Quotes from Jason Robert Brown

What I always wanted to do was to be a rock star.

It is scary to write - period - for me, but once you get past the idea that it's scary to write, I still can only be who I am. As a writer, my job, to me, is to expose myself - to really sort of dig in and find out who I am and then put it on the page.

I'm not doubtful that I am doing what I should be doing - writing for theater - and that I'm doing it in a way no one else does it. Whether anyone else is paying attention or anyone else cares, I'm still ambivalent about that. It's still an open question.

I love my stuff - you're not supposed to say that. But because I'm performer as well as a writer, I'm constantly interacting with my own work. I always get to find these little secrets that I left for myself, little notes - I find them all over the scores.

I don't want costumes and makeup between me and the audience - I want more direct communication. There's something for me about being honest on stage, and I'm at my most honest when I'm behind a piano. So I prefer my concert performances.

I don't come from a musical family at all, but I realized early on I was a musician. I started begging for a piano when I was 6 years old.

I did musicals in high school, certainly. And then I just kept wanting to do them. I felt at home in the theater, in that way that, you know, you're supposed to if that's the kind of person you are.

Personally, I've never been popular, so I'm not surprised that professionally I'm a bit out of step, too.

In terms of my religious preference, if a year goes by and I don't have a Seder or I don't light the menorah, I feel a loss.

I know I'm really good at writing for the theater. I can deny it all I want. Other people can fight me on it. It doesn't really matter. It's the thing I happen to know is my gift.

The jury is still out on whether I'm a genius or not.

Leonard Bernstein was probably the most significant formative influence on me - he was such an encompassing musician. I spent my teenage years absorbing him, and my other interests stemmed off of that. Bernstein led me to Sondheim and to Gershwin, and Sondheim led me to listening to Joni Mitchell.

You're supposed to be a control freak when you're an artist. That's the whole point of having a vision: Why have one if you're not going to protect it?

Writing music and lyrics, you tend to become a control freak - sitting alone in your room with a bare light bulb over your head, writing communist manifestos.

I've never been particularly good at explaining or even understanding what this sort of rage is that is so accessible to me. I'm not an out-of-control person, but I can access in my work very easily a feeling of real fury. Thank goodness I've channeled it into my work, I guess.

What's great about collaborating is getting to work with wonderful people. That's what theatre is about: other people getting you to give your best, and getting everyone else's best out of them.

You have to understand the medium you're writing for. People jump into writing musicals without realizing how complicated they are. Knowing one form doesn't necessarily mean you know the other. You have to be comfortable with it.

Immediate, simultaneous connection between the audience and a performer is crucial to me. It's why I do what I do. Other things, like recording, are satisfying, but they're not the same. I love the connection I get with the audience when I'm sitting behind that piano.

What I aspire to do, and what I try the hardest to do, is write stuff that's very personal in its way. I figure I can only say things the way I say them, so I'm trying to do something that is kind of anti-generic.

Actually, if you ask my really close friends, they would say that 'Honeymoon' is more me than anything else I've written.

My work is very popular with performers, and there are theatre people who get what I'm doing and what tradition I'm working in. I'm very grateful to them - they're my people, who understand why I work the way I do.

Comedy is drama. I think that if your characters are feeling something that is very real, then they have to respond in a way that feels real to them, and some situations, the only response you could possibly have is to respond in a way that's so extreme that people are going to laugh.

Maybe I'd see how you could be so certain that we had no chance...at all.

I never wanted to write 'Mamma Mia!' or 'The Book of Mormon' - they're not my thing, I don't care about them. What I do is very different.