The Last Five Years (Play)

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    ‘The Last Five Years’ Review: Nick Jonas and Adrienne Warren Star in a Muddy Revival

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    Nick Jonas and Adrienne Warren star in a muddy revival of Jason Robert Brown’s still-scathing musical.Leave aside its seriousness, its intimacy, its wit. Leave aside, too, its relative obscurity, despite being frequently performed. (Without really trying, I’ve seen it six times, including the 2014 film.) Even apart from any of that, “The Last Five Years,” by Jason Robert Brown, is still the ur-nerdical — nerdical being a term I made up to describe shows, like “Fun Home,” “The Band’s Visit” and “Kimberly Akimbo,” that are too good to stay in the very small theater-geek niche they arose from. Turns out they can speak, and sing, to anyone.What really makes “The Last Five Years,” which debuted Off Broadway in 2002, look like the father of that family of choice, is its baroque structure. Doubling down (and doing a backflip) on reverse-chronology narratives like the ones in “Betrayal” and “Merrily We Roll Along,” it presents the story of Jamie Wellerstein, a suddenly successful young novelist, and Cathy Hiatt, a slowly sinking young actor, in two timelines. Jamie’s moves forward, from the day he falls headlong for Cathy to the day, five years later, he resentfully leaves her. Cathy’s moves backward, from despair over Jamie’s betrayal to exhilaration over the first stirrings of his love.The structure is no mere appliqué, decorating the surface of the show like a doodle. It is how “The Last Five Years” expresses its truth. One arc always going up, one down, there’s sadness waiting whenever there’s joy and joy whenever there’s sadness. Seen alternately in separate scenes, the lovers never touch, let alone share Brown’s pyrotechnical songs, except halfway through, on the day they marry. Whether the story has a happy ending thus depends on how you look at it.Instead of staying out of each other’s scenes, the actors in this production are often thrown together: one singing, one reacting to the song in mime.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBut in the show’s first Broadway incarnation, starring the resplendent Adrienne Warren and an underpowered Nick Jonas, the structure (along with the balance) has been compromised. The production, which opened on Sunday at the Hudson Theater, muddies the show’s temporal ironies and flattens its emotional topography. Its meaning and thus its impact are short-circuited.With material so precision-made, it takes just one mistake to do big damage. Instead of keeping the characters out of each other’s scenes as Brown’s libretto indicates, the director, Whitney White, often throws them together: one singing, one reacting to the song in mime. They make faces, make contact and even make out. As a result — follow me with a protractor if you must — each inhabits the other’s arc, thus disturbing their own. The individual timelines no longer track.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Nick Jonas and Adrienne Warren to Star in ‘Last Five Years’ on Broadway

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      Whitney White will direct the first Broadway production of Jason Robert Brown’s popular musical, which plans to open next spring.Nick Jonas and Adrienne Warren are planning to star in a production of “The Last Five Years” on Broadway next spring.Jonas appeared in several Broadway shows as a child; his one starring role was in 2012, when he stepped into a production of “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying,” and his most recent appearance on Broadway was for a Jonas Brothers concert stand last year.Warren is a Tony Award winner for playing the title role in “Tina.” She also had roles in Broadway productions of “Shuffle Along, or the Making of the Musical Sensation of 1921 and All That Followed” and “Bring It On.”“The Last Five Years,” by Jason Robert Brown, is about the breakup of a marriage. Critics have rarely warmed to it, but it has a huge fan base, and is widely staged. It has never been on Broadway, in part because it is so small — just two characters and one act. The show also has an unusual structure: the male protagonist, a novelist named Jamie, tells the story from beginning to end, while the female protagonist, an actress named Cathy, tells it in reverse chronological order.It was first staged in Illinois, at Northlight Theater, in 2001, with Norbert Leo Butz and Lauren Kennedy, and then had an Off Broadway run at the Minetta Lane Theater in 2002, with Butz and Sherie Rene Scott. In the decades since, there have been numerous national and international productions and adaptations. There was a film adaptation, starring Anna Kendrick and Jeremy Jordan, in 2015. More recently, Cynthia Erivo and Joshua Henry starred in a concert version in 2016, and at the height of the pandemic Out of the Box Theatrics and Holmdel Theater Company staged a memorable streaming production filmed inside an apartment with Nicholas Edwards and Nasia Thomas. (The number of licensed productions of the show doubled during the pandemic because the small cast and idiosyncratic narrative structure made it conducive to social distancing.)The Broadway production, directed by Whitney White (a Tony nominee for “Jaja’s African Hair Braiding”), will be produced by Seaview, an increasingly prolific producing entity run by Greg Nobile; ATG Productions, a subsidiary of British theater owner ATG Entertainment; and the Season, which is the new producing entity of theater marketers Mike Karns and Steven Tartick. More

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      ‘The Connector,’ a Show That Asks: Should News Feel True or Be True?

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      A new musical from Jason Robert Brown, Daisy Prince and Jonathan Marc Sherman explores the diverging trajectories of two young writers in the late 1990s.The director Daisy Prince had a flash of inspiration for a new show nearly 20 years ago: She wanted to explore the fallout from a string of partially or entirely fabricated news articles (by writers like Stephen Glass and Jayson Blair). The show would be set at a New York City magazine with a storied history — a publication much like The New Yorker. Also, it would be a musical.“I had become somewhat fixated on all these falsified news stories — these larger questions about fact, truth and story,” said Prince, who directed Jason Robert Brown’s “The Last Five Years” and “Songs for a New World.”She jotted the thought down in her great big notebook of ideas. But by the time she finally returned to it, around 2010, she was certain she had missed out.“I thought by the time we were going to be able to tell this story, it would no longer be relevant,” she said.But then the Trump presidency arrived, along with his strategy of labeling unfavorable coverage as fake news — and the premise only became more timely. Now the show, titled “The Connector,” conceived and directed by Prince with music and lyrics by Brown and a book by Jonathan Marc Sherman, is premiering Off Broadway at MCC Theater, where it is set to open Feb. 6.Ben Levi Ross, left, as Ethan Dobson and Hannah Cruz as Robin Martinez in the musical.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Review: Close Quarters and Distant Love in ‘The Last Five Years’

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      Casting Black actors and filming in a claustrophobic New York apartment revitalizes Jason Robert Brown’s popular two-character musical.Breakups, hookups, divorces, engagements: Even if you haven’t been afflicted yourself, you’ve surely heard stories of the dramatic changes Covid-19 has wrought on relationships, as though Cupid himself got feverish and went rogue.It’s unsurprising, given how the pandemic has redefined space, shrinking the square footage of our lives to a house or a studio apartment. Proximity became a test, and if you don’t believe me, the proof is in Out of the Box Theatrics and Holmdel Theater Company’s gorgeously performed and neatly contained virtual production of “The Last Five Years.”Plot-wise, you may already know the lowdown: Created by Jason Robert Brown, the 2001 musical is about the beginning and ending of a five-year relationship between two young New Yorkers. Each side of the story is enacted separately, and in opposite chronological order; Cathy (Nasia Thomas), a struggling actress, begins the tale in the future, after the fights and farewells, while Jamie (Nicholas Edwards), a talented novelist on the path to celebrity, starts in the past, in the exciting early days of courtship. Their paths only cross once, in the middle of the musical, during their wedding.Though the show is barely old enough to be of legal drinking age, it’s had many lives. Consider the myriad productions we’ve recounted in this newspaper: in 2002, at the Minetta Lane Theater; in 2012, at Crossroads Theater Company; in 2013, at Second Stage Theater; and in 2016, a benefit concert with Cynthia Erivo and Joshua Henry at Town Hall. I’ll even take a moment to recall the tragically limp 2015 film version, starring the otherwise button-cute Anna Kendrick and Jeremy Jordan.And yet for all of this, “The Last Five Years” was and remains just … fine. The diverging timelines are often confusing, the songs workable but nothing extraordinary and the character portraits rely too heavily on the clockwork conceit.Which is what makes this virtual production, directed by Jason Michael Webb (the musical director of several Broadway shows), that much more delightful. For one, a Black Cathy and Jamie feel like a novelty, given how many productions cast white leads by default. And Webb’s arrangements, which anchor Brown’s score with more soul and strut, allow Thomas and Edwards to revitalize the songs.Thomas and Edwards in the filmed production, which, under Jason Michael Webb’s direction, stresses the claustrophobia of a troubled relationship.Gerald Malaval“Still Hurting” is a showcase for Thomas’s regal timbre, her vibrato recalling the crystal-clear tone of a knife clinked on a champagne glass.Edwards, who recently starred as the Son of God in the Berkshire Theater Group’s pandemic-era production of “Godspell,” wears the kind of toothy grin that could bring out the sun on a cloudy day, and his vocals are just as sunny, especially in his character’s effervescent early numbers.Later, Edwards, as an older, restless Jamie, slows down into the melancholic swells of “Nobody Needs to Know.” (Carin M. Ford’s sound editing and Nicole Maupin’s sound mixing expertly coax liveliness from the performers, by no means a given in a recorded musical.)The production’s most clever aspect, however, is what defines it as a Covid-19 theater experience: the penned-in feel of where and how it’s shot. Filmed inside a New York apartment, “The Last Five Years” recalls the claustrophobic bubble of a couple who remain stuck — because of love or codependency or, maybe, a pandemic — in each other’s orbits until something gives.Wall scrolls, tapestries, pictures, books and random Star Wars collectibles (like a familiar green baby alien) create the look of a fully lived-in space and also provide visual clues into the couple’s style and personality, details absent in the script (design is by Adam Honoré).Webb’s inspired direction keeps the characters, and the paths of their relationship, in a tight embrace. Cathy and Jamie move around each other, often inhabiting the same space, but their interactions often feel distanced. Because the couple meets only once in the timeline, there’s a sense of pantomime to their other scenes together, reactions and physical proximity but no dialogue. It’s fitting because we know, watching, that what we’re seeing is only one character’s memory of an event.At least Cathy and Jamie have beautiful accompanists to score their confrontations and declarations of love. Six musicians haunt the space like ghosts: Sitting on a couch, perched on a bed, they function as silent stand-ins for friends and roommates, before fading back into the background, or discreetly poke the fourth wall with a subtle smirk or nod at the singing characters.Meanwhile, Brian Bon’s videography waltzes with the contours of the apartment, angling high and low and peeking around corners to create the illusion of a labyrinthine setting for relationship purgatory.In purgatory, time doesn’t pass. The same may feel true during a pandemic. Two lovers stuck together but living in two different moments — one racing toward the future, one clinging to the past — that’s a story I’ve heard before.But in this robust production, it’s a story impressively freed, not trapped, by its physical and creative limitations.The Last Five YearsThrough April 25; ootbtheatrics.com More