Homogeneous Theatre
Presents

By Jason Robert Brown

Starring Jessica Healy and Billy Butler

The Last Five Years is an intimate, two-person song-cycle that tells the compelling story of Jamie, a nice Jewish boy, and Cathy, a good Irish Catholic girl, who fall in love, get married, and fall apart over the course of five years. Jamie is an emerging novelist enjoying his first taste of success, while Kathy is a struggling actress having trouble hitting it big, making their musical duet by turns wildly funny and crushingly sad.

Brown has employed an unusual temporal shift in the piece, with Cathy starting at the end of the marriage and working her way back, while Jamie begins on their first date and works his way forward. Only once do Jamie and Cathy sing together, at their wedding in the middle of the play. This underscores cause and effect, as two people whose powerful love for one another cannot overcome their cultural differences and divergent dreams.

Musically, Brown's score navigates the minefields of love and marriage through soulful, soaring music and lyrics that evoke contemporary pop songwriters like Joni Mitchell and Paul Simon, combined with the theatrical styles of Stephen Sondheim and Leonard Bernstein. Traditional Jewish and Irish musical themes are also played against the sounds, pace and complexity of contemporary life in New York City.

Musicals about relationships are nothing new, but The Last Five Years manages to reinvent the familiar formula and offers up one of the brightest, freshest scores of the new century.

Presented through special permission by MTI