Any forensic accounting of a relationship can’t help but be colored by the weight of its history. But here’s a twist: the conceit in the telling of Cathy and Jamie’s relationship in “The Last Five Years,” now playing at ACT, is that each partner tells the story starting from different ends of the relationship. Jamie, a writer whose career in the New York publishing world skyrockets while they’re together, starts at the beginning, full of excitement and possibility. Cathy, a struggling actress having rather less success, works backward, fresh in the hurt and disappointment of the failure, peeling back the years.
Their stories, told in a series of emotionally poignant he said/she said songs, has them frequently onstage at the same time but almost never interacting except for a scene at about 45 minutes into the show (the halfway point) when the stories crisscross as they marry. Two ships passing.
The unusual structure of this storytelling telescopes the narrative, underlining the conflicting trajectories of the couple’s lives. The withering of Jamie’s marriage even as his literary success soars. Cathy’s failure at career liftoff receding as she looks back to recall the heady days of a new relationship.
Writer/composer Jason Robert Brown’s two-person musical about a relationship gone bad, which debuted in Chicago in 2001 before going on to considerable success on Broadway, takes what could have been a classic story of a couple’s descent into disaffection and scrambles the momentum. It’s an old story – one side of the couple becomes successful and glamorous while the other is left behind, growing more and more resentful. As things come apart, the intensity builds. Traditionally, dysfunction quickens the pace; romance suspends time. But what happens when you squish them together?
Brown’s musical language is next-gen Sondheim, all sophisticated multi-modal harmonies, Rorschach melodies and incisive lyrics that almost always hit their targets. He uses music to color and heighten the emotional intensity, rather like an Impressionist splashing washes of color, or perhaps more accurately, the way movie composers construct mood and establish scenes on the screen. The orchestra, arranged around the perimeter of the Falls thrust stage at ACT, is a living, breathing chorus that both propels and cradles the characters.
The show is double-cast, and the night I went Cassie Q. Kohl was Cathy and Jeffery Wallace was Jamie. Kohl’s voice has a terrific range for this show, an explosive full-power pop soprano that can turn pinched and squeaky on a dime when the tenor changes. Wallace is a different flavor of exuberant, in a more measured way. He seems more pulled along by his success rather than the architect of it.
But herein is the underlying problem with “The Last Five Years.” There’s virtually no chemistry between these two. None. Their lack of interaction, their mismatch in intensity because they’re almost never in the same part of the story together—we never get to relate to them as a couple, never get to like them as a pair. So it’s difficult to mourn the loss of something we never saw. “The Last Five Years” cries out for a meet-cute at the beginning, but then perhaps that might have killed the forward/backward story device. (And maybe this is an argument against letting a novel structure too strictly dictate an idea.)
If this music was less dazzling than it is or if these performances were less accomplished, the emotional hole at the center of “The Last Five Years” would be fatal. That it isn’t, that the elements that work are so compelling, makes for a show that is never less than engaging, esactly what you hope for in the theatre.
