“The Last Five Years” at the Hudson Theatre (Photo: Matthew Murphy)
To address it at the top: I’m not interested in joining the critical pile-on of what Nick Jonas is doing in The Last Five Years. The wave of pre-opening promotional videos didn’t lie: he’s not up for the vocal marathon of Jason Robert Brown’s score. It eludes whatever skills he has, his head twitches at every note, and he averts sustaining anything longer than four beats by interrupting with unrelated riffs. Yes, he’s canonically Christian playing a canonically Jewish role. But there’s so much more that isn’t working in Whitney White’s production. It’s unfair to hang the blame around the neck of stunt casting and walk away.
Adrienne Warren, inarguably a spectacular talent, is close to, if not equally, as adrift as Jonas. The reverse chronology of Cathy’s storyline means she has to begin at the absolute rock bottom of the character’s life. Warren’s “Still Hurting” is marked by a curious blankness. There are no tears and there’s no anguish, almost as if Cathy has already processed and moved on from her husband leaving her by handwritten note. In the latter half, as Cathy moves into a more optimistic mode, Warren gains a little more comfort and imbues the character with more personality, but it only highlights the inscrutable nature of what came before.
Most of that is due to a lack of lyrical interpretation in any of the songs, by both of the actors. Whether by direction or a rushed process, both Jonas and Warren play Brown’s songs for their broad, overarching idea with little to no attention to the individual dramatic beats that build the song. Brown’s lyrics and their accompanying melodic lines are masterful dramatizations of two people expressing their thoughts, working things out in real time, and coming to conclusions. They are suffused with subtext, with sarcasm, with hindsight, and with humor. But none of them land. Both actors are distilling the songs into one word adjectives and playing only that, draining these incredible pieces of writing of all color into something uniformly gray and lifeless.
And because of that, the production is a slog. The Last Five Years relies on two people with excellent interpretative ability and powerhouse voices to deliver its message. Otherwise, it’s just one long solo after another, and if each small shift in the lyric isn’t brought across, the songs begin to feel like they’re saying the same thing. As a longtime Brown devotee, I obviously love The Last Five Years, but even I began to see the things that people often complain about. If there’s no shading to the characterizations, Cathy does feel like a shrill failwife who resents her husband’s success and Jamie does feel like an overconfident ass.
To say that Jonas and Warren have no chemistry is laughably understated. They are like the opposite ends of magnets, pushing each other away no matter how much the musical tries to bring them together. In a two-person musical, that dearth of chemistry has nowhere to hide. Likely because the songs are so limp, White has made the decision to put the other actor on stage during some of their partner’s solos. But because they have no lines and the songs are not written as duets, Jonas and Warren are left to silently mime gestures while the other one sings. Both of these characters, in their own material, are not shy about expressing themselves. The songs are highly, some might say extremely, verbose. Why, then, are they suddenly rendered silent when the other person is singing? The answer is: they’re not supposed to be there.
It also confuses the competing timelines. Cathy’s story is moving backwards, from breakup to first meeting, and Jamie’s is moving chronologically, from first date to his composition of that aforementioned handwritten note. As they jump into and out of each other’s timelines, it blurs the clear delineation in Brown’s plotting. In the writing, they alternate turns being alone on stage so we see, easily, the back-and-forth across time. It’s also important that they be alone for the majority of the show so that when they appear together, particularly during their wedding day duet “The Next Ten Minutes”, it’s momentous. We see the storylines cross there because that’s where it’s meant to cross, not just…because.
Maybe The Last Five Years was never meant to be on Broadway. It’s a chamber musical and it thrives in a small house. The production we have now almost entirely misunderstands what’s great about it. For the generation of musical theatre kids my age, The Last Five Years is deep in our blood, so the prospect of seeing a large-scale production was exciting. But judging by the audience around me, they weren’t there to see The Last Five Years, they were there to see a Jonas Brother. At least they got what they wanted.