Jason Robert Brown is an American musical theatre composer and lyricist from Ossining, New York. His career began with the unorthodox Songs for a New World, whose original off-Broadway production ran for 28 performances at the WPA Theater in New York City in 1995. The show sits on the boundary between musical and song cycle: it is a series of largely disjoint songs with (unlike a musical) no plot or characters that continue from song to song, but the songs and production themselves are highly theatrical and character-driven.