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Jason Robert Brown

Jason Robert Brown

On Friday, October 3, 2008, Jason announced the winners of his "First Official Summer JRB Karaoke Competition." They are Natalie Hawkins, Natalie Weiss, Jonathan Reid Gealt and Jonathan Shew. Each of these winners will perform on-stage with Jason at his October 13 concert in NYC.

We present individual links to each of their winning entries below. (You may need to turn off your pop-up blocker to hear the entries from the Jonathans, as they're not posted on YouTube.)

Click to view winning entries:

Natalie Hawkins
Natalie Weiss
Jonathan Shew

Hear more from these four performers on this site at:


More strong entries

Watch our favorite entries to the "First Official Summer JRB Karaoke Competition." Note: we reviewed all YouTube entries, but only a few from other services.


JRB Contest Special Awards

JRB joked that he might pick finalists in categories, like "Craziest Bedroom Decor" and "Most Interesting Interpretation Of Pitch." We suggest creating a few "Special Awards" - and we present our winners here.

Some of these awards are serious, some are funny and some are both. However, nobody is listed here unless they gave a finalist-level performance.

Other award suggestions? Send us a message on our BestArts YouTube channel.

Best Music Video

  • Winner - Dan Olson (Banion5), King of the World - or in his case, King of central Japan
  • Honorable Mention - Maddy Trumble, I'm Not Afraid

Best Riffs

  • Winner - Shelly Bort, She Cries - the entire second half

Most Excited Video Camera

  • Winner - Shelly Bort again, King of the World - watch the photos dance at 4:14

Best Interpretation

  • Winner - Amber Nicole Patrick, I'm Not Afraid - especially after 2:20

Best Triple Threat

  • Winner - Daniel Hines (DShines22), for very strong entries on all three songs

Most Effective Use of Vibrato

  • Winner - Alex Heinen (MissBroadwayDork), I'm Not Afraid
  • Honorable Mention - Zak Resnick, She Cries - especially after 3:00

Prettiest Blue Eyes Ever Seen

  • Winner - Anthony Johnson (WoodlandCreature22), I'm Not Afraid - and he rocks the song, too
  • Honorable Mention - Anthony Johnson, She Cries

Most Famous Performer

  • Winner - Jonathan Reid Gealt, She Cries
  • Honorable Mention - Natalie Weiss (natdawg7), I'm Not Afraid

Best Non-Native English Performer

  • Winner - Bobby Araujo, She Cries
  • Also, winner best timed slideshow

Best Discovery

  • Winner - Adam Parnell (MrBroadwayDork), She Cries - can't wait to hear more from him

Jason is the composer and lyricist of the musical, The Last Five Years, which was cited as one of Time Magazine's 10 Best of 2001 and won Drama Desk Awards for Best Music and Best Lyrics. Jason won a 1999 Tony Award for his score to Parade, a musical written with Alfred Uhry and directed by Harold Prince, which premiered at Lincoln Center Theatre in December 1998, and subsequently won both the Drama Desk and New York Drama Critics' Circle Awards for Best New Musical. Parade was also presented on a national tour in 2000, which Jason conducted.

Jason's first musical, Songs for a New World, a theatrical song cycle directed by Daisy Prince, played Off-Broadway at the WPA Theatre in the fall of 1995, and has since been seen in more than two hundred productions around the world. Jason's newest musical, 13, written with Dan Elish and directed by Todd Graff, premiered this January to rave reviews at Los Angeles's Mark Taper Forum, and opens on Broadway in the spring of 2008.

Jason is the winner of the 2002 Kleban Award for Outstanding Lyrics and the 1996 Gilman & Gonzalez-Falla Foundation Award for Musical Theatre. Jason's songs, including the cabaret standard Stars and the Moon, have been performed and recorded by Audra McDonald, Betty Buckley, Karen Akers, Renée Fleming, Philip Quast, Jon Hendricks and many others.

Hear more from and about JRB on his website at http://www.jasonrobertbrown.com/. JRB Piano/Vocal scores are available for purchase online at sites such as Amazon.com.

JRB videos

Watch for a set of JRB videos here soon!