Murney Joins Brown for Last Five Years in L.A., Jan. 30

By: Jan. 09, 2006
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Lennon star Julia Murney will play opposite composer/lyricist Jason Robert Brown in a one-night-only staging of The Last Five Years at UCLA's Freud Playhouse on January 30th. The evening will be presented as part of Reprise! Broadway's Best's Marvelous Musical Mondays series.

Murney will play Cathy, the insecure actress-wife of Jamie (Brown), a young writer whose success and expanding ego threaten his marriage. A song cycle with music, lyrics and book by Brown, The Last Five Years presents Cathy's story from the end to the beginning of the relationship, while Jamie's last five years is viewed from the beginning to the end (with the two stories meeting at the middle with "The Next Ten Minutes.")

Murney recently made her Broadway debut in Lennon. Known for her multi-octave belt range, Murney has also appeared off-Broadway in The Wild Party, A Class Act and Time and Again, as well as in concerts of Funny Girl, Chess and Pippin. Other credits include Cloud 9, Crimes of the Heart and Mata Hari, while she has also appeared on "Law and Order: SVU" and "Ed."

The Last 5 Years won Brown Drama Desk Awards for Best Music and Best Lyrics. Brown won a 1999 Tony Award for his score to Parade, a musical written with Alfred Uhry and directed by Harold Prince, which premiered at Lincoln Center Theatre in December 1998, subsequently winning both the Drama Desk and New York Drama Critics' Circle Awards for Best New Musical. Parade was also presented on a National Tour in 2000, which Brown conducted. Songs for a New World opened Off-Broadway at the WPA Theatre in the fall of 1995, and has since been seen in more than two hundred productions around the world. Brown provided the orchestrations and contributed songs to Urban Cowboy, as well as handling the arrangements and musical direction. 13 and Honeymoon in Vegas are his other musicals-in-progress, while Wearing Someone Else's Clothes is a recently-released CD.

The Last 5 Years opened at the Minetta Lane Theatre on March 3, 2002 and closed on May 5th.  Originally directed by Daisy Prince, it starred Norbert Leo Butz as Jamie and Sherie Rene Scott as Cathy.

The Musical Mondays season will wrap up on Monday, May 8th, with the presentation of Oh What a Beautiful Evening: The Songs of Rodgers and Hammerstein!

For tickets to The Last Five Years, call (310) 825-2101.  For more information, visit www.reprise.org.



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