The Last Five Years Broadway Reviews

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.

Unfortunately, this long-awaited debut is a frustrating misfire — overproduced, emotionally hollow, and fundamentally at odds with the delicate intimacy that makes the musical so beloved.

The show’s toxicity has apparently affected at least one of its performers. Jonas and Warren are both strong singers, but Warren possesses the better voice. And she doesn’t mind proving that fact. Warren hangs on to high notes, and her fan base is prone to rewarding her with vocal outbursts and applause while she distorts the musical line. In her final duet with Jonas, at the preview I attended, Warren held a high note long after he concluded his. That’s grounds for divorce in the musical theater.

Audiences always deserve clarity, but “The Last Five Years” must be especially well-defined in its staging and performances, since the weird structure is jarring to the uninitiated. You see, Jamie tells the couple’s tale in sequential order, from meeting gentile Cathy, his “Shiksa Goddess” who’s a struggling actress, to their breakup. Cathy’s songs, meanwhile, occur in reverse. She begins “hurting” from the split and ventures backwards to the elation of their first date — a la “Merrily We Roll Along.” Well, best of luck figuring any of that out. The first Broadway bow of Brown’s semi-autobiographical musical is almost impossible to follow, and the viewer gives up on it quickly.

Whitney White’s revival is sleek and unpretentious—Stacey Derosier’s lights, elegantly juxtaposing oranges, golds, and blues, are particularly lovely in helping to score the story’s temporal and spiritual separations—but it hasn’t quite solved the asshole problem. Emotionally, this Last Five Years goes the route it’s easiest for the show to go: It belongs unquestionably to its Cathy, the luminous Adrienne Warren.

At its core, Jason Robert Brown’s two-character musical “The Last Five Years” is about the difficulty of maintaining a relationship while working in high-pressure creative fields. Its score, provocative and beautiful, is filled with songs about loneliness, insecurity and isolation and about how hard it can be to sustain the power balance within a marriage when one partner’s career is on the rise and the other’s is stuck perpetually in the weeds. It’s also a show about early-career artists, those years when big breaks have to be grabbed by the horns but also when the agonizing realization first dawns that they might never happen (one chills out either way, as one ages). And that’s the first disconnect with the disappointing new Broadway production at the Hudson Theatre, featuring the truly bizarre casting of Nick Jonas, the pop star of Jonas Brothers heritage and fame, playing the rising novelist Jamie, and Adrienne Warren, best known for playing the title role in “Tina: The Tina Turner Musical,” a character that is about as far away from the struggling summer-stock actress Cathy as Jupiter is from Mars. That’s always a risk with this 90-minute show, which I first saw in its lovely premiere at the Northlight Theatre in Chicago in 2001, where it starred Lauren Kennedy and Norbert Leo Butz, working with director Daisy Prince. That’s because Brown structured the show so that the five-year relationship between Jamie and Cathy unspools in opposite directions. Jamie’s story is told in chronological order. But Cathy’s story is recounted in reverse, akin to “Merrily We Roll Along.” In the first scene, her song mourns the end of her marriage. Adrienne Warren and Nick Jonas in 'The Last Five Years' on Broadway.

If everything else about this revival were perfect, it might somehow overcome the wrongness of its Jamie. But aside from Warren and the band—expanded from six to nine pieces in Brown’s new orchestrations, and music-directed once again by Tom Murray, who has been with this show from the start—White’s staging looks a mess. Model buildings crop up like Monopoly hotels on David Zinn’s unprepossessing set, and Stacey Derosier’s lighting nearly drowns the characters in pools of blue and red; even the costumes, by the normally faultless Dede Ayite, often miss their marks. Brown’s show deserves better than the serial missteps of this 85-minute faux pas de deux.

There's no question that both of these stars know how to command a stage. Jonas' pop star status means he is no stranger to winning over a crowd, while Warren is a proven success with a Tony already under her belt. But the emotional disconnect is impossible to overcome in a show that's almost entirely sentimental ballads.

the problem with The Last Five Years, even with White’s sensitive direction, splendid orchestrations that lean heavy on piano, percussion, guitar and some gorgeous cello, and an impressionistic New York streetscape set, is the play itself, too confusing to offer clarity when clarity is needed – is Cathy a good actress or just a pipe-dreamer? Is Jamie a narcissist or just a writer who wants to write? Given that the musical is written by Jamie, er, Jason Robert Brown who, like his onstage stand-in had just had his commercial breakthrough – Brown’s Parade on Broadway to Jamie’s bestselling novel – when their actress wives allegedly began their cycles of depression and failure – The Last Five Years can’t help but feel a little skewed toward the dudes.

More winning—and revealing—are the banks of bright spotlights designed by Stacey Derosier at the back at the stage and fringing the upper stage platforms upon which the excellent band is playing. The lights make the show into what it makes most sense as: a concert that at different moments showcases the best of Adrienne Warren and Nick Jonas’ voices.

Even more than its distillation of a failed relationship, the reason to see this full-length duet of a show is for the singing, and on that account, The Last Five Years delivers. Warren may blow Jonas out of the water, at least in terms of vocal prowess, but both have a solid grasp of their characters in isolation, if not together. In a season of overhyped shows, the evident sincerity, the effort, the fervent belief in character – and Warren’s occasional transcendence – feels refreshing.

But novelty and cleverness are not enough to turn “The Last Five Years” into a fully realized musical, and neither is Brown’s score, although many of the songs, ranging from catchy to lilting, have become beloved singalong and audition material. What has made “The Last Five Years” hold together as more than a pleasant-enough collection of show songs was a credible sense of connection between the two characters. Of the several productions of the show that I’ve seen, the one in 2021 achieved this best — through the staging, which circumvented the script by placing the two together in the scenes, and through the palpable chemistry of the two performers, Nicholas Edwards and Nasia Thomas (who, intriguingly, is the standby for Cathy in the current production.)

Well, The Last Five Years has suffered underwhelming Jamies and powerhouse Cathys before (and vice versa, cf. the 2014 film version with Jeremy Jordan and Anna Kendrick). Yet its depth of feeling and universality always manage somehow to click. This Broadway incarnation is well worth taking in, but its fulfillment – just like that of the connection between Cathy and Jamie itself – remains tantalizingly, yet undeniably, just out of reach.

Director Whitney White—who has done notable work of late in both Jaja’s African Hair Braiding and Liberation—sees fit to disrupt Brown’s cannily crafted plan. (Brown seems to have permitted this, as he has been on hand contributing modernized alterations to some lyrics.) With the two characters frequently interacting through the 15-song evening, a first-time viewer might not glean that while Jamie ends the evening five years older and five years sadder, Cathy is just embarking on what will hopefully be—as Jamie earlier puts it—the next 10 minutes, and then another 10 minutes, and then the next 10 lifetimes. An enigmatic song list, hastily inserted into the Playbill during the final previews, doesn’t help.

The score, as ever, is jammed with gems. But like a troubled couple, the production has issues. Under the direction of Whitney White, Warren and Jonas overdo their performances, pushing too hard too often.

To be honest, Warren elevates the entire revival — she even, improbably, offers a convincing portrayal of a struggling actress’s insecurities in the hilarious inner-monologue-heavy number “Climbing Uphill.” (“I’m up every morning at six and standing in line with two hundred girls, who are younger and thinner than me, who have already been to the gym,” she sings — making you wonder why this Cathy wouldn’t bowl over casting directors as easily as she does us.) Brown’s score sounds terrific, newly re-orchestrated for a nine-member band that captures his eclectic mix of pop and theater styles. It’s a treat to have The Last Five Years on Broadway after all these years, but it’s hard to escape the feeling that the show could do better than this.

Warren is a marvel, her powerful voice and expert skills as an actress painting a complete portrait of the defiantly happy, defiantly determined and defiantly angry Cathy. She’s properly mournful in the melancholy “Still Hurting”; hilarious in the vaudevillian “A Summer in Ohio”; and cockeyedly optimistic in “I Can Do Better That.” Jonas (likely cast for his formidable name value) is rather too appealing as Jamie; he simply lacks the character’s formidable egotism and neuroticism.

The production saga in its final section, perhaps more a problem of material than staging—as Jamie and Cathy’s doomed love hurtles towards its last gasps, Brown has made his point and runs out of things to say. White similarly runs out of ideas, and her sharp-edges give way to an unwelcome note of sentimentality. All the same, White has crafted an intriguing and intellectually ambitious revival, one that embraces the brutal emotional honesty of Brown’s source material.