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The Last Five Years
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Description
Two young New Yorkers fall in and out of love in this musical theater work by Jason Robert Brown. Sponsored by Monks Delight Kona Coffee.
Every time I tell someone I know to listen to the cast recording for “The Last Five Years”, I ask them what they thought afterwards. The usual response is “The music is really pretty!” and “I thought The Schmuel Song was really funny!” I nod eagerly, and tell them to listen to it again.
The second time, the response is more along the lines of “The songs are so good, but so many of them are so sad. I did really like the use of musical callbacks, but I can’t decide who is more to blame for their relationship falling apart. What do you think?”
I smile, and tell them that they should listen to it again.
The next time I talk to them about it, they’re usually on their sixth or seventh listen and have thoroughly fallen down the rabbit hole. “I can’t stop listening to this,” they’ll say, or “I didn’t know they made musicals like this!” One of my songwriting teachers in college described it as a “masterwork”, a descriptor with which I wholeheartedly agree.
Ever since a friend of mine recommended it to me, back in 2003, Jason Robert Brown’s two-person musical, “The Last Five Years”, has been one of my favorites. I’ve recommended it to other friends, and coworkers, and friends of friends on a near-constant basis, so much so that I used to go to parties and have strangers refer to me as “The Last Five Years guy.”
I’m not alone in thinking that it is one of the great musical theater works of the 21st century, possibly of all time. For a small production with just two actors, a show that only lasted for three months during it’s original off-Broadway run, the show has shown surprising durability. It is a staple of regional and community theater, and there have been many international productions, as well as a limited run off-Broadway revival in 2013. That same year, a movie production starring Jeremy Jordan and Academy Award nominee Anna Kendrick was filmed.
The reasons for the world’s continued interest in this musical are numerous. The score is gorgeous. From the frenetic piano stylings of “Moving Too Fast” to the tender, romantic strings of “The Next Ten Minutes”, the music is sophisticated and layered, while still being engaging and accessible. The lyrics are often riotously funny, and the performances on the cast album, by future two-time Tony winner Norbert Leo Butz and Broadway star/Grammy-winning producer Sherie Rene Scott, are inspired.
But beyond that, the reason why this work has endured is because it is breathtakingly, painfully honest. It’s a well-written, entertaining show, that is, at it’s core, a startlingly authentic representation of what it’s like to find yourself in a relationship that is slowly disintegrating. Everything, from the rationalizations that Cathy tells herself over and over again in the hopes that she might finally start to believe them, the dreams both characters stubbornly cling to while everything crumbles around them, and it’s depiction of the way tiny resentments build up over time until the person you fell madly in love with has disappeared, only to be replaced with a towering symbol of life’s endless disappointments, has an air of heartbreaking truth.
This is because lurking beneath the interesting temporal structure and the beautiful music are real life experiences of its composer, Jason Robert Brown. Inspired more-or-less directly by his own failed marriage, the similarities between his life and the story of Cathy Hyatt and Jamie Wellerstein are so strong that, prior to the original Off-Broadway run, one of the songs was rewritten under the threat of legal action from the composer’s ex-wife in order to reduce the similarities between her and Cathy.
And while I imagine that many of the involved parties would like the show to be judged on its own merits, and not as a reflection of events which happened over a dozen years ago, I’ve come to believe that the “Inspired by real events” nature of the show’s genesis is an essential part of what has made it so enduring, and continues to make it not just a beautiful work, but an important one. Somehow, a show that is about nothing more than one man, one woman, and their relationship over the course of the five years they are together is transformed into a universal allegory. It is, over the course of its ninety minute running time, a powerful meditation on human nature, the way things change over time, and all the little things that can lead two people with the best of intentions to end up hurting each other terribly.
Welcome, then, to the Hawaii Performing Arts Festival’s production of Jason Robert Brown’s “The Last Five Years”. It is my sincere hope that you enjoy the show as much as I do.
And if you do, tell your friends.
--Michael Chu
