Yahoo News Nick Jonas & Adrienne Warren To Star In First-Ever Broadway Staging Of ‘The Last Five Years’ Musical
Singer-actor Nick Jonas and Tony Award-winning Tina actor Adrienne Warren will star in the first-ever Broadway production of Jason Robert Brown’s musical The Last Five Years, a show that’s built a devoted following since its New York debut Off Broadway in 2002.
Opening in spring 2025, the musical will be directed by Whitney White, the Tony-nominated director of 2024 Best Play nominee Jaja’s African Hair Braiding.
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Venue, opening night and additional creative team members will be announced at a later date. Producers Seaview, Ambassador Theatre Group and The Season described the project as “a bold, brand-new production.”
“The Last Five Years is one of the greatest original American musicals in the canon,” White said in a statement. “I could not be more excited to bring it to Broadway for the first time with Nick and Adrienne, two powerhouse performers and lovers of theatre. I fell in love with this musical many years ago when I was a student at Northwestern. I found it then, and still consider The Last Five Years to be such a human portrait and a beautiful exercise in making time– the one thing we are all bound to– feel consequential.”
Both Jonas and Warren are scheduled to be presenters at tonight’s Tony Awards ceremony.
Jonas and Warren will play, respectively, rising author Jamie and aspiring actor Cathy, two New Yorkers who fall in and out of lover over the course of five years. The musical, as its synopsis reads, “explores whether a couple, once united by their dreams, can remain connected as their paths diverge.”
The musical was first produced in Chicago in 2001 starring Norbert Leo Butz and Lauren Kennedy, and a year later Off Broadway with Sherie Rene Scott taking the female role. The numerous other stagings over the years include a 2016 London production starring Jonathan Bailey and Samantha Barks. A 2014 film adaptation directed by Richard LaGravenese starred Jeremy Jordan and Anna Kendrick.
“On June 15, 1999, I wrote the first song of a new project,” said Brown (Parade, Mr. Saturday Night). “It was the first time I had started a project without knowing where it was going to end up, without a producer or collaborators, just me very much on my own needing to find the music and words that would tell a story that was twisting my heart into impossible shapes every day.
“For twenty-five years, I have let The Last Five Years lead me on its journey, through our very first production in Skokie in 2001 to our Off Broadway premiere a year later, a thrilling film version, a record-breaking revival at Second Stage [starring Adam Kantor and Betsy Wolfe], and thousands of productions spanning every continent. I have always believed that when the time was right, The Last Five Years would make its way to Broadway. To have Nick and Adrienne taking on these roles is a composer’s dream come true, and to have Whitney’s extraordinary guidance and vision is the hope of every playwright. It has taken twenty-five years, but the time is right.”
Musical numbers in The Last Five Years include The Next Ten Minutes, “A Miracle Would Happen/When You Come Home to Me,” “Shiksa Goddess,” and “Still Hurting.”
“The songs are iconic,” White said, “and the vibes are very two-thousand-and-now because this is a story about artists falling in and out of love and what happens when something has to come to an end. There is no place in the world that can rip people apart and bring them together like New York City. I think we all understand how hard it is to leave something behind; a lover, a job, a country, a relationship that doesn’t serve you anymore. But for me, the heartbreak at the center of the show walks hand in hand with abundant love and possibility. I know that audiences will be blown away, once again, by the brilliance of Jason Robert Brown’s one-of-a-kind composition, orchestration and musical vision, and that they will see themselves in Jamie and Cathy– two young people trying to figure it all out.”
Not counting his 2023 Jonas Brothers concert residency, Jonas has appeared on Broadway four times, in Les Misérables, Beauty and the Beast, Annie Get Your Gun, and How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. Warren made her Broadway debut in 2012 in Bring It On – The Musical and then in 2016 in Shuffle Along, Or The Making of the Musical Sensation of 1921 and All That Followed. She last appeared on Broadway in her career-making, Tony-winning performance as Tina Turner in 2019’s Tina.
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