Music Theater Kansas City's THE LAST FIVE YEARS Begins Today

After 25 years of offering steady, top-quality musicals performed by the city's top youth talent, Music Theatre Kansas City (MTKC) will introduce its first paid-professional production with The Last Five Years at Union Station City Stage and the start of the longtime local theater company's expansion into professional-level performances.

MTKC Pro, as the professional division is called, presents the inaugural production of The Last Five Years at 8 p.m. today, May 26 and tomorrow, 27 and at 2 and 10 p.m. May 28, and 8 p.m. June 2, 3, and 4. All performances will be at Union Station City Stage. Tickets are $15 for students and $25 for adults and are available online at www.mtkc.org.

"This has been a dream of ours for a long time," said MTKC's Artistic Director, Julie Danielson, who grew up singing and performing for MTKC. Her mother, Cary Danielson is the founder and executive director.

"As Kansas City has transformed throughout the past several decades, we began to recognize the importance of our metro area as a training ground for incredible musical theater talent on a national scale. Every single year, there are top level singers and actors from our city performing on Broadway who've come through our program, and we wanted to create an opportunity for them to return to KC to perform and shine for their hometown."

MTKC Pro selected The Last Five Years because of its solid reputation and manageable size for a first-time professional production. The Last Five Years was named one of Time Magazine's 10 best shows of 2001. It enjoyed an Off-Broadway revival in 2013 and a major motion picture adaptation was released in 2014 starring Anna Kendrick (Pitch Perfect) and Jeremy Jordan (Smash).

The Last Five Years will be directed by Julie Danielson (Broadway production of "Bring It On" and National Tour production of "Spring Awakening").
Sarah Cline, a MTKC Alumni (Norwegian Cruise Lines productions of "Legally Blonde" and "Priscilla: Queen of the Desert") will play Cathy.
Anthony Fortino (Lyric Stage Dallas production of "South Pacific" and Circle Theatre Fort Worth production of "The Fantasticks") will play Jamie.

The Last Five Years, a musical written by Jason Robert Brown, is an emotionally powerful and intimate musical about two New Yorkers in their twenties who fall in and out of love over the course of five years. The show's unconventional structure consists of Cathy, the woman, telling her story backwards while Jamie, the man, tells his story chronologically; the two characters only share the stage once, at their wedding in the middle of the show.

Cary Danielson's passion for Youth Theater started in Wichita, Kansas in 1984 when she started her first theater company, Music Theatre for Young People. That program still remains an active and vibrant component of the Wichita arts scene today. Then in 1991, Cary moved to Overland Park and started a similar theater company. In 2014, the organization changed its name to Music Theatre Kansas City and remains dedicated to bringing quality musical theater and preparatory training to the Kansas City community. MTKC performs on a variety of Kansas City area stages and partners with a number of local schools, universities, theater companies and musical organizations. Formally only for youth theater, MTKC now offers MTKC Pro, a professional division committed to bringing professional-level performances to Kansas City.

For more information, please visit www.mtkc.org or call (913) 341-8156.

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