Broadway review by Adam Feldman
When viewed in retrospect, at least, some matches are doomed from the start. That’s half the story in Jason Robert Brown’s he-sang, she-sang musical The Last Five Years, which looks at a failed relationship—between Jamie, a rising novelist, and Cathy, a plateaued actress—from both sides and in two temporal directions. It is also half the story in the show’s woefully uneven new revival with Nick Jonas and Adrienne Warren, directed by Whitney White. The balance is broken: She has all the weight.
As its Playbill insert helpfully illustrates, The Last Five Years lays out the narratives of its two exes in the form of an X: His side of the story moves forward, starting at the end of their first date; hers unfolds in reverse, starting at the end of their marriage. They’re at cross-purposes, and aside from a wedding song at the intersection of their timelines—the lovely “The Next Ten Minutes,” which cleverly incorporates the words “I do”—their stories are never on the same page. Until the counterpoint finale, there’s only one duet in this whole two-person show; the rest of the score is apportioned into alternating solos.
The Last Five Years | Photograph: Courtesy Matthew Murphy
Brown’s structural choice suggests an insurmountable problem in Jamie and Cathy’s romance. If they can’t connect, maybe it’s because each of them puts the other on a pedestal. They love each other’s types. Jamie, who sees himself as a little Jewish nebbish, is excited by the attentions of a beautiful Gentile woman: "Hey! Hey! Shiksa goddess!” he sings, “I’ve been waiting for someone like you." (Not “you,” mind: “someone like you.”) And Cathy, with the battered self-esteem of a struggling actor, feels validated by how good this writer looks on paper: “Finally I’ll have something worthwhile to think of each morning…Top of the line, and totally mine!” (Note that “something.”) As they used to say of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, he gives her class and she gives him sex—and, as they more recently say, she does what he does backward and in heels.
The Last Five Years’s agile, animated and intelligently crafted score is beloved by musical-theater performers, partly because many of the numbers, whether funny or sad, excerpt well as stand-alone story songs. When presented in sequence, though, successive monologues run a risk of monotony despite the variety of Brown’s writing, and the show’s ambitious format and unflinching honesty don’t always make the journey easy on the audience. If you don’t know the material already, you have to listen attentively, and even then it can be tricky to remember where Jamie and Cathy stand at any given moment. (Even the actors seem to have trouble keeping track: Warren forgot to take off her wedding ring for the second half of the performance I attended, and Jonas is mistakenly wearing his in one of the publicity shots.)
That doesn’t mean this show can’t work; it did work in its 2002 Off Broadway premiere (with Norbert Leo Butz and Sherie Rene Scott) and in 2013 at Second Stage (with Adam Kantor and Betsy Wolfe), as you can hear on those productions’ very strong cast albums. But certain key factors need to be in place. In bringing this musical to Broadway, its producers may hope to replicate the success of two other recent revivals of challenging shows, both of which had been considered too downbeat in their original runs: last season’s Merrily We Roll Along, which also played the Hudson Theatre and also employs a bittersweet back-to-front narrative; and Brown’s own Parade, which marched back to Broadway in triumph two seasons ago. But those productions had something that this one does not: excellent casting. The fault of this version of The Last Five Years is not in itself, but in its stars.
The Last Five Years | Photograph: Courtesy Matthew Murphy
Or rather, the fault is in one of its stars. Warren is an unconventional choice—her self-confident mien is sometimes at odds with Cathy’s insecurity, and her beauty as a Black woman signifies differently than the archetypal blonde shiksa’s does—but she’s a prodigiously talented performer and she makes the character hers. This role is miles away from her Tony-winning dramatic turn in Tina, and it confirms her range as a singer and actor; she’s touching from the start—a hard lift, since Cathy is bleeding from wounds we haven’t yet seen her receive—and she delivers on the humor of the performer’s indignities that Cathy suffers through in “A Summer in Ohio” and “Climbing Uphill.” But she’s doing all the pedaling on a bicycle built for two.
Not since Beanie Feldstein in the 2022 revival of Funny Girl has the advance skepticism that greeted a Broadway casting announcement proved so apt. Like Feldstein, Jonas is talented and likable, and he’s not some carpetbagger; he was a child actor in Beauty and the Beast and Les Misérables before he and his brothers became Disney Channel stars and international pop pinup boys. And, not for nothing, he has 35 million followers on Instagram. The problem is not that Jonas can’t sing the part, though he doesn’t sing it especially well. (He’s fine in his middle range but wobbly at the bottom and strained at the top.) It’s that the persona he has crafted over time and the performance habits that go with it—the ingratiating moves, mild pop riffs and bouncy strut of a cute, athletic, slightly cocky but basically nice All-American boy next door—are at a polar distance from what he is asked to play in The Last Five Years. Even with a pair of glasses slapped on his face, nothing about him reads for a moment as a Jewish intellectual novelist. He’s the shiksa goddess here.
The Last Five Years | Photograph: Courtesy Matthew Murphy
The result is sometimes discomfiting, as in his performance of “The Shmuel Song,” a Yiddishkeit fable that is often on the knife edge of twee but in this case squirms straight into cringe. But the larger problem is the damage to the show’s equilibrium. How you respond to The Last Five Years, and whom you think it sides with, is a Rorschach test of sorts that reflects an essential even-handedness in the writing. (My own feelings in that regard have shifted quite a bit over time.) But while Jamie can be cruel—“I will not fail so you can be comfortable, Cathy,” he says in the show’s coldest line, “I will not lose because you can’t win”—he’s also supposed to be a genius. If he’s only a jerk, the whole contraption falls apart.
If everything else about this revival were perfect, it might overcome the wrongness of its Jamie. But aside from Warren and the band—expanded from six to nine pieces in Brown’s new orchestrations, and music-directed once again by Tom Murray, who has been with this show from the start—White’s staging looks a mess. Model buildings crop up like Monopoly hotels on David Zinn’s unprepossessing set, and Stacey Derosier’s lighting nearly drowns the characters in pools of blue and red; even the costumes, by the normally faultless Dede Ayite, often miss their marks. Brown’s show deserves better than the serial missteps of this 85-minute faux pas de deux.
The Last Five Years. Hudson Theatre (Broadway). Book, lyrics and music by Jason Robert Brown. Directed by Whitney White. With Nick Jonas, Adrienne Warren. Running time: 1hr 25mins. No intermission.
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The Last Five Years | Photograph: Courtesy Matthew Murphy
