Review: The Last Five Years (Another Production Company)

The Last Five Years

Written by Jason Robert Brown
Directed by Toma Tavares Langston
   and Raymond K. Cleveland
at Stage 773, 1225 W. Belmont (map)
thru Oct 5 | tickets: $25   | more info

Check for half-price tickets

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A heartfelt, musical memoir that plays with time and tugs at the heart

Another Production Company presents

The Last Five Years

Review by Clint May

There is perhaps no more heartbreaking device than the one that lies at the core of Jason Robert Brown’s The Last Five Years. As a story, it’s fairly straightforward. What makes a pedestrian tale of love found and lost is the point and counterpoint exploration of a relationship’s entropy. While the man’s timeline moves forward chronologically, his wife’s time moves backwards from the end of their five-year relationship. Her opening song is the end of their marriage, while his is after their first date. They move through time until his last song is sung while leaving his ring on the table, while hers is the breathless desire she felt upon meeting him. The contrast remains poignant throughout as the sine wave of emotions elegantly demonstrates the rise and fall of love turned sour.

For Cathy (Dominique Reid), the beginning is the end. She’s just found her ex-husband Jaime’s ring coldly left next to the bed. She’s “Still Hurting,” and her opening number is a plaintive ode to the confusion of love lost after long trials. Jaime (Rob Riddle) has just met his “Shiksa Goddess,” and he’s willing to break with his entrenched Jewish traditions to court her. If the ensuing tale of infatuation, love, and marriage were flattened into a traditionally linear tale, it would be intentionally unsurprising. The point is not to mine new depths of how love can fail but to explore the dissonance between beginnings and ends, promises and betrayals. Jaime and Cathy are both artists in their own right—she a flailing actress, he a twenty-something author on a meteoric rise. Egos clash as Cathy struggles with Jamie’s success in the face of her failure. Jaime grows to resent his wife’s inability to believe in him when he professes belief in her (“If I Didn’t Believe in You”). She struggles to find herself still relevant to his success (“I’m A Part of That”), while he struggles—and eventually fails—to resist the women throwing themselves at him (“A Miracle Would Happen”). She tries to reignite the flame (“I’m Still Smiling”), but he has already moved on to another woman (“Nobody Needs to Know”). Their divergent timelines only intersect at their marriage (“The Next Ten Minutes”). His increasing self-absorption and her growing neediness create the schism that eventually becomes a divide too big for their promises to traverse.

Another Production Company’s directors Langston and Cleveland mostly rise to the challenges of telling such a simple tale with a complex conceit. Song stylings cover a vast range from pop to jazz, rock to folk, and of course, klezmer. The set design is sparse but augmented by projections to help the audience track the years and places. A four-person string orchestration (less the guitar of the original) is largely up to the task of Brown’s gamut. Musical director and pianist Charlotte Rivard-Hoster shines brilliantly on the piano, which is almost a third cast member.

The Last Five Years is unforgiving to its cast—there is no ensemble to bolster and little interaction with either a set or each other. Reid and Riddle are energetic and endearing, creating an out-of-view chemistry wherein the audience only knows of their love and troubles as mirrored in the other’s eyes and their one shared intersection. Reid’s got a few problems to work out in her uneven projection, sometimes dropping off at softer moments and inhabiting a Fantasia-esque vibrato at others, but she’s almost always compelling as a presence. Riddle is unbelievably charming despite being the ‘bad guy’ in the couplet (Jamie is the one who cheats, after all), and his instrument is finely tuned from vocals to physical phrasing. He has an old-school appeal (you have to love his “The Schmuel Song”) that plays nicely off Reid’s more contemporary approach.

Thought to be based on Brown’s real-life failed marriage to Theresa O’Neill, Years is an alternately touching, funny, and compelling work to behold. Its insights into the reasons decay creeps into the most ardent of affections are sympathetic, though Brown seems to blame mostly himself through Jaime. The Last Five Years only wants to present these two flawed people with their big dreams and bigger shortcomings. We can only hope that they—and by extension, ourselves—can learn from the past to be more selfless in future love. Most of us would probably be surprised and perhaps even melancholy if we saw our relationships five years ago. Years is an intimate tale that might just leave you walking out into the night air resolved to make the next five years better than the last.

Rating: ★★★½

The Last Five Years continues through October 5th at Stage 773, 1225 W. Belmont (map), with performances Thursdays and Fridays at 8pm. Tickets are $25, and are available by phone (773-327-5252) or online through PrintTixUSA.com (check for half-price tickets at Goldstar.com). More information at AnothurProductionCo.com. (Running time: 90 minutes, no intermission)

artists

cast

Dominique Reid (Catherine Hyatt), Rob Riddle (Jamie Wellerstein)

musicians

Charlotte Rivard-Hoster (piano), Julia Macholl (violin), Katalin Von Walterskirchen (cello), Katie Spero (cello 2)

behind the scenes

Toma Tavares Langston, Raymond K. Cleveland (co-directors); Charlotte Rivard-Hoster (music director); Devin Carroll (lighting)

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