Anna Kendrick Will Keep Up Her Adorable Singing With ‘The Last Five Years’

By  · Published on October 22nd, 2012

If you’ve yet to see the season’s bonafide feel-good feature of the season otherwise known as Pitch Perfect, you should bookmark this post, check the film out post-haste, and then return here so that you too can bask in the news that star Anna Kendrick has singed on for another aca-awesome film that will require her to use her very own musical prowess. Good lord!

Moviehole reports (via CinemaBlend) that Kendrick is now set to star in director Richard LaGravenese’s adaptation of Jason Robert Brown’s off-Broadway musical, The Last Five Years. Based in part on Brown’s own love life (to the point that his ex-wife, Theresa O’Neill, threatened legal action due to the play mirroring their struggles a touch too closely), the play centers on a pair of struggling creative types who meet and fall in love – with a twist.

The play uses a nifty storytelling trick – “the young woman’s story is told in reverse chronological order (beginning the show at the end of the marriage), and the male’s is told in chronological order (starting just after the couple have first met). The characters did not directly interact except for a wedding song in the middle as their timelines intersect.” Ah, crafty. And sure to come complete with all sort of wrenching emotional connections (they’re falling in love but also falling apart! they are meeting cute and also breaking the hell up! the humanity!).

The play first debuted at the Northlight Theatre in Skokie, Illinois in 2001, before opening Off-Broadway at the Minetta Lane Theatre the following year. The play won the 2002 Drama Desk Award for outstanding music and lyrics, as well as receiving Drama Desk nominations for Outstanding Musical, Outstanding Actor, Outstanding Actress, Outstanding Orchestrations, and Outstanding Set Design, along with a Lucille Lortel Award nomination for Outstanding Musical and Outstanding Actor, and the Outer Critics Circle Award nomination for Outstanding Off-Broadway Musical.

The production is currently set for an Off-Broadway revival in the spring at the Second Stage Theatre. There’s no word on casting, but it seems like such a revival would be elevated by the casting of Kendrick and whoever she’ll star opposite of in LaGravenese’s film.

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