This weekend, the TCU Festival of American Song returns for its second annual event and welcomes Jason Robert Brown. The 45-year-old composer is one of the new Broadway lights, combining the traditional Broadway style with classical, pop, rock, jazz, klezmer, and other musical genres to create a sound more familiar to contemporary audiences. He’s coming off two successes: winning multiple Tony Awards for his 2014 musical adaptation of The Bridges of Madison County and the film version of his stage musical The Last Five Years, which came out earlier this year and featured Anna Kendrick singing his songs.
On Saturday evening, the composer will take the stage to participate in a Q&A session and play excerpts from some of his songs. On Sunday afternoon, TCU singers will give full performances of his music. Some will be from the aforementioned shows, while others will be from his other adaptations of Urban Cowboy and Honeymoon in Vegas, plus his revue Songs for a New World and 13 the Musical, a show about a Jewish boy’s bar mitzvah that remains the only Broadway show ever to have an entirely teenage cast. We’ll also hear songs from Parade, the other musical he won a Tony for, about the lynching of Leo Frank. If you want to hear what Broadway sounds like now, you should come to TCU.
The TCU Festival of American Song runs Sat-Sun at PepsiCo Recital Hall, 2800 S University Dr, FW. Tickets are $10. Call 817-257-7602.
