Broadway is no stranger to stunt casting, as much a diss in New York theater as it is de rigueur – and controversial enough to crack a joke at producers’ expense in The Last Five Years, when aspiring actor Cathy, played by Adrienne Warren, derides “the people who cast NeNe Leakes in a musical”. (That would be the Real Housewife of Atlanta, in 2014’s Cinderella).
You could make the case that the term applies to Warren’s co-star Nick Jonas, as one half of a doomed couple in the first Broadway run of Jason Robert Brown’s cult-favorite musical, which traces the arc of a five-year relationship between New York creatives in their 20s. Though Jonas has actually performed in several Broadway productions, mostly as a child actor, he is (very) famous as one of three boyband brothers beloved by a swath of millennials, myself included, who grew up on the Disney Channel. A solo pop star in his own right, Jonas possesses, at 32, still-boyish charisma and the seemingly inexhaustible energy of a former teen star, and he brings an inherent nostalgia factor to any performance – but not the robust singing voice typically demanded by musical theater, a fact which has generated some skepticism over how the cult-favorite musical, a two-hander almost entirely free of dialogue, would fare.
