With the Last Five Years Movie and Parade in Concert, Jason Robert Brown Has a Nostalgic Week

"I guess this has been my week of nostalgia," three-time Tony Award-winning composer and lyricist Jason Robert Brown remarks. It's a solid assertion, considering that two of his earliest musicals, The Last Five Years and Parade, have returned to prominence in the form of a long-awaited film and a star-studded concert at Avery Fisher Hall, respectively. The former, directed by Richard LaGravenese (of The Fisher King fame) and starring Anna Kendrick and Jeremy Jordan as a couple whose individual sides of their relationship move from beginning to end and vice versa, hits select movie screens and video on demand on February 13. The latter, a presentation of Manhattan Concert Productions on February 16, stars Jordan, Laura Benanti, and an assortment of Broadway's greatest performers. TheaterMania recently caught up with Brown, whose musical Honeymoon in Vegas is currently running at the Nederlander Theatre, to get the scoop on his upcoming projects, long-awaited movies, and previews of the future.

What's the strangest part about watching The Last Five Years as a movie?
Everything. Everything is the strangest part about it. It's all really strange. What I keep saying is, when you watch it on a movie screen, everybody's heads are just enormous. It's a show that I've seen on stage several hundred times now, so to be up close on a porous level, to know something about their hair color and their skincare, things you don't get to find out when you're sitting much farther away from the actor, to be connected to where their eyes are going, it's all immensely strange. In a way, you get pulled into something much more intimate.

What do Anna and Jeremy bring to the roles?
Anna doesn't hide a whole lot once the cameras are rolling. [She] is so brilliant at allowing the camera to just get inside. There's something pretty amazing about her performance. Jeremy is no slouch at it either, but he brings a whole other thing…He manifests a certain kind of exuberance. You really pull for him. People really root for Jeremy in a way that I'm not used to people rooting for that character.

Onstage, The Last Five Years is set in a pre-social media/pre-cell phone world. Does watching the 2015-set film, and seeing, say, Cathy and Jamie Skyping during "A Summer in Ohio", change your perspective?
It doesn't. What's most important, as far as I was concerned, was that it's a story that takes place in 1996. Once Richard said no, it's a story that takes place in the present, it was up to him to figure out how to make that happen. But the play doesn't take place now. I think if you mess with the play, it gets very complicated. There are things about why these people aren't connecting or communicating that doesn't make any sense if they're just texting each other through the whole show. I think Richard swerves around a lot of these things in the movie, all for the good. As always, he's very skillful about the world that these people live in.

How are rehearsals going for the Parade concert?
It's so awesome, you can't even imagine. I did the first orchestra rehearsal yesterday. To have thirty musicians…In fifteen years, I haven't heard the full orchestra, because the Donmar [Warehouse] and [Mark] Taper [Forum] productions used much smaller bands. The color that comes out of it and the dramaturgical power of having that many musicians being able to help tell the story, it's amazing. And this cast, no one on earth will ever get a cast like this. Jeremy is so good, and you pair him with Laura? Laura is a formidable presence up there. The two of them together is really intense. It's insane. On Monday we had our first rehearsal and read through the show, and we got to the end of it and we were like, "Jesus Christ, what the hell is this? When are we ever gonna get this group of people again?"

How much of the show has changed since it was last seen in New York?
When we did the show at the Donmar, we revisited it top to bottom. About twenty-five percent of it changed. New songs, a lot of characters got changed. That has been the version that has been out in the world since 2009 after we did it at the Taper. What we did for this was adapt that version for a much larger orchestra. Because that version was written for fifteen actors who had to do a lot of doubling, now that we've got more actors, we restored tiny bits of things that got cut along the way. One of the great things about the version we did at the Donmar is that it moves like lightning. We were very careful to preserve that.

What's the status of the movie version of 13?
I'm waiting on the screenplay, actually. The deals are all in place. There's a writer who is working on it in Los Angeles, and I saw one draft and gave some notes on that and it was very exciting. We're waiting on the next draft. As with Last Five Years, I continue to believe movies never actually get made, so we can talk about it all you want but at the moment there's nothing much to talk about. The train is continuing down the track in some manner, so that's good news.

Can you give us a preview of what you're working on now?
[Actress/playwright] Claudia Shear and I are working on a piece, which I'm very excited about. I haven't been able to write anything in two years because I've been in rehearsal the whole time. I have a new idea for a new piece that's just me writing on my own. I'm starting to burrow into it. I have a whole month this year where I've told people they can't call me, I'm not doing any concerts, I'm not doing anything. I'm just staying in my studio and writing. Hopefully at the end of that month I'll come out with something that sounds like the beginning of a new piece.