NEW YORK — 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 a 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 as struggling summer-stock actress Cathy. Warren is best known for playing the title role in “Tina: The Tina Turner Musical,” a character that is about as far away from Cathy as Jupiter is from Mars.
Both of these performers are whopping musical talents and their mutual vocal prowess is very much on display — to the obvious delight of the many Jonas fans in the house. But you simply cannot believe that Warren is a hard-working but everyday young actress stuck in Ohio, doing shows no one of importance comes to see, any more than you can believe Jonas is a writer who is new to the temptations of fame, and also young enough to be excited by a New Yorker review of his book, rather than the reality, which is that he is an accomplished and experienced star.
More importantly, you also cannot believe these two are in love. Rather, they seem stuck both invulnerable to each other and stuck in two completely different worlds.
That’s always a risk with this 90-minute show, which I first saw in its lovely premiere at the Northlight Theatre in Skokie 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.
Think that structure through and you’ll realize that the two have to meet in the middle. In the previous productions I’ve seen, that’s been the core of the experience and, metaphorically, an observation about how a two-career marriage, although shot through with expectations and pressures of perpetual unity, typically has only a very limited amount of time when both parties could actually be said to be in the same place. The show’s excellent advice is to grab it while you can, because the rest of a marriage is hard work. Brown came to some early wisdom on that particular topic.
But in a musical, if you’re not pulling for said relationship to survive and if you don’t believe you are watching a real partnership that could live or die before your eyes, nothing works. And so it goes here.
The pivotal meeting in the middle feels much like any other scene in director Whitney White’s production, a show that delivers beautifully sung treatments of Brown’s score, which on Broadway features some newly enriched orchestrations from the composer.
Indeed, the whole experience feels as if you are watching two very different cabaret performers smushed together on a single bill, not two characters fighting for their marital lives. Frankly, the set design by David Zinn doesn’t much help, either; it seems to reflect ambivalence of scale and purpose.
I’ll forever be deeply fond of this score and, indeed, the show’s willingness to probe one of the trickiest aspects of a relationship, which is who has to give up what and when, and whether one party ever has a responsibility to rescue another. (Sure they do). “The Last Five Years” also is uncommonly wise when it comes to explaining how skillfully some people rationalize marital difficulties as being seated entirely with the other person. You may be familiar.
But with all due respect for their formidable talents, Jonas and Warren just aren’t right for the piece, either individually or together.
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.
cjones5@chicagotribune.com
At the Hudson Theatre, 141 W 44th St, New York; thelastfiveyearsbroadway.com
