TADA! 35th Anniversary Gala Honors Jason Robert Brown And Georgia Stitt, Hosted by Tituss Burgess

TADA! Youth Theater will celebrate its 35th Anniversary Gala. This year's honorees are Jason Robert Brown and Georgia Stitt, and the TADA! Gala will be hosted by Tituss Burgess. The event will be held on March 2, 2020 from 6 pm to 9 pm at Tribeca 360, located at 10 Desbrosses Street in Manhattan.

The evening will feature cocktails, dinner, live auction, and performances by Broadway stars and members of the Resident Youth Ensemble of TADA!, along with many more great surprises.

As quoted by Jason Robert Brown and Georgia Stitt, "TADA! isn't just a theater company, it's a community, and it's a community that we have been proud to be part of for over two decades. As music directors, writers and parents of ensemble members, we have been witness to the most magical transformations, watching kids turn from nervous introverts to confident performers and strong leaders. TADA's ethos of inclusivity, diversity and equality has brought our family into constant, energizing conversation with every corner of New York's vibrant population. And: the shows are always really fun!"

Since 1984, TADA!'s mission has been to provide young people from different backgrounds with musical theater programs that inspire them to be creative, learn, and think differently through high-quality musical theater productions and educational programs. A unique Drama Desk award-winning nonprofit youth theater, TADA! produces original musicals for children, teens, and family audiences. Alumni of TADA! include Jordan Peele (Key & Peele, Get Out, Us), Sasha Allen (HAIR, The Voice, For Colored Girls), Ricardo Zayas (Hamilton, Head Over Heels, West Side Story- upcoming from famous director Steven Spielberg), and Sheldon Henry (Tina - The Tina Turner Musical, The Prom).

TADA! also offers a free, year-round, pre-professional training and a positive youth development program for its Resident Youth Ensemble (ages 8-18); musical theater classes/camps for the public; as well as musical theater residencies in NYC schools and community centers. TADA!'s high-quality work enhances young people's self-confidence and creativity. They also develop advanced skills in leadership, communication, responsibility, collaboration, and problem-solving - skills that help with growing up and are essential to their success both in school and in life.

To purchase tickets, please visit www.tadatheater.com/gala.

Jason Robert Brown is the ultimate multi-hyphenate - an equally skilled composer, lyricist, conductor, arranger, orchestrator, director and performer - best known for his dazzling scores to several of the most renowned musicals of our time, including the generation-defining The Last Five Years, his debut song cycle Songs for a New World, and the seminal Parade, for which he won the 1999 Tony Award for Best Score.

Jason 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's score for The Bridges of Madison County, a musical adapted with Marsha Norman from the bestselling novel, received two Tony Awards (for Best Score and Orchestrations). Honeymoon In Vegas, based on Andrew Bergman's film, opened on Broadway in 2015 following a triumphant production at Paper Mill Playhouse.

A film version of his epochal Off-Broadway musical The Last Five Years was released in 2015, starring Anna Kendrick and Jeremy Jordan and directed by Richard LaGravenese; previously, the show had been cited as one of Time Magazine's 10 Best of 2001 and won Drama Desk Awards for Best Music and Best Lyrics (and was later directed by the composer in its record-breaking Off-Broadway run at Second Stage Theatre in 2013).

13, which opened on Broadway in 2008, is being filmed for Netflix this summer. Songs for a New World, a theatrical song cycle directed by Daisy Prince, has been seen in hundreds of productions around the world since its 1995 Off-Broadway debut, including a celebrated revival at New York's City Center in the summer of 2018. Jason conducted his orchestral adaptation of E.B. White's novel The Trumpet of the Swan with the National Symphony Orchestra, and recorded the score for PS Classics.

Future projects include a new chamber musical created with Daisy Prince and Jonathan Marc Sherman called The Connector; an adaptation of Lilian Lee's Farewell My Concubine, created with Kenneth Lin and Moisés Kaufman; and a collaboration with Billy Crystal, Amanda Green, Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel on a musical of Mr. Saturday Night. Jason is the winner of the 2018 Louis Auchincloss Prize, 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 Ariana Grande, Audra McDonald, Kristin Chenoweth, Billy Porter, Betty Buckley, Renée Fleming, Jon Hendricks and many others, and his song "Someone To Fall Back On" was featured in the Walden Media film, Bandslam

As a soloist or with his band The Caucasian Rhythm Kings, Jason has performed concerts around the world. For the past four years (and ongoing), his monthly sold-out performances at New York's SubCulture have featured many of the music and theater world's most extraordinary performers. His newest collection, How We React and How We Recover, was released in June 2018 on Ghostlight Records. His previous solo album, Wearing Someone Else's Clothes was named one of Amazon.com's best of 2005, and is available from Sh-K-Boom Records.

Jason's 2012 concert with Anika Noni Rose was broadcast on PBS, and he was the featured soloist for a live episode of Friday Night Is Music Night, broadcast live from the London Palladium and featuring the BBC Concert Orchestra.

Georgia Stitt is an award-winning composer, lyricist, music producer, pianist and activist. She has two original musicals that premiered recently: Snow Child (commissioned by DC's Arena Stage and directed by Molly Smith), and Big Red Sun (at 11th Hour Theater in Philadelphia, NAMT 2010). Her children's musical, Samantha Spade, Ace Detective, (TADA Youth Theater) won "Outstanding New Musical" from the National Youth Theatre in 2014 and is now licensed by Concord Theatricals. Other shows include The Big Boom (with Hunter Foster), The Water (winner of the 2008 ANMT Search for New Voices in American Musical Theater), and Mosaic (commissioned for Inner Voices, starring Heidi Blickenstaff). Georgia has released three albums of her music: This Ordinary Thursday, Alphabet City Cycle (featuring Tony-nominated actress Kate Baldwin) and My Lifelong Love, and she is currently at work on a collection of theatrical art songs and an as-yet-untitled oratorio.

Her choral piece with hope and virtue (using text from President Obama's 2009 inauguration speech) was featured on NPR as part of Judith Clurman's Sing Out, Mister President cycle, and her orchestral piece, Waiting for Wings, co-written with husband Jason Robert Brown, was commissioned by the Cincinnati Pops Orchestra and premiered there with conductor John Morris Russell. Georgia is a member of the Council of The Dramatists Guild, The American Federation of Musicians, The Recording Academy, SAG/AFTRA, and ASCAP, and she has been on faculty at USC and Pace University.

She has degrees from Vanderbilt University's Blair School of Music and NYU's Tisch School for the Arts. She is on the Board of Directors for The Lilly Awards Foundation and she is the Founding Director of MAESTRA, an organization for women theater composers and conductors in New York City. Other fun credits include being the music director of the recent Off-Broadway revival of Sweet Charity (starring Sutton Foster), music supervisor of the Anna Kendrick/Jeremy Jordan film The Last Five Years, writing arrangements for Tony Bennett's 80th birthday party, serving as the vocal coach for America's Got Talent, and playing a nun in The Sound of Music Live! on NBC with Carrie Underwood and Audra McDonald. For more information, please visit www.georgiastitt.com.