Ariana Grande sings a heartfelt rendition of Still Hurting from the musical The Last Five Years

Ariana Grande wowed with her vocals yet again on Monday, with a refreshing and unorthodox choice of song that wasn’t from her repertoire. 

The Side To Side songstress, 26, appeared on the Virtual SubCulture Residency Concert Series, a longstanding collaboration with Tony Award-winning composer and lyricist Jason Robert Brown.

As one of the special featured guests for the evening, Grande performed the heartbreaking opening number from Brown’s beloved 2001 Off-Broadway musical The Last Five Years, Still Hurting.

For the remote concert, Grande appeared at what looked to be the microphone of a professional recording studio, dressed in black, while Brown played at his piano elsewhere along with other members of the orchestra.

SubCulture, described on its site as ‘an intimate theater and gathering place in one room’ in New York City, has had a long running Artist-in-Residence series, which has now been relegated to a remote at-home version in light of the coronavirus pandemic. 

Monday night’s concert marked SubCulture’s 58th residency concert with Brown, and was presented as part of a benefit for the SubCulture staff and the musicians from the Jason Robert Brown Artist-In-Residence concerts during the current health crisis.

The Last Five Years was a wildly successful musical that premiered in Chicago in 2001, quickly transitioning to Off-Broadway in March 2002. 

It tells the tale of a doomed relationship between a struggling actress and a novelist, who almost never actually meet throughout the show –– the female lead tells her story backwards, from the moment their marriage ends to when they first meet, while her partner tells his side of the story in a forward chronological order.

Monday night’s show was the first SubCulture Residency appearance for Grande, who is nonetheless quite connected to theater and Brown in particular: she made her Broadway debut in his 2008 musical 13.

It was quite clear on Monday that Ariana still has a knack for dramatic interpretations when it comes to musicality and singing, as her performance is moving even though it took place in a recording booth as opposed to on stage or in a theater.

The special concert, which also featured longtime Brown collaborator Shoshana Bean, was free to watch but encouraged viewers to donate in order to assist the SubCulture staff and musicians during this unprecedented time. 

The Last Five Years was also turned into a 2014 musical film, starring Anna Kendrick and Jeremy Jordan.