History of JKB

First there was a bang. Not just any bang, but a big ass bang. Galaxies formed, stars, planets, the whole works. A certain planet called "Earth" was formed. A little while later, there were people.

Two of these people were Brian & Mark Karmelich. For many years, they lived their lives quietly in the town of San Pedro, California.



One day they started a band called Sauce. They wrote a bunch of songs. A while later, they wrote a musical (with fellow Sauce member Jim Hudson) called One Dakota. This told the story of a young man who wanted to reunite North and South Dakota. One Dakota premiered off, off, off, off Broadway. It was so far off, in fact, that it was in Visalia, California.

It went over fine. Busloads of old ladies came and went. They didn't understand the story, but they liked it just the same.

Bouyed by what they considered success, they started working on their follow up, to be called Jesus' Kid Brother. The first song written was called Jesus' Kid Brother. Sauce played the song quite a few times in concert. It went over fine.

Then one day, Brian & Mark were informed that many musicals featured more than one song. So they had to write more. And so they did.

It took a few years, in fact, but Brian & Mark quietly built one heck of a musical. They discarded bad characters and meaningless story lines. The dumped the less memorable melodies. They got into a groove.

Soon, their performances of Jesus' Kid Brother had grown more elaborate. They ditched their acoustic guitars and found musicians to play with. They stopped singing so much, and got others singers involved with better voices. New material was introduced. It went over well.



A workshop was mounted at the Lillian Theater in Hollywood, directed by prominent musical theatre director Greg Borrud. The workshop was a great success, and the writers got the necessary feedback to fine tune the show for its world premiere.



Hollywood producer Don Cesario got wind of the show and jumped on board with his production company, Elephant Stageworks. Then "best of L.A." director Jules Aaron got wind of the piece and joined the group, and eventually musical director icon Brian Murphy and award winning choreographer BP Mendoza. Soon the whole cast and crew was in place.



JKB had truly arrived. The run at the Hudson Theatre in Hollywood was a smash success, and the reviews were incredible.

In 2005 10 members of the original JKB cast, as well as our key crew flew out to Broadway for 2 peformances in a Backers Showcase performed on 42nd Street.

From there, the show went to the 350 seat International City Theatre in Long Beach for a successful and extremely well reviewed run.



In 2007, Jesus' Kid Brother was selected by Stephen Schwartz and Michael Kerker of ASCAP to be features in their annual ASCAP Disney Musical Theatre Workshop.

(Photos by Eric Sabroff, except where noted)