Adrienne Warren Is Unapologetically Herself in The Last Five Years

It’s a late afternoon at the Hudson Theatre. The house is empty for now, quiet, except for the occasional footsteps echoing through the mezzanine and the low hum of preparation for the evening’s performance. In a quiet corner, Adrienne Warren sits quietly scrolling through her phone, looking the definition of “one of the cool kids” in her black leather jacket. At first, you might feel intimidated being in front of the Tony winner, but as soon as Warren’s eyes catch yours, her warm smile beams, and all insecurities quickly disappear. There’s a kind of stillness around her that doesn’t feel rehearsed. She’s calm and centered. That steadiness never wavers—not in front of the camera of a photo shoot, not while commanding the stage. Not now, as she takes a moment before her call time.

She’s here eight times a week playing Cathy Hiatt opposite Nick Jonas’ Jamie Wellerstein in the Broadway production of The Last Five Years at the Hudson Theatre, Jason Robert Brown’s time-bending two-hander about love, ambition, and everything that gets lost in between. The show has been staged many times since its debut in 2001, but this version marks the show’s Broadway debut. And for Warren, it's the opportunity to play the role she never thought she would ever play.

Warren first heard the music of The Last Five Years as a teenager at the Governor's School for the Arts in Virginia. “I just remember hearing people in my class sing it, and I just thought, ‘Wow, this music is incredible,” she recalls. However, she says it was never music that was assigned to her because Cathy had never looked like her before.

Adrienne Warren and Nick Joans in *The Last Five Years* Matthew Murphy

But now, returning to Broadway for the first time since her Tony-winning performance as Tina Turner in Tina: The Tina Turner Musical, Warren is taking on the role of the struggling actress—not by adapting herself to Cathy, but by letting Cathy come closer to Warren herself. “It took me a long time to—and it's still taking me a long time…for me to embrace everything that I am as Adrienne and bring that to this Cathy,” she explains.

“That is, sometimes I'm rough around the edges. Sometimes, I'm angry and I can be loud about it and unapologetically myself. That means sometimes I'm scared and quiet. Sometimes I'm soft, sometimes I'm hard. Sometimes I am all those things as a woman, and specifically as a Black woman.”

Warren explains that her take on Cathy is not a woman who things happen to. She is someone navigating a relationship and an industry determined to shut her out as a Black woman. “I really wanted to find a Cathy that could stand her ground and a Cathy that had agency over her own life.”

In preparing for the show, Warren returned to the Brown’s original material. “It began truthfully, at the piano with Jason because I actually wanted to hear what he wrote, note for note for Cathy,” she explains. “I wanted to get back to the basics, and get back to his story, and get back to his writing and his intentions, so I could then find my Cathy from that.”

She realized that her Cathy is grounded, not ethereal, not dainty—this "Shiksa goddess" is real. “Jason and I had that conversation,” Warren says. “I was like, ‘Let's say Cathy is a Taurus. She loves the earth. How do we find that in the music as well? And we did.”

Adrienne Warren photographed at *Serendipity 3 Times Square* Heather Gershonowitz

For Warren, finding Cathy also meant finding herself again. “Over the last year, I’ve been doing a lot of concert work, and I spent, like, the whole year finding my voice again,” she reveals. “Because of Tina, because of Shuffle Along, I’ve created these characters’ voices. It's taken a while for me to flex muscles that I haven't flexed in the years. But it's nice to get back to me.”

As she continued to develop her portrayal of Cathy, Warren and director Whitney White found moments that felt particularly personal. In the production’s portrayal of Cathy, “as a Black woman in an interracial relationship, [the song] ‘Climbing Uphill’ is about this woman's tenacity and her resilience to just try one more time,” Warren says as she leans forward and raises her pointer finger. “Just try one more time.”

“And yes, there's comedy in it,” she continues, “but at the end of the day, when I say, ‘Okay, thank you’ that last time, you recognize it's not just funny. This is her life! She will not make money. She will not be able to stand on her own two feet without this man. And that resonated so deeply with me.”

Warren knows all too well the hustle that comes from trying to make it in the industry—and the feelings of uncertainty and desperation for approval that comes with that. Similar to Cathy, “I did summer stock in Ohio. I did summer stock every year. I was struggling to get a job for a very long time—no matter what I sounded like, no matter what I did—because I didn't know who I was as a person,” she confesses. “I think when I was younger, I would sing the way that I thought everyone in the room wanted me to sing.”

That desire for authenticity extends to the blocking onstage. In rehearsal, director White and the two actors found a new setting for the song “I Can Do Better Than That,” which usually has Cathy take Jamie home to meet her parents. “Whitney, Nick, and I were just talking about what it's like when you bring someone home, and what's the most intimate moment you could possibly share with someone?” Warren recalls.

“Then all of a sudden, Nick says, ‘She could be bringing him to church.’ And Whitney and I lost it! We just started screaming and running around the room,” she says, waving her arms around and smiling at the memory. “We're like, ‘Oh, my God, yes! She's taking him to church.’ Because if you take him to a Black church, that means it is serious,” she laughs excitedly. “We thought that was so intimate and so deep. How beautiful it would be to see the juxtaposition of their faiths in that song.”

Though the ghosts of past productions haven’t been easy to shake off: Warren admits she’s found herself falling into previous expectations of her character. “There were moments where I was like, I was trying to be meeker. I was trying to be quiet,” she explains. “And then Whitney and Tom [Murray], our music director, were like, ‘What are you doing? Release yourself.'...I was scared to because people have only been used to a certain kind of Cathy."

Those fears, Warren admits, were fueled by outside factors. “I like to stay away from social media if I can, but I was starting to see some things,” she says.

“People have opinions,” she adds with a deep exhale. “And for me, specifically, being a woman of color, stepping into this, I didn't realize the armor that I would have to have for that. I don't know why I should. I should have, of course, known that I had to have a bit of an armor to protect myself, to protect this rendition, to protect this Cathy that I believe so much in.”

Eventually, Warren learned how to silence that outside noise, saying, “You have to trust yourself and trust that you're in the room for a reason.”

As time draws close to the Hudson Theatre opening the house for the evening’s guests, the earlier quiet has gradually been replaced by the chatter of ushers stuffing Playbills, bartenders preparing bottles, and the crew making their final checks. As Warren gets ready to go backstage to prepare, she reveals her secret for getting into character, courtesy of her costar.

“Nick actually wrote me a letter,” she reveals with her brows raised. “The breakup letter that I’m holding at the top of show, is a letter that Nick wrote me in his words as Jamie.” Warren explains that while in previews, the pair originally started off stage, and the preparation to get into Cathy’s emotional state took her some time. But now, she and Jonas begin the show onstage together.

“I actually don't need as much time, because all it takes is me staring at him in his eyes for a few minutes. And that connection between those two characters in that relationship, and the intimacy that we've created and the trust that Nick and I have—it takes me exactly where I need to be and then…we're off to the races.”

Now two months into the run, Warren has proven that she is more than just capable of taking on the beloved role. She is also carving a new perspective: “I was afraid to bring myself into that. And then finally, I had to say, well, this is why I'm here. This is why Jason said yes. This is why I'm here, to tell this story.”