Talia Curtin and Grant Jacoby in "The Last Five Years." Photo by Andrew Nathanson '13.
The Last Five Years is a musical about a relationship. It is odd, then, that the audience rarely sees the two characters together. Jamie (Grant Jacoby ’13) and Cathy (Talia Curtin, ’13), tell their story in a series of fourteen songs. Of these, only three are duets, and only one is sung in such a way that the couple acknowledges each other’s existence. The harmony is lovely, but it is purely musical. Even in the best of times, there is little love visible in this relationship. Rather, we are presented with two different stories: one of Jamie, the writer, whose meteoric rise to literary success inflates his ego to disgusting proportions; and Cathy, his less-successful actress girlfriend (later wife) whose devotion is rewarded with betrayal.
Alone, these stories could be compelling. Both characters have their dreams come true right away, only to have them dashed soon after. There is a rise and fall; a recognizable arc. If playwright Jason Robert Brown had chosen to he could have told the stories of both characters, emphasizing how they were intertwined by their relationship and by circumstance. Instead, he complicates things by presenting two different timelines. Jamie tells his side of the story in chronological order, beginning where he first met Cathy and ending as he leaves her. Cathy, however, begins at the end of the relationship and moves backward, ending on the evening after their first date. This configuration ensures that the couple is only really together once (though they share the stage for the majority of the play). This moment is “The Next Ten Minutes,” a beautiful duet in which Jamie proposes to Cathy and they marry. Had we ever seen the couple together before, or had an idea of the progression of their relationship, this scene could have been much more affecting. Instead, it is merely a pretty song.
There are quite a few pretty songs in The Last Five Years, in genres ranging from pop to jazz to klezmer. The two actors handle what seems to be difficult material quite well, backed by a small but talented pit orchestra. Aside from some minor out-of-tune moments, the music keeps the show from becoming tedious. Most of Jamie’s songs in the first half are confident, upbeat and occasionally a little silly. His arrogance is softened by Jacoby’s delightful comic timing, which helps humanize his character. “The Schmuel Song” is one of Jamie’s standout numbers. It takes place on the couple’s first Christmas together, as he tells a story he wrote recently of an old tailor who makes a deal with time. Not only is Jacoby an engaging storyteller, but one of very few moments of genuine sweetness occurs as Jamie expresses his wish to give Cathy the gift of unlimited time to make her own dreams come true.
As the show goes on, however, it becomes more and more difficult to sympathize with either Cathy or Jamie. The latter complains about being constantly hit on by attractive women post-marriage, portraying a caricature of the oversexed male in “A Miracle Would Happen.” Cathy, on the other hand, is still in the early stages of the relationship. In her self-satisfied state, she sings “I Can Do Better Than That” in reference to the way her high school friends have gotten married and settled down into domestic life. By this point, the dissolution of the relationship that we witnessed at the beginning of the play seems inevitable – and perhaps for the best.
Thus, the heartbreaking final scene seems to have been wasted on a couple the audience has little reason to care about. As Cathy sits on her bed, starry eyed after her first date with Jamie and sings “Goodbye Until Tomorrow,” Jamie leaves a note and his wedding ring and walks out on the relationship singing “I Could Never Rescue You.” Once again, the duet is beautiful and performed well, and in theory the scene is incredibly sad. It is possible this single scene was the whole reason for the oddball chronology. Unfortunately, it leaves the audience more or less empty handed. It is as if Mr. Brown couldn’t decide whether to tell the story of the relationship or of the two individuals involved, and instead decides on a garbled, he-said she-said version of events. We have very little information on what Jamie and Cathy’s relationship is like, creating vast distance between the audience and the couple that they are supposed to care about. Instead, the clues we receive from each one’s songs paint a vague picture of events that occurred during their five-year relationship without ever explaining why this relationship even exists.
If The Last Five Years is meant to chronicle the growth and disintegration of a relationship in a meaningful way, it fails on this point. The music used to tell the story is engaging, lively, and often beautiful, and Jacoby and Curtin handle the material quite well. However, the modernistic tricks employed by Brown remove all but a few traces of humanity from the show, leaving the audience instead with a whole lot of artifice for such a stripped-down show. The actors are talented and the music is lovely, but all of this signifies nothing.
