Interesting experiment with confusing results
The word “disconcerting” is not exactly a word that pops into the mind at most musicals, but this is no ordinary musical.
“The Last Five Years” is a small, intense musical, with only two characters, no dialogue and a plot that nearly guarantees a downer. It’s about a couple whose courtship and marriage lasts only five years and then dissolves in bitterness and regret.
Even a well-done production with two fine singer-actors, Andrea Dawson and Robby French, can’t turn this into a rollicking good time.
Yet that’s not even the disconcerting part. Writer-composer Jason Robert Brown makes this tough nut of a story even more of a challenge by playing an odd trick with time. The husband, Jamie (French), tells the story the normal way, from start to finish. The wife, Cathy (Dawson), tells it backward, beginning with the breakup and moving toward the wedding and then the first flush of love.
They trade off their songs throughout the show, coming together only in the middle, at their wedding in Central Park. Director Yvonne A.K. Johnson effectively underscores the essential pathos of this wedding scene by having Cathy walk down a ramp into her new life while Jamie reaches out his hand, as if he knows they are once again going their separate ways in time.
Brown’s gimmick does have some fascinating results. Because Cathy tells us how the marriage turns out in the very first song, “Still Hurting,” every moment becomes charged with bittersweet emotion. When Jamie sings of his enduring love, when he gives her an engagement ring, we can’t help but feel the tension.
The audience also gets to play with an intriguing puzzle. Who knows what and when did they know it?
Unfortunately, these are intellectual games, not always conducive to good drama. In fact, this trick of time creates serious barriers to enjoyment. First, we’re so busy trying to sort out the chronology we can’t lose ourselves in the simple pleasure of a good story. Second, at any given moment, at least one character is always miserable (Cathy in the first half, Jamie in the second). I found myself envying the “real” Cathy and Jamie – at least they had a few years where they were happy at the same time.
None of this is any reflection on the production, which is solid throughout. Dawson has an outstanding, pure and accurate voice, and she makes Cathy into a sympathetic and thoroughly enjoyable character. Her rendition of “A Summer in Ohio,” a summer she compares to a “root canal in hell,” is funny; her rendition of “See I’m Smiling” is brave and touching.
French is a strong singer as well, and he creates a vivid picture of a young novelist struggling with that giddy curse, early success. The song “Moving Too Fast” is exactly about that. The character comes across as insufferably pleased with himself sometimes, but that’s the way Brown wrote him.
Johnson does a clever job of staging this show, a particular challenge because while one character’s singing, the other must be doing something, but not enough to be distracting. We see Jamie changing shirts, Cathy looking through a photo album, and, in one startling scene, Jamie committing adultery. Johnson stages all of this with grace.
Grace is not as evident in the brief bits of dancing in this show. The space is too small, the audience too close, the story too intense for dancing to work. Also, a grown man should never have to skip, unless for satirical purposes.
Brown’s music is quite complex and melodic, with some songs sounding like art songs, others like Billy Joel anthems. The four-piece ensemble, directed by Carolyn Jess, sounded particularly rich, especially in the interplay between the violin and the cello.
In the end, I left this show thinking it was an interesting experiment, executed with skill by the Civic. I’m not entirely sure it’s an experiment that bears repeating.