When, in 2013, The New York Times sounded a call for stories from fans of The Last Five Years—a show with music, lyrics, and a book by Jason Robert Brown—the responses were many and deep. The fleet musical had recently been revived off-Broadway and its devotees wrote of the way its story—about the painful dissolution of a marriage between two artists—had helped them parse their own relationships. Others reflected on some of the regional productions that followed its 2001 world premiere in Skokie, Illinois, starring Norbert Butz and Lauren Kennedy, and directed by Daisy Prince. (A movie adaptation with Anna Kendrick and Jeremy Jordan would expand the fan base in 2014.)
Never mind that critics had never gone mad for the show. (“Novelist and an Actress Sharing a Leaky Boat,” read the headline for Ben Brantley’s tepid review in 2002, when The Last Five Years opened in New York.) Brown’s score—spanning pop, Latin, klezmer, and more musical vernaculars—remained, as one admirer put it, “an actor’s dream, a pianist’s dream/nightmare, and a director’s heaven.”
The narrative structure nods a little to Betrayal, a little to Merrily We Roll Along: While one character goes through his side of things in chronological order, ending where the marriage does, his partner’s storyline moves backward, concluding with their first date. (The device doubles as metaphor: As Brown has summarized it, The Last Five Years is about “two people who, really, except for one moment, are simply never in the same place. They just cannot connect.”) Despite sharing the stage throughout, it is only during their wedding, in the middle of the show, that the couple interact.
Now, a good 25 years after it was written, The Last Five Years is getting its maiden run on Broadway, with Adrienne Warren playing Cathy, the promising young musical theater actress floundering in summer stock, and Nick Jonas as Jamie, the driven young writer hurtling toward literary stardom. Whitney White (Jaja’s African Hair Braiding) directs.
For Brown, the Tony-winning composer behind Parade, 13, and The Bridges of Madison County, it’s a bit surreal, seeing a show “that was sort of designed to be done in my living room” gussied up for its Broadway debut this spring. “I deliberately wrote a piece that was going to be very small and very intimate,” he says. Yet he feels that the coming staging has “managed to find the exact right balance, in terms of the building that it’s going to be in”—the jewel-box-like Hudson Theatre—“and the people who are starring in it and what it means to them.”
Indeed, Warren, Jonas, and White could all be counted among The Last Five Years’ most ardent fans—people for whom Brown’s portrait of love, loss, and the vagaries of creative ambition has long resonated. But nestled right alongside their reverence for the material is a desire to make it their own—something that Brown, who has not only directed the show before, but also performed its songs in concert “on and off for 20 years now,” accepts completely. “Whitney was prepared to just bring herself to the work and bring her particular perspective,” he says. “Often, when you do revivals of musicals, the idea is to sort of get the old hand to do it, and that was what I really didn’t want.” After 24 years’ worth of productions, he thought, the show “needs some challenging.”
A Chicago native, White was there when The Last Five Years first ran in Skokie. (“I have the most amazing single mom,” she tells me, “and she really tried to expose me to everything.”) Her own way into it, she hints, will hinge on a powerful sense of place—using Italo Calvino’s postmodern novel Invisible Cities, from 1972, as a point of reference—as well as a strong sense of movement. (Rick and Jeff Kuperman, whose muscular choreography for The Outsiders earned them a Tony nomination last year, are on The Last Five Years’ creative team.)
