If you like Anna Kendrick, particularly when she’s singing, this was a good year for you.
The Pitch Perfect hit “Cups” continues to be a radio fixture, and she showed off her pipes on SNL and in the trailers for The Last 5 Years and Pitch Perfect 2. Kendrick also has a meaty role in Into the Woods, which opens on December 25th, a Christmas present for theater nerds, including Kendrick herself — if she didn’t play Cinderella, she’d be first in line to see the film.
Well before she made America swoon in Up In the Air, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, and 50/50, Kendrick was a fixture in the New York City theater community, including a part in Cole Porter’s High Society, where she played Dinah, the little sister of socialite Tracy Samantha Lord. Her performance was so well-received that in 1998, Kendrick was nominated for a Tony, becoming the second youngest person to do so (she eventually lost to Ragtime‘s Audra McDonald).
Also in 1998 was a pig-tailed Kendrick performing Showboat‘s “Life Upon the Wicked Stage” with the Kit Kat Girls from Cabaret for My Favorite Broadway: The Leading Ladies at Carnegie Hall.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=stnQnmLvCxU
Five years later, Kendrick sang in the New York City Opera production of A Little Night Music and secured a role in Camp, Todd Graff’s cultishly-adored film about a musical theater summer camp in upstate New York. As Fritzi Wagner, she delivered the immortal line, “She’s f*cked, I’m ready, and the goddamn show must go on.” I’ll drink to that.
Things have worked out pretty well for her ever since.
