Review Roundup: Second Stage's THE LAST FIVE YEARS

THE LAST FIVE YEARS features scenic design by Derek McLane, costume design by Emily Rebholz, lighting design by Jeff Croiter, and sound design by Jon Weston. The musical director is Thomas Murray. Single tickets start at $80 and can be purchased by phoning 212-246-4422 or online at www.2ST.com.

Let's see what the critics had to say...

Charles Isherwood, New York Times: Unfortunately, for most of the show such piercing insight into the hearts of the characters is absent or muted by the pleasant but blandly meandering melodies. It all goes down smoothly but too easily.

Melissa Rose Bernardo, Entertainment Weekly: Brown may have won a Best Original Score Tony Award for 1998's Parade, but this is far and away his finest work. Treat yourself to the original cast recording with Sherie Rene Scott and Norbert Leo Butz, or, if you prefer, wait for the unannounced but I suspect inevitable new version with Kantor and Wolfe. (There will be comparisons between the two casts - neither one is 'better' when you come right down to it. Wolfe does manage to make Cathy somewhat sympathetic, even appealing in a few spots - a much-appreciated detail.)

Jocelyn Noveck, Associated Press: It goes without saying that this production comes with a lot of built-in good will, since "The Last Five Years," despite running only a few months, has developed quite a following in its afterlife, becoming a staple of regional and school productions. To sense the affection for it, one needed only to witness the curtain calls at a recent preview. As the audience cheered, a man called out repeatedly: "Thank you! Thank you!" Kantor responded: "You're welcome."

Robert Kahn, NBC New York: Kantor's energy carries the musical's early scenes, perhaps because it's here where his Jamie, at 23, is so upbeat. A riff on the nebbishy-sexy academic guys who populate New York, he's thrilling in the famous "Shiksa Goddess" scene, which has him saying goodbye to Catherine after their first date. A musical paean to the forbidden fruit of a nice Jewish boy, the song was an audience favorite from the cast recording. They're even selling "Shiksa Goddess" T-shirts upstairs in the Second Stage cafe. Wolfe comes fully to life a bit later, notably with "A Summer in Ohio," which has her writing a letter to Jamie about a mind-numbing summer doing stock. It's delightful to watch her lithely dropping comedic references to "West Side Story" and "Fiddler on the Roof."

Linda Winer, Newsday: Without magnetism between them, we are left with a structural gimmick and a concert oF Brown's heady, enjoyable songs. Brown, who won a 1999 Tony for his first Broadway musical, the darkly ambitious "Parade," is lighter but no less intelligent in this rich pastiche of classical strings, jazz, blues and theater-pop pastiche.

Matt Windman, amNY: Considering how many productions the musical has received since its premiere in 2002, its first major New York revival ought to have been better than the musically outstanding but depressingly sterile one now on display at Off-Broadway's Second Stage, which Brown directed himself.

Elisabeth Vincentelli, NY Post: "The Last Five Years" certainly is clever - sometimes to a fault. The show essentially is a series of solos, and the only time the characters actually cross paths and sing to each other is midway through, when Jamie proposes in the boat. Otherwise each actor has to emote to the empty space where the other should be, robbing the show of much- needed energy. In musicals, as in life, one is the loneliest number.

Jesse Green, Vulture: Which brings us back to Brown. The question about his directing The Last Five Years had been whether he was too close to the material to balance it well. Turns out, he did fine on that point. He's put together a beautiful emotional and aural experience of his work. (The six-piece orchestra, led by Andrew Resnick under the musical direction of Tom Murray, is exemplary.) But the visual production - perhaps in response to Daisy Prince's original staging, which had a baroque mise en scène - is oddly sterile, dominated as it is by a series of portentous floating windows. That and some sloppy little mistakes suggest that, for all his self-admitted talents, Brown might have done better to follow the conventional wisdom about directing one's own work. How many hats can even the grand fromage wear?

Joe Dziemianowicz, Daily News: "The Last Five Years" isn't perfect. We never see the couple together, so there's no chemistry and no real sense of loss. The sketchy details we do get are that Jamie's Jewish and Cathy's not. His career is rising, hers is flatlining. As such, the plot comes with traces of "Merrily We Roll Along," which told its story in reverse, and "A Star Is Born."

Erik Haagensen, Backstage: Wolfe's beauty is no impediment to the delicate shades of wide-ranging emotion that play tellingly across her face. The actor's understatement in Cathy's first song, "Still Hurting," sung as she fingers her husband's wedding ring and rereads his breakup note to her, undercuts the moment's self-pitying melodrama and makes us immediately wonder if Cathy's accusations might carry some truth. Yet Wolfe can also be riotously funny, as in a stream-of-consciousness interior-monologue meltdown during a musical audition.

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