June 16, 2025 • 14 mins
Join PARADE Composer and Lyricist Jason Robert Brown in conversation with Des Moines Performing Arts President and CEO Jeff Chelesvig. Brown recounts the development of this production’s sweeping score which won him a Tony Award in 1999. He talks about its award-winning 2023 return to Broadway and its relevance on tour now in 2025.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to DMPA Conversations. I'm Jeff Chelswig, President and CEO
of Do Moin Performing Arts. This podcast gives you an
insider's perspective of the fantastic performances headed to our stages,
straight from the creators themselves. Winner of the twenty twenty
three Tony Award for Best Revival of a Musical, Parade,
will close out the twenty twenty four to twenty five
(00:25):
Willis Broadway series. Entertainment Weekly called Parade the most gorgeous
production on Broadway, and today I welcome the man behind
the gorgeous score of Parade. Three time Tony Award winner
composer and lyricist Jason Robert Brown. Jason has a unique
relationship with De Moin. We have presented him at the
(00:45):
Temple Theater as part of our Cabaret series a few
years ago, and ten years ago, Jason's musical The Bridges
of Madison County made its national tour debut here in
Des Moines, with Jason conducting. We also brought him in
prior to that run to conduct a Des Moines Symphony
at the Yankee Doodle Pops Concert on the State Capitol
(01:07):
Grounds in twenty fifteen. Here is my conversation with Tony
Award winning composer and lyricist Jason Robert Brown. Jason, thanks
(01:32):
so much for joining me today. I'm reminded a lot
of the amount of time that you spent in Iowa
a few years ago when we opened the bridges of
Madison County the tour here and just had such a
wonderful time with you, And I'm so thrilled that we
are able to bring this tour of Parade to Des Moines.
So let's kind of jump in. Tell us about the
(01:54):
storyline of Parade, because this is not your typical song
and dance musical.
Speaker 2 (01:59):
No, I mean, Parade is a true story, or at
least as much of a true story as a musical
can ever tell. But the story of Leo Frank. Leo
Frank was the superintendent of a pencil factory in Atlanta
in nineteen thirteen, and one of the girls who worked
on the factory floor putting erasers into pencil caps. Her
(02:22):
name was Mary Fagan and Mary Fagan was found murdered
in the factory basement on Confederate Memorial Day on April
twenty sixth, nineteen thirteen, and there were a number of suspects,
but Leo Frank, who was a Yankee, he was a Northerner. Well.
He was born in Texas, but he by way of Brooklyn,
(02:44):
he ended up in Atlanta. He had only been there
for a couple of years, and he was Jewish in
a town that really didn't have a lot of Jewish
population at the time. And Leo Frank became, for a
variety of reasons, the principal suspect in the murder of
Mary Fagan, which was sort of a shock to him
(03:06):
and to his wife, Lucille, who was a very well
established member of the Jewish community in Atlanta and had
been for a couple of generations by then. And so
it's the story really of how Leo and Lucille come
together and try to deal with the accusations against Leo,
and also the way that political expediency ultimately made Leo
(03:32):
the sort of perfect suspect. And it explores outsiderness and
anti Semitism and sort of the effects of what had
happened in the years after the Civil War in the
South as they were going through reconstruction and industrialization.
Speaker 1 (03:50):
The first production of this was in nineteen ninety eight
at Lincoln Center. That was your first Broadway show, Is
that right?
Speaker 2 (03:56):
Yeah? I had written a little off Broadway review called
Songs for New World that was directed by my friend
Daisy Prince. And when I was working on that, I
met her dad, who was Hal Prince, and Hal said, well,
you know, I like your work on this, and I've
got a project that I'm working on. I wonder if
you want to come take a look at it. And
so when I was twenty five years old, I started
(04:17):
working on Parade with Hal and Alfred Yuri, who had,
you know, just want to Pullitzer Prize for driving Miss Daisy.
And so I was in pretty heady company for a
very young guy.
Speaker 1 (04:28):
Tell us about the process of putting the show together.
Speaker 2 (04:30):
The most interesting part of putting the show together is
that Leo Frank worked at a pencil company that was
owned by a guy named sig Montag, and sig Montag's
I think great nephew was Alfred Yuri, and so Alfred
had this story in his family. The Leo Frank story
(04:52):
was sort of always spoken in hush tones in Atlanta's
Jewish community for years after the events that are in
the play. So Alfred grew up with it, but always
sort of got the sense that it was forbidden, that
it was, you know, something that wasn't talked about in
polite company, which of course made him just want to
write about it and explore it as deeply as he could.
(05:13):
He brought this idea to Hal, and Hal jumped up
and said, that's a musical. And you know, of course
it would only be Hal Prince who would think that
the Leo Franks story was a musical, but he did,
and when they brought me on board. Strangely, I had
been exploring the idea of writing a musical based on
an Alfred Hitchcock movie called The Wrong Man and the
(05:35):
Wrong Man Henry Fonda. It was also about a man
who was unjustly accused of a crime, and so I
think that was just in my head, that idea of
what it is to be accused of something that you
didn't do, and kind to manifest that musically. So I
think I was already working on that idea, which made
it particularly serendipitous that Hal gave me that call, and
(05:56):
so I worked with them for you know, I guess
it was about four years years that we spent really
building the show, and I was never made to feel
like I was, oh, that kid, or you know, I
didn't know what I was doing and I should just
let the grown ups handle it. I was. I was
part of the team and treated like part of the
team from the outset, which was such a luxury. I mean,
(06:19):
I'm not always treated like that now, and it was
a wonderful initiation into the professional theater world. You know,
I couldn't have asked for better.
Speaker 1 (06:30):
You won the Tony Award for Best Musical Score. I'm
always curious. You write the music and the lyrics, which
is unusual what typically comes first for you.
Speaker 2 (06:39):
I think in the theater world it's unusual, but in
my head they really are very closely intertwined. I can
separate out music and lyrics if I have to, like
I've written lyrics for other people's music and vice versa.
But for me, what always comes first is the character.
And the character has a story that they need to tell,
and sometimes the character is like a whole town. But regardless,
(07:02):
like a character is the voice that is singing this song,
and so that character is gonna tell me a lot
of things. It's gonna tell me what the musical language is.
Because certain characters only you know, sing in certain ways.
It's the reason why you know, you couldn't take and
I am telling you from dream Girls and have Tevia
(07:24):
sing it in Fiddler on the Roof. You know, characters
have their own language and their own vocabulary. You know,
what does the character sound like, and then what does
the character say? And sometimes what the character says is
not the same as what the character wants, And that's
always a fun thing to explore as a writer. You know,
usually I'll hear the music not so much as like
(07:45):
a melody, but there's a rhythm, there's a groove, there's
a harmonic sense, there's some sort of texture that I get,
and then the words start coming in around that, and
eventually it all comes together and at a certain point
that I have to like put aside the music and
just finish the lyrics. And then you know, I carved
the music around that a little more. And I've been
doing it for a very long time, so I think
(08:07):
it's a fairly evolved process now. But the short answer
to your question remains, it has to start with the
character and the story. Sure.
Speaker 1 (08:16):
So this production that is now touring the country started
at City Center right now.
Speaker 2 (08:21):
Yeah, we came out of the pandemic. I mean to
the extent that we're out of the pandemic, but we
came out of the pandemic, and City Center wanted to
do a gala presentation, and Michael Arden had been working
on doing a production with Ben Platt, and so City
Center said can we do this here? And I said,
you can do it. You know, I just want to
(08:42):
make sure we have the full orchestra and with a
large cast, and you know, it's deliberately an epic show.
That's what how Prince always wanted, and so we wanted
to sort of honor the epic nature of it, and
City Center was a great way to do that. But honestly,
I didn't assume we were going to do more than
those seven performances at City Center. But fortunately a producer
(09:04):
named Greg Noble had already been excited when he saw
that it was happening, and sort of the minute we
started performances, he said, let's just take it to Broadway,
which I had never expected or anticipated but was just
the most wonderful sort of vindication for the show.
Speaker 1 (09:21):
What do you hope audiences in de Win take away
from the show.
Speaker 2 (09:25):
Parade is not a show with a happy ending, and
I think sometimes people are like, why would you write
a sad musical, what's the point of that? But for me,
I tell stories with music, and this is a story
that I think needed to be told. When we did
this show in nineteen ninety eight, a lot of the
(09:45):
knock on the show was, you know, why do we
have to bring up all this old history. It was
during the Clinton administration. I think everybody in New York
was feeling like, we're, you know, we're on the good
side of history now and we don't want to dwell
in this. And the difference between that and when we
did the show two years ago and now when it's
on tour is that the politics of this country have
(10:08):
shifted very hard, and a story about a man who
is essentially railroaded because of his outside earnest, I think
is very important to tell. And I think it's important
to talk about the way that this country is really
built on that kind of violent tribalism that we don't
(10:28):
get to say it's in the past, and we don't
get to say this is sort of just some history.
I think this still flows strongly through the heart of
this country, and Parade asks us to confront it and
look at it and acknowledge it. And I'm very proud
of it for doing that.
Speaker 1 (10:47):
As you should be. It's a terrific production and such
a wonderful show. Jason, just want to wrap up here.
We have the Iowa High School Musical Theater Awards, which
is part of the Jimmy Awards in New York that
I think you're familiar with. Advice do you try to
give high school kids that are theater, kids that may
want to be a composer, lyricist, or just be in
the theater.
Speaker 2 (11:07):
In general, theater should be about community. It should be
about building community and enforcing community and strengthening community, and
it's not so much about you. And I think the
thing I want to share most with kids who are
(11:27):
starting out in the musical theater is not to focus
so much on what makes you look good or what
gets you in the center, But how do you strengthen
the community, How do you help build that community, What
do you mean in that community? What is your role
in it? And I think if you can think about
(11:48):
theater that way, it's different than pop music, and it's
different than movies, and it's different than television and it's
certainly different than social media, but it's what makes theater
beautiful is like everybody fits their position in this community,
and then that opens up to a larger community that
then opens up to the audience that sits there and
(12:10):
sees it and experiences it together. And what is your
part in that ecosystem? Like, just philosophically, in the back
of your head, ponder what you want your part to
be in that ecosystem, because I there's room, There's so
much room. I mean, we need people in the theater,
but we don't need stars, and we don't need divas.
(12:32):
Those will show up all the time anyway. But we
need the community to be built. We need people to
sort of join together to make a thing, and that
thing which sort of tells us stories and allows us
in the audience to look up and see ourselves reflected
reflected back, both more beautiful than we are and also
(12:53):
exactly as we are, show us the best versions of ourselves,
and also show us, you know, things that we may
not want to see. But that only works if there's
a real sense of ensemble, a real sense of everyone
stepping into this together and doing one thing at the
same time. Even though we're all different, little moving parts
of it.
Speaker 1 (13:13):
That is a fantastic answer. Thank you. That's really great, Jason.
Thanks so much for joining me today and really appreciate
you taking the time. And we are so looking forward
to presenting parade here in Deoin.
Speaker 2 (13:23):
Absolutely and I can't wait to get back to Iowa.
Speaker 1 (13:25):
Great. That's great, we'd love to have you back. Thank you.
Speaker 2 (13:44):
To night. De Wine.
Speaker 1 (13:49):
Performing Arts is proud to bring world class productions to
our stages. So much of what we do would not
be possible without the generosity of our donors and the
loyalty of our and ticket holders. Thank you for your
continued support. DMPA Conversations is produced by Andrew Downs. For
further conversations, visit DMPA dot org or wherever you get
(14:12):
your podcasts. Thank you for listening.
Welcome to DMPA Conversations. I'm Jeff Chelswig, President and CEO
of Do Moin Performing Arts. This podcast gives you an
insider's perspective of the fantastic performances headed to our stages,
straight from the creators themselves. Winner of the twenty twenty
three Tony Award for Best Revival of a Musical, Parade,
will close out the twenty twenty four to twenty five
(00:25):
Willis Broadway series. Entertainment Weekly called Parade the most gorgeous
production on Broadway, and today I welcome the man behind
the gorgeous score of Parade. Three time Tony Award winner
composer and lyricist Jason Robert Brown. Jason has a unique
relationship with De Moin. We have presented him at the
(00:45):
Temple Theater as part of our Cabaret series a few
years ago, and ten years ago, Jason's musical The Bridges
of Madison County made its national tour debut here in
Des Moines, with Jason conducting. We also brought him in
prior to that run to conduct a Des Moines Symphony
at the Yankee Doodle Pops Concert on the State Capitol
(01:07):
Grounds in twenty fifteen. Here is my conversation with Tony
Award winning composer and lyricist Jason Robert Brown. Jason, thanks
(01:32):
so much for joining me today. I'm reminded a lot
of the amount of time that you spent in Iowa
a few years ago when we opened the bridges of
Madison County the tour here and just had such a
wonderful time with you, And I'm so thrilled that we
are able to bring this tour of Parade to Des Moines.
So let's kind of jump in. Tell us about the
(01:54):
storyline of Parade, because this is not your typical song
and dance musical.
Speaker 2 (01:59):
No, I mean, Parade is a true story, or at
least as much of a true story as a musical
can ever tell. But the story of Leo Frank. Leo
Frank was the superintendent of a pencil factory in Atlanta
in nineteen thirteen, and one of the girls who worked
on the factory floor putting erasers into pencil caps. Her
(02:22):
name was Mary Fagan and Mary Fagan was found murdered
in the factory basement on Confederate Memorial Day on April
twenty sixth, nineteen thirteen, and there were a number of suspects,
but Leo Frank, who was a Yankee, he was a Northerner. Well.
He was born in Texas, but he by way of Brooklyn,
(02:44):
he ended up in Atlanta. He had only been there
for a couple of years, and he was Jewish in
a town that really didn't have a lot of Jewish
population at the time. And Leo Frank became, for a
variety of reasons, the principal suspect in the murder of
Mary Fagan, which was sort of a shock to him
(03:06):
and to his wife, Lucille, who was a very well
established member of the Jewish community in Atlanta and had
been for a couple of generations by then. And so
it's the story really of how Leo and Lucille come
together and try to deal with the accusations against Leo,
and also the way that political expediency ultimately made Leo
(03:32):
the sort of perfect suspect. And it explores outsiderness and
anti Semitism and sort of the effects of what had
happened in the years after the Civil War in the
South as they were going through reconstruction and industrialization.
Speaker 1 (03:50):
The first production of this was in nineteen ninety eight
at Lincoln Center. That was your first Broadway show, Is
that right?
Speaker 2 (03:56):
Yeah? I had written a little off Broadway review called
Songs for New World that was directed by my friend
Daisy Prince. And when I was working on that, I
met her dad, who was Hal Prince, and Hal said, well,
you know, I like your work on this, and I've
got a project that I'm working on. I wonder if
you want to come take a look at it. And
so when I was twenty five years old, I started
(04:17):
working on Parade with Hal and Alfred Yuri, who had,
you know, just want to Pullitzer Prize for driving Miss Daisy.
And so I was in pretty heady company for a
very young guy.
Speaker 1 (04:28):
Tell us about the process of putting the show together.
Speaker 2 (04:30):
The most interesting part of putting the show together is
that Leo Frank worked at a pencil company that was
owned by a guy named sig Montag, and sig Montag's
I think great nephew was Alfred Yuri, and so Alfred
had this story in his family. The Leo Frank story
(04:52):
was sort of always spoken in hush tones in Atlanta's
Jewish community for years after the events that are in
the play. So Alfred grew up with it, but always
sort of got the sense that it was forbidden, that
it was, you know, something that wasn't talked about in
polite company, which of course made him just want to
write about it and explore it as deeply as he could.
(05:13):
He brought this idea to Hal, and Hal jumped up
and said, that's a musical. And you know, of course
it would only be Hal Prince who would think that
the Leo Franks story was a musical, but he did,
and when they brought me on board. Strangely, I had
been exploring the idea of writing a musical based on
an Alfred Hitchcock movie called The Wrong Man and the
(05:35):
Wrong Man Henry Fonda. It was also about a man
who was unjustly accused of a crime, and so I
think that was just in my head, that idea of
what it is to be accused of something that you
didn't do, and kind to manifest that musically. So I
think I was already working on that idea, which made
it particularly serendipitous that Hal gave me that call, and
(05:56):
so I worked with them for you know, I guess
it was about four years years that we spent really
building the show, and I was never made to feel
like I was, oh, that kid, or you know, I
didn't know what I was doing and I should just
let the grown ups handle it. I was. I was
part of the team and treated like part of the
team from the outset, which was such a luxury. I mean,
(06:19):
I'm not always treated like that now, and it was
a wonderful initiation into the professional theater world. You know,
I couldn't have asked for better.
Speaker 1 (06:30):
You won the Tony Award for Best Musical Score. I'm
always curious. You write the music and the lyrics, which
is unusual what typically comes first for you.
Speaker 2 (06:39):
I think in the theater world it's unusual, but in
my head they really are very closely intertwined. I can
separate out music and lyrics if I have to, like
I've written lyrics for other people's music and vice versa.
But for me, what always comes first is the character.
And the character has a story that they need to tell,
and sometimes the character is like a whole town. But regardless,
(07:02):
like a character is the voice that is singing this song,
and so that character is gonna tell me a lot
of things. It's gonna tell me what the musical language is.
Because certain characters only you know, sing in certain ways.
It's the reason why you know, you couldn't take and
I am telling you from dream Girls and have Tevia
(07:24):
sing it in Fiddler on the Roof. You know, characters
have their own language and their own vocabulary. You know,
what does the character sound like, and then what does
the character say? And sometimes what the character says is
not the same as what the character wants, And that's
always a fun thing to explore as a writer. You know,
usually I'll hear the music not so much as like
(07:45):
a melody, but there's a rhythm, there's a groove, there's
a harmonic sense, there's some sort of texture that I get,
and then the words start coming in around that, and
eventually it all comes together and at a certain point
that I have to like put aside the music and
just finish the lyrics. And then you know, I carved
the music around that a little more. And I've been
doing it for a very long time, so I think
(08:07):
it's a fairly evolved process now. But the short answer
to your question remains, it has to start with the
character and the story. Sure.
Speaker 1 (08:16):
So this production that is now touring the country started
at City Center right now.
Speaker 2 (08:21):
Yeah, we came out of the pandemic. I mean to
the extent that we're out of the pandemic, but we
came out of the pandemic, and City Center wanted to
do a gala presentation, and Michael Arden had been working
on doing a production with Ben Platt, and so City
Center said can we do this here? And I said,
you can do it. You know, I just want to
(08:42):
make sure we have the full orchestra and with a
large cast, and you know, it's deliberately an epic show.
That's what how Prince always wanted, and so we wanted
to sort of honor the epic nature of it, and
City Center was a great way to do that. But honestly,
I didn't assume we were going to do more than
those seven performances at City Center. But fortunately a producer
(09:04):
named Greg Noble had already been excited when he saw
that it was happening, and sort of the minute we
started performances, he said, let's just take it to Broadway,
which I had never expected or anticipated but was just
the most wonderful sort of vindication for the show.
Speaker 1 (09:21):
What do you hope audiences in de Win take away
from the show.
Speaker 2 (09:25):
Parade is not a show with a happy ending, and
I think sometimes people are like, why would you write
a sad musical, what's the point of that? But for me,
I tell stories with music, and this is a story
that I think needed to be told. When we did
this show in nineteen ninety eight, a lot of the
(09:45):
knock on the show was, you know, why do we
have to bring up all this old history. It was
during the Clinton administration. I think everybody in New York
was feeling like, we're, you know, we're on the good
side of history now and we don't want to dwell
in this. And the difference between that and when we
did the show two years ago and now when it's
on tour is that the politics of this country have
(10:08):
shifted very hard, and a story about a man who
is essentially railroaded because of his outside earnest, I think
is very important to tell. And I think it's important
to talk about the way that this country is really
built on that kind of violent tribalism that we don't
(10:28):
get to say it's in the past, and we don't
get to say this is sort of just some history.
I think this still flows strongly through the heart of
this country, and Parade asks us to confront it and
look at it and acknowledge it. And I'm very proud
of it for doing that.
Speaker 1 (10:47):
As you should be. It's a terrific production and such
a wonderful show. Jason, just want to wrap up here.
We have the Iowa High School Musical Theater Awards, which
is part of the Jimmy Awards in New York that
I think you're familiar with. Advice do you try to
give high school kids that are theater, kids that may
want to be a composer, lyricist, or just be in
the theater.
Speaker 2 (11:07):
In general, theater should be about community. It should be
about building community and enforcing community and strengthening community, and
it's not so much about you. And I think the
thing I want to share most with kids who are
(11:27):
starting out in the musical theater is not to focus
so much on what makes you look good or what
gets you in the center, But how do you strengthen
the community, How do you help build that community, What
do you mean in that community? What is your role
in it? And I think if you can think about
(11:48):
theater that way, it's different than pop music, and it's
different than movies, and it's different than television and it's
certainly different than social media, but it's what makes theater
beautiful is like everybody fits their position in this community,
and then that opens up to a larger community that
then opens up to the audience that sits there and
(12:10):
sees it and experiences it together. And what is your
part in that ecosystem? Like, just philosophically, in the back
of your head, ponder what you want your part to
be in that ecosystem, because I there's room, There's so
much room. I mean, we need people in the theater,
but we don't need stars, and we don't need divas.
(12:32):
Those will show up all the time anyway. But we
need the community to be built. We need people to
sort of join together to make a thing, and that
thing which sort of tells us stories and allows us
in the audience to look up and see ourselves reflected
reflected back, both more beautiful than we are and also
(12:53):
exactly as we are, show us the best versions of ourselves,
and also show us, you know, things that we may
not want to see. But that only works if there's
a real sense of ensemble, a real sense of everyone
stepping into this together and doing one thing at the
same time. Even though we're all different, little moving parts
of it.
Speaker 1 (13:13):
That is a fantastic answer. Thank you. That's really great, Jason.
Thanks so much for joining me today and really appreciate
you taking the time. And we are so looking forward
to presenting parade here in Deoin.
Speaker 2 (13:23):
Absolutely and I can't wait to get back to Iowa.
Speaker 1 (13:25):
Great. That's great, we'd love to have you back. Thank you.
Speaker 2 (13:44):
To night. De Wine.
Speaker 1 (13:49):
Performing Arts is proud to bring world class productions to
our stages. So much of what we do would not
be possible without the generosity of our donors and the
loyalty of our and ticket holders. Thank you for your
continued support. DMPA Conversations is produced by Andrew Downs. For
further conversations, visit DMPA dot org or wherever you get
(14:12):
your podcasts. Thank you for listening.
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