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Anatomy of a breakup
"The Last Five Years' at Media Theatre.
Steve Cohen
The Last Five Years is a two-character musical about a couple's romance, based on its creator's own life. Jason Robert Brown and his wife had just ended their five-year relationship when he wrote the lyrics and music that chronicled it.
Her story starts at the end of their relationship; his begins on the day they met. The Last Five Years describes the arc from two perspectives, each heading in the opposite direction. He sings the story forward, while she goes backward from the point of her post-breakup pain.
The trigger for their coming apart is his career accomplishment and her envy of it. Jamie's first novel gets a rave review and he's off to Manhattan literary parties while she's trapped in Ohio motels, appearing in second-rate summer stock.
The Last Five Years was presented in Chicago, then Off-Broadway in 2002. I enjoyed that production, and a later one in Philadelphia, but this production at Media is the most involving and compelling, thanks to the excellent casting of Jennie Eisenhower and Marcus Stevens as the couple.
Eisenhower's depth
Their separate careers provide diverse songs with witty lyrics, like her audition for a role, "Climbing Uphill," and a funny number about a gay midget who plays Tevye in Fiddler On the Roof. Eisenhower sings these memorably; more important, she endows her character with more depth than I've seen in other productions.
Brown's best song is a Jerome Kern-style ballad, "When You Come Home to Me," which gets lost because it's staged as part of the female lead's comic audition. I hope that when Eisenhower records a solo album, she'll include a romantic rendition of that song.
Stevens possesses a fine voice and winning personality. He awakens memories of his role as Motel in the Walnut Street Theatre's Fiddler on the Roof when he sings a tour de force narrative of an eastern-European tailor who gives a Christmas gift.
Like a wedding chapel
Brown's songs cover a virtuosic range of styles from rock/pop to klezmer to country. The rhymes are witty, the melodies catchy. Tom Fosnocht conducts a six-person band in Brown's original arrangements of the score for piano, guitar, bass, two cellos and a violin.
Director Jesse Cline uses two spare archways, reminiscent of a wedding chapel, to frame the entrances and exits, and a series of projected photographs to set all the scenes.
Only after the warm glow of the performances recedes do you begin to realize that the male character was a jerk and the female was pretty much a cypher. We never see what he saw in her, except that he was tired of dating Jewish girls and she was a shiksa. In fairness to Brown, his portrait of a marriage on the rocks may have been inhibited by a suit filed against him by his ex-wife for invading her privacy.
But these shortcomings are swept away by the memorable performers.
Her story starts at the end of their relationship; his begins on the day they met. The Last Five Years describes the arc from two perspectives, each heading in the opposite direction. He sings the story forward, while she goes backward from the point of her post-breakup pain.
The trigger for their coming apart is his career accomplishment and her envy of it. Jamie's first novel gets a rave review and he's off to Manhattan literary parties while she's trapped in Ohio motels, appearing in second-rate summer stock.
The Last Five Years was presented in Chicago, then Off-Broadway in 2002. I enjoyed that production, and a later one in Philadelphia, but this production at Media is the most involving and compelling, thanks to the excellent casting of Jennie Eisenhower and Marcus Stevens as the couple.
Eisenhower's depth
Their separate careers provide diverse songs with witty lyrics, like her audition for a role, "Climbing Uphill," and a funny number about a gay midget who plays Tevye in Fiddler On the Roof. Eisenhower sings these memorably; more important, she endows her character with more depth than I've seen in other productions.
Brown's best song is a Jerome Kern-style ballad, "When You Come Home to Me," which gets lost because it's staged as part of the female lead's comic audition. I hope that when Eisenhower records a solo album, she'll include a romantic rendition of that song.
Stevens possesses a fine voice and winning personality. He awakens memories of his role as Motel in the Walnut Street Theatre's Fiddler on the Roof when he sings a tour de force narrative of an eastern-European tailor who gives a Christmas gift.
Like a wedding chapel
Brown's songs cover a virtuosic range of styles from rock/pop to klezmer to country. The rhymes are witty, the melodies catchy. Tom Fosnocht conducts a six-person band in Brown's original arrangements of the score for piano, guitar, bass, two cellos and a violin.
Director Jesse Cline uses two spare archways, reminiscent of a wedding chapel, to frame the entrances and exits, and a series of projected photographs to set all the scenes.
Only after the warm glow of the performances recedes do you begin to realize that the male character was a jerk and the female was pretty much a cypher. We never see what he saw in her, except that he was tired of dating Jewish girls and she was a shiksa. In fairness to Brown, his portrait of a marriage on the rocks may have been inhibited by a suit filed against him by his ex-wife for invading her privacy.
But these shortcomings are swept away by the memorable performers.
What, When, Where
The Last Five Years. Music and lyrics by Jason Robert Brown; directed by Jesse Cline. Through February 27, 2011 at Media Theatre, 104 E. State St., Media, Pa. (610) 891-0100 or mediatheatre.org.
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