Category: Ask JRB!
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ASK JRB ABOUT ALTERNATE KEYS FOR 13
Ooh, I haven’t done one of these in a while! Jason Marks writes: Getting ready to musically direct 13 this fall, and just had callbacks last night. We had lots of terrific kids who are great actors and most who are fairly strong singers. However, the role of Evan Goldman is proving to be a…
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ASK JRB: ENOUGH WITH THE BILLY JOEL ALREADY
I got a weird and huffy comment this morning on yesterday’s blog about “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant.” Perhaps this guy was annoyed by my incessant Twittering about the Billy Joel project, perhaps he doesn’t like the sound of my voice, perhaps my guitar playing justifiably drives him to distraction. Who knows? But this is…
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ON GERMANS, TEACHING, WILDHORN, COMPOSING, PANDERING, AGING & BROADWAY
When I was in Hamburg last September, I was interviewed by Ralf Rühmeier for Musicals Magazine, a German periodical devoted entirely to musical theatre. (Don’t you love that there’s one of those in Germany but nothing equivalent in the United States?) Because I don’t speak German, the interview was conducted in English, then translated into…
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ASK JRB: INTERPRETING THE SCORE
Some of you may have already read Georgia’s blog, in which she responds to questions about performance practice and score interpretation posed by our friend, Bruce Mayhall (who we met when he was the conductor of the Gay Men’s Chorus of Los Angeles). As it happens, Bruce sent the same questions to me, and I…
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ALL-PURPOSE INSPIRATIONAL QUOTE
My glorious friend Shoshana Bean asked me to provide an inspirational quote for young people starting out in show business. I don’t know what she’s doing with all these quotes she’s collecting, but here’s what I said: The hardest thing in the world is convincing other people to love the same thing you do. But…