do a show together. It sort of fulfilled a long-held, long-deferred dream of mine to be Billy Joel or Elton John or whoever. We started by doing a couple of shows in New York at what was then the Sh-K-Boom Room at The Cutting Room; over the past three years, we’ve developed a real repertoire of songs that aren’t quite theatrical but aren’t not theatrical. There’s a tradition of songwriters whose music I grew up with, people like Billy Joel and Randy Newman. They tell stories through their songs, and the songs on our new album are in that tradition.”

Wearing Someone Else’s Clothes will be released by Sh-K-Boom Records on June 28 but advance copies of the CD will be available for purchase and signing by Brown at the El Portal concerts; for more information and/or to purhase tickets, click here. Brown and his band will also perform in New York at Au Bar (formerly Le Jazz Au Bar) on June 27, 29, 30, and July 1-3.