Musical tells story of broken marriage

“The Last Five Years” is a musical, but don’t think of it as a standard musical comedy – at least not in the Rodgers & Hammerstein sense.

This 2002 off-Broadway hit by Jason Robert Brown features only two characters: a wife and a husband. The accompaniment consists of a small combo with keyboard, bass, cello and violin.

Don’t expect fancy costumes, elaborate sets or anybody belting out “Oh What a Beautiful Morning.”

Yet it is unquestionably a musical – the entire story told, with two brief exceptions, through song. It’s the story of an unraveling marriage, as seen from each party’s perspective.

The man, a novelist named Jamie, tells the story in the conventional way, from beginning to end. The woman, Cathy, an actress, tells it from end to beginning.

This is a challenge for director Yvonne A.K. Johnson, the Civic’s executive artistic director, as well as for Andrea Dawson, who plays Cathy.

“It’s far more difficult to tell the story from end to beginning,” said Johnson. “She has to start on a very down note.”

Cathy is lamenting the ruins of a romance, while Jamie, played by Robby French, is exulting in fresh new love. They trade songs back and forth until the middle of the show, in which they duet joyfully during their wedding. Then they go their separate ways again.

A semi-autobiographical look at Brown’s own doomed first marriage, the play is relatively brief; it runs without intermission and clocks in at under 90 minutes. Ben Brantley of The New York Times called it a “slim, elegiac new musical.”

Brown was fresh off the success of his musical “Parade,” for which he won a Tony Award for Best Musical Score in 1999, before he was 30. The songs he wrote for Jamie in this show deal with what Brantley called “the delicious, embarrassing energy of being young, gifted and meteoric in New York City.”

Johnson jumped on the opportunity to direct this show after a previous chance to direct it in London fell through. The challenge, she said, was to make these two characters likable.

“We’ve been trying to find the qualities that made them fall in love with each other in the first place,” said Johnson. “It’s easy to judge, but it’s another thing to empathize.”

Her two lead actors are both veterans of the Coeur d’Alene Summer Theatre. Dawson played Sarah Brown in “Guys and Dolls” there in 2005; French has played numerous roles over the years, including Ethan in “The Full Monty” last year, and has recently played a number of professional roles in New York

The musical director is Carolyn Jess.