13 - THE MUSICAL Receives London Cast Recording from Ghostlight

Ghostlight Records has announced the digital release of the Original London Cast Recording of the acclaimed musical 13 – The Musical on Tuesday, December 18. The show has music and lyrics by Tony Award-winner Jason Robert Brown and book by Dan Elish and Robert Horn, and was produced in London by Jeremy Walker for National Youth Music Theatre. The new recording, produced by Brown and recorded by Robin Sellars, includes two previously unrecorded songs, as well as revised lyrics and musical scoring, and the all-teenage cast that Mark Shenton of The Stage called "rougher, tougher and more adorable" than the original Broadway company. In addition to the download – which will be available on Tuesday everywhere digital music is sold – physical CDs are available to order now at http://sh-k-boom.com/13MusicalOriginalLondonCast.shtml.

According to Jason Robert Brown, "13 – The Musical has had an amazing journey in the four years since it opened on Broadway, with over a thousand productions throughout the world, but a particularly exciting milestone was this summer's premiere in London's West End, produced by the invaluable National Youth Music Theatre company. With a cast handpicked from all over England, this production of the show represented yet another step in its evolution, as librettists Robert Horn, Dan Elish and I dug back in and tailored the show to the extraordinary young performers." The NYMT/West End recording (the first in NYMT's history) preserves the performances of this incredible cast, as well as documenting the latest version of the show.

13 – The Musical is a grown-up story about growing up! When his parents get divorced and he's forced to move from New York to a small town in Indiana, Evan Goldman just wants to make friends and survive the school year: easier said than done. The star quarterback is threatening to ruin his life and his only friend, Patrice, won't talk to him. The school freak sees an opportunity for blackmail and someone is spreading the nastiest rumors. With an unforgettable rock score from composer Jason Robert Brown, the show is a hilarious, high-energy musical for all ages about discovering that cool is where you find it, and sometimes where you least expect it. 13 – The Musical premiered at The Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, California in 2007 before opening on Broadway in 2008.

Jason Robert Brown has been hailed as "one of Broadway's smartest and most sophisticated songwriters since Stephen Sondheim" (Philadelphia Inquirer), and his "extraordinary, jubilant theater music" (Chicago Tribune) has been heard all over the world, whether in one of the hundreds of productions of his musicals every year or in his own incendiary live performances. The New York Times refers to Jason as "a leading member of a new generation of composers who embody high hopes for the American musical." 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, and will be revived in a new production this spring at New York's Second Stage Theatre. 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. 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. His newest musical, The Bridges of Madison County – written with Marsha Norman – premieres this summer, and this autumn sees the premiere of Honeymoon in Vegas, a musical written with comedy legend Andrew Bergman.

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