Time's Arrow

An intimate falling-in-and-out-of-love musical, The Last Five Years, arrives on Broadway-with star power to spare.

-  By Marley Marius

When, in 2013, The New York Times sounded a call for stories from fans of The Last Five Years— a show with music, lyrics, and a book by Jason Robert Brown— the responses were many and deep. The fleet musical had recently been revived offBroadway and its devotees wrote of the way its story— about the painful dissolution of a marriage between two artists—had helped them parse their own relationships. Others reflected on some of the regional productions that followed its 2001 world premiere in Skokie, Illinois, starring Norbert Butz and Lauren Kennedy, and directed by Daisy Prince. (A movie adaptation with Anna Kendrick and Jeremy Jordan would expand the fan base in 2014.)

Never mind that critics had never gone mad for the show. (“Novelist and an Actress Sharing a Leaky Boat,” read the headline for Ben Brantley ’s tepid review in 2002, when The Last Five Years opened in New York.) Brown’s score—spanning pop, Latin, klezmer, and more musical vernaculars—remained, as one admirer put it, “an actor’s dream, a pianist’s dream/nightmare, and a director’s heaven.”

The narrative structure nods a little to Betrayal, a little to Merrily We Roll Along: While one character goes through his side of things in chronological order, ending where the marriage does, his partner’s storyline moves backward, concluding with their first date. (The device doubles as metaphor: As Brown has summarized it, The Last Five Years is about “two people who, really, except for one moment, are simply never in the same place. They just cannot connect.”) Despite sharing the stage throughout, it is only during their wedding, in the middle of the show, that the couple interact.