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A Messy Breakup: Nick Jonas and Adrienne Warren in The Last Five Years
Nick Jonas’s pop-star casting runs up against Adrienne Warren’s sheer luminosity, and the two leads’ onstage power dynamic never feels quite right.
That moment gave us Jason Robert Brown’s The Last Five Years, a kind of stripped-down twist on Merrily We Roll Along for the Gen X–millennial cusp and still a beloved standard for NETC hopefuls and college-theater departments from here to Skokie (where the show premiered). For Jamie, the author, events go forward — he begins as an aspiring, about-to-get-his-break novelist who’s thrilled to belt out an ode to his “Shiksa Goddess” (“I’ve had Shabbas dinners on Friday nights / With every Shapiro in Washington Heights,” he sings giddily. It would be tough to accept a performer so radiant, with such a killer voice, as an actor who can’t get the gig — except that Warren brings such sincere frustration and longing to Cathy’s struggles that she becomes an unhappy reminder of just how many extraordinary talents there are out there, battling it out against a system that refuses to give.
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