Singer-actor Nick Jonas and Tony Award-winning Tina actor Adrienne Warren will star within the first-ever Broadway manufacturing of Jason Robert Brown’s musical The Final 5 Years, a present that’s constructed a faithful following since its New York debut Off Broadway in 2002.
Opening in spring 2025, the musical shall be directed by Whitney White, the Tony-nominated director of 2024 Finest Play nominee Jaja’s African Hair Braiding.
Venue, opening night time and extra artistic workforce members shall be introduced at a later date. Producers Seaview, Ambassador Theatre Group and The Season described the venture as “a daring, brand-new manufacturing.”
“The Final 5 Years is among the biggest authentic American musicals within the canon,” White mentioned in an announcement. “I couldn’t be extra excited to carry it to Broadway for the primary time with Nick and Adrienne, two powerhouse performers and lovers of theatre. I fell in love with this musical a few years in the past once I was a scholar at Northwestern. I discovered it then, and nonetheless contemplate The Final 5 Years to be such a human portrait and a wonderful train in making time– the one factor we’re all certain to– really feel consequential.”
Each Jonas and Warren are scheduled to be presenters at tonight’s Tony Awards ceremony.
Jonas and Warren will play, respectively, rising writer Jamie and aspiring actor Cathy, two New Yorkers who fall out and in of lover over the course of 5 years. The musical, as its synopsis reads, “explores whether or not a pair, as soon as united by their desires, can stay related as their paths diverge.”
The musical was first produced in Chicago in 2001 starring Norbert Leo Butz and Lauren Kennedy, and a 12 months later Off Broadway with Sherie Rene Scott taking the feminine position. The quite a few different stagings through the years embrace a 2016 London manufacturing starring Jonathan Bailey and Samantha Barks. A 2014 movie adaptation directed by Richard LaGravenese starred Jeremy Jordan and Anna Kendrick.
“On June 15, 1999, I wrote the primary tune of a brand new venture,” mentioned Brown (Parade, Mr. Saturday Evening). “It was the primary time I had began a venture with out understanding the place it was going to finish up, and not using a producer or collaborators, simply me very a lot by myself needing to seek out the music and phrases that will inform a narrative that was twisting my coronary heart into not possible shapes day-after-day.
“For twenty-five years, I’ve let The Final 5 Years lead me on its journey, via our very first manufacturing in Skokie in 2001 to our Off Broadway premiere a 12 months later, an exhilarating movie model, a record-breaking revival at Second Stage [starring Adam Kantor and Betsy Wolfe], and 1000’s of productions spanning each continent. I’ve at all times believed that when the time was proper, The Final 5 Years would make its strategy to Broadway. To have Nick and Adrienne taking over these roles is a composer’s dream come true, and to have Whitney’s extraordinary steering and imaginative and prescient is the hope of each playwright. It has taken twenty-five years, however the time is correct.”
Musical numbers in The Final 5 Years embrace The Subsequent Ten Minutes, “A Miracle Would Occur/When You Come Residence to Me,” “Shiksa Goddess,” and “Nonetheless Hurting.”
“The songs are iconic,” White mentioned, “and the vibes are very two-thousand-and-now as a result of it is a story about artists falling out and in of affection and what occurs when one thing has to return to an finish. There isn’t any place on this planet that may rip individuals aside and convey them collectively like New York Metropolis. I feel all of us perceive how exhausting it’s to go away one thing behind; a lover, a job, a rustic, a relationship that doesn’t serve you anymore. However for me, the heartbreak on the heart of the present walks hand in hand with ample love and risk. I do know that audiences shall be blown away, as soon as once more, by the brilliance of Jason Robert Brown’s one-of-a-kind composition, orchestration and musical imaginative and prescient, and that they may see themselves in Jamie and Cathy– two younger individuals making an attempt to determine all of it out.”
Not counting his 2023 Jonas Brothers live performance residency, Jonas has appeared on Broadway 4 occasions, in Les Misérables, Magnificence and the Beast, Annie Get Your Gun, and Tips on how to Achieve Enterprise With out Actually Attempting. Warren made her Broadway debut in 2012 in Carry It On – The Musical after which in 2016 in Shuffle Alongside, Or The Making of the Musical Sensation of 1921 and All That Adopted. She final appeared on Broadway in her career-making, Tony-winning efficiency as Tina Turner in 2019’s Tina.