Nick Jonas and Adrienne Warren on How Their Paths Intersected for the Broadway Premiere of The Last Five Years
(Photo: Matthew Murphy)
It was 2002 and Nick Jonas—pre-Disney Channel and family-band stardom—was playing Chip in Beauty and the Beast on Broadway. He was one of the only kids in a magical cupboard of seasoned stage actors, and as musical theater people tend to be, they were all obsessed with the songs of Jason Robert Brown. Brown’s latest musical, an avant-garde two-hander about a couple who sing through their five-year relationship in opposite directions, had just opened off-Broadway at the Minetta Lane Theatre with Norbert Leo Butz and Sherie Rene Scott.
“My adult castmates brought the cast recording of the off-Broadway production in and were all raving about it,” Jonas reminisces to Tamsen Fadal on The Broadway Show. “So I went and bought a copy and fell in love with it.”
(Photo: Matthew Murphy)
He adds a postscript: “I think I understand what's going on a bit more at this stage in my life than I did when I was eight.” (He was probably closer to 10, but you get the idea.)
Barring the Jonas Brothers’ handful of concerts at the Marquis Theatre in 2023, The Last Five Years will be Jonas’ first time on Broadway as a bona fide adult. He was still a teen when he starred as J. Pierrepont Finch in the last revival of How to Succeed in Business… (replacing an equally fresh-faced Daniel Radcliffe), and was in single digits when he played both Les Miz’s Gavroche and Annie Get Your Gun’s Little Jake (opposite Reba McEntire). Now, at 32, he’s a father, a husband and an artist who balances creative ambition with personal priorities—a measured perspective that oh-so-frustratingly eludes Brown’s budding novelist Jamie Wellerstein.
“I understand when to turn it off and actually go and spend time with the people I love and stop answering the phone because you're overly ambitious,” says Jonas. “I'm more driven than I've ever been. But I perhaps have the balance in my life that Jamie doesn't have sometimes, which I think costs him a lot.”
What it costs him, of course, is Cathy Hiatt— struggling actress and genuine “shiksa goddess” (for anyone still sharpening their Yiddish, that means non-Jew, typically of the blue-eyed, blonde-haired variety). “I just didn’t think it was a show that I could be a part of,” Adrienne Warren says to Fadal. Warren is the Cathy to Jonas’ Jamie in her first Broadway role since her Tony-winning stint as Tina Turner in the legendary rock singer’s biomusical. “I was in awe of this score constantly—and I never, ever sang it.”
(Photo: Matthew Murphy)
Warren became familiar with the score as a musical theater student at Marymount Manhattan College. Classmates regularly tried their hand at its songs—showcase after showcase of acting finesse and high belting. Still, she stayed away. “I was paying attention to Audra [McDonald] and Heather Headley and LaChanze. I didn't think Cathy could be something that could be in my world.”
Cynthia Erivo was the first Black actress to perform the role in New York—a Town Hall concert she headlined with Joshua Henry in 2016. It was just one night, but it cracked open the door to a broader view of how the show, with its infectious score that thrives on power vocals, could be cast.
“I remember being a girl who came here at 18 years old to New York City and wanted to perform,” Warren reflects. “I remember those moments where I was going through what Cathy went through. I had the summer stock experience in Ohio. I didn't realize how much this show and these characters actually are already in me.”
It’s a backward-glancing perspective that suits her turn as Cathy in The Last Five Years’ first-ever Broadway production. And with Jonas’ hard launch into Broadway adulthood, his forward-tumbling Jamie is equally befitting.
“I think that there's a lot of great lessons to be learned in this about relationship and connection and just where you are at different stages in your life,” says Jonas.
Warren tacks on a suggestion: “You can even go to couples therapy after if you need to.”
