Review: Nick Jonas and Adrienne Warren Unpack The Last Five Years on Broadway

There are a lot of ways to cope with the pain of a failed marriage. Some people move. Others take up meditation (or medication). And a rare few commit their heartbreak to the stage. Joining Annie Hall’s Alvy Singer in this last group is Tony Award-winning composer Jason Robert Brown, whose 2001 two-person musical The Last Five Years is, at its best, like staring into a screaming wound.

The show is now making its Broadway debut at the Hudson Theatre starring Tony winner Adrienne Warren (Tina) and pop-star-cum-Broadway-veteran Nick Jonas as the couple in question. While there’s plenty of screaming, the wound appears oddly bloodless in this overcooked production from director Whitney White (Jaja’s African Hair Braiding), leaving audiences with a top-notch recital of favorite audition songs—but a mostly unmoving theatrical experience.

It’s about writer Jamie (Jonas) and actor Cathy (Warren), who meet in their early 20s right as his career is about to take off. Meanwhile, she attends grueling auditions that lead to little more than summer stock gigs in deepest, darkest Ohio. They marry despite their diverging trajectories, because love is love. But Jamie seems to be more in love with himself and his career. Compounding matters, he struggles to resist the cornucopia of sex New York City affords bestselling novelists. Maybe an open arrangement might have saved this marriage, but probably not. The vines of infidelity and professional resentment are impossible to untangle in this tale of creative class twentysomethings doomed to divorce.

Brown was inspired by the crackup of his own first marriage, so much so that his ex-wife, Theresa O’Neill, sued him and the producers of the original off-Broadway run, claiming the show constituted a violation of the nondisclosure clause of their divorce settlement. As part of a subsequent agreement, Brown removed details about Cathy that might have identified her with O’Neill (like all references to her being “Irish Catholic”), but he neglected to replace them with anything as specific, resulting in an uneven portrait of two people and the major lingering flaw of this musical—one that this production somewhat unintentionally corrects.

We know exactly who Jamie is: Jewish, a die-hard Upper West Sider, and a young man flying on the adrenaline that can only come from early success. Brown gives us the clearest introduction in Jamie’s first two songs, “Shiksa Goddess” and “Moving Too Fast,” with the former sporting the lyric, “I’ve been wand’ring through the desert! / I’ve been beaten, I’ve been hit! / My people have suffered for thousands of years / And I don’t give a shit!”

A more goyishe interpretation of this line you couldn’t ask for from Jonas, who feels strangely disconnected from the text, hitting all the right notes beautifully, if blandly. When in doubt, he reverts to concert mode, leaning toward the audience and slicing the air with his hand as he vocally leaps to his teen heartthrob falsetto. This is iconically Nick Jonas; but Jamie, so sharply drawn, becomes fuzzy.

Conversely, Cathy can easily come off as a generic sad sack, less an active participant in her own marriage than an innocent bystander. Happily, Warren takes control with a performance that is specific and heartfelt, elucidating every lyric and telling us so much more with her doe eyes and incredulously crossed arms. Her performance of “A Part of That” is particularly memorable as we witness, in real time, a woman come to terms with the fact that she has become exactly what she swore to avoid: an accessory to her husband’s dream.

Warren’s performance is even more impressive considering the unconventional timeline of The Last Five Years, which has Jamie telling the story chronologically while Cathy moves backward, from breakup to first date. We meet Cathy in a place of depression exactly when Jamie is at his most manic. Their only duet transpires around their wedding in the song “The Next Ten Minutes,” but director White has staged the solos so we can regularly see the reactions of the other performer, something Warren exploits more effectively than Jonas.

A helpful projection (by Asher Robinson) establishes the time convention from the outset and a program insert with the song list further illustrates it. This is the clearest I’ve ever seen this musical presented—but this show-offy backwards-and-forwards schtick is still more trouble than it’s worth.

That’s evidenced by David Zinn’s unfocused scenic design, which has the cluttered feeling of a playroom that needs tidying. A green subway lamp, buckets of bodega flowers, a desk on a platform, a double bed that floats on and off, and miniature models of landmark buildings on the Upper West Side all occupy stage space while adding very little. Dede Ayite’s chic contemporary costumes (and the presence of smartphones) pull the story into the literal last five years (sans Covid), while Stacey Derosier’s lighting holds the story in the simultaneously hazy and vibrant realm of memory.

Musically, it’s superb under the direction of Tom Murray, with lush, expanded orchestrations by Brown. Sound designer Cody Spencer mostly gets the balance right. Only once, during “Moving Too Fast,” was an actor overpowered by percussion.

Brown has made minor revisions to the lyrics to account for shifting manners and inflation: Sonny Mehta has been shoved aside for Salman Rushdie; Jamie’s magazine fee has been doubled to $4,000; and Karl, Cathy’s summer stock co-star, is no longer a “gay midget” but a gay dentist.

But for the most part, this is still The Last Five Years as devoted fans know it: a tuneful sketch of an ill-considered marriage between two young people who still hadn’t fully discovered who they were and what they wanted. The silver lining is it only took them five years to realize it.