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.
But 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.
It’s understandable that White, so deft with new work including “Jaja’s African Hair Braiding” and “Liberation,” would want to put her mark on a contemporary classic. Casting Warren as Jamie’s “shiksa goddess” was a great start. The contrast between the lovers’ backgrounds — Cathy is Catholic; Jamie previously dated “every Shapiro in Washington Heights” — is even starker when Cathy is Black, as is her struggle to make headway as an actor.
Both shifts tend to tilt the story’s balance of sympathy toward Cathy. Jamie’s revolt against his Jewish upbringing now has a racial (not just a religious) component and her professional struggle takes on a suggestion of bias. This is an improvement over the role as written, in which her failure is attributed unkindly to a lack of talent or will.
Warren lacks neither. A Tony Award winner for her portrayal of Tina Turner in “Tina,” she sings the famously difficult songs with ease and, as her story moves backward, increasing splendor. By the time she gets to “I Can Do Better Than That” — her late (which is to say, early) declaration of independence from her gray upbringing in a Maryland backwater — she might as well be Tina herself.
Jonas as a “mahvelous novelist” is a bit of a stretch, however. Jonas as a Jew — and not just a Jew but one who affects a Yiddish accent to sing his demented version of a shtetl folk tale — is even more of one. “The Schmuel Song,” as the shtetl number is called, is always a bit of a problem anyway; the only semi-dud in the sung-through score, it barely makes sense even when read word by word with a magnifying glass.
Sung by Jonas, it’s basically incomprehensible — to be fair, that’s at least in part because of the generally murky sound. David Zinn’s set, a weird abstraction of platforms and flowers, doesn’t help either. Only the aptly harsh, psychological lighting, by Stacey Derosier, and Dede Ayite’s sociological costumes, give him shadings and layers.
But if he starts out too blandly likable, he improves as time reveals Jamie’s narcissism and self-righteousness. His mellow croon slowly becomes a sputtering belt. Still, I only came to dislike the character as much as Brown evidently intends when he exuberantly leaped onto the couple’s bed with his boots on. The cad! But by then it was too late. Cathy had walked off with the show.
More often than not that is the case with productions of “The Last Five Years,” and it’s to Brown’s great credit that he has shaped the story to favor the woman even though it is basically his own. He’s the ur-Jamie.
But whereas the selection we hear from Jamie’s novel is meh, Brown’s achievement is unmistakable. The music (now somewhat over-enhanced with the addition of several musicians on a crowded elevated platform) is rapturous and difficult but not randomly so; it’s rapturous and difficult because love is too. The lyrics specify and condense both feelings in often scathing, always memorable phrases. Indeed, when Jamie sings to Cathy, near the end of their marriage, “I will not lose because you can’t win,” you may gasp at its cruelty. And yet you may feel, as I did, that Warren’s Cathy could have sung the same thing.
The Last Five Years
Through June 22 at the Hudson Theater, Manhattan; thelastfiveyearsbroadway.com. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes.
Jesse Green is the chief theater critic for The Times. He writes reviews of Broadway, Off Broadway, Off Off Broadway, regional and sometimes international productions. More about Jesse Green
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