Happy Birthday to Tony nominee Adrienne Warren, born May 6, 1987, in Hampton Roads, Virginia. A preacher’s daughter, she began singing in her church choir. One of her first stage roles was the lead in a local production of Annie. “That’s when I realized that I could do something outside of myself, that there’s power in this hobby,” she told the New York Times. Weeks after graduating from Marymount Manhattan College (2009), she was cast to understudy Ashanti in The Wiz for City Center’s Encores! series. She followed that with tours of Dreamgirls and Bring It On, with which she made her Broadway debut (2012). Below are highlights of Warren, Taylor Louderman, and the cast of Bring It On.
Warren spent the next few years in episodic TV, including pilots for People in New Jersey (2013), Irreversible (2014), and Point of Honor (2015). Her breakthrough came with Shuffle Along (2016), for which she received a Tony nomination for Best Featured Actress in a Musical. Below is Warren and the company of Shuffle Along performing “Broadway Blues” at the 70th annual Tony Awards.
In 2018, Warren was cast as Tina Turner in the West End production of Tina, which earned her an Olivier nomination for Best Actress in a Musical. The following year, she reprised her peformance for the Broadway production, which earned her a Drama Desk Award, Outer Critics Circle Award, and a Tony Award nomination for Best Actress in a Musical. In 2020, Warren narrated the audiobook of Tina Turner’s memoir, Happiness Becomes You. Below is Warren singing “River Deep, Mountain High” at the 2018 Royal Variety Performance.
Warren’s recent work includes “Sally’s Song” in The Nightmare Before Christmas in Concert (2020), which you can watch below, and her first TV leading role in the ABC miniseries Women of the Movement (2021), in which she played activist Mamie Till-Mobley, mother of Emmett Till.