The Last Five Years (Red Horse Theatricals)

Red Horse Theatricals in association with the Gene Bua Theatre and Meredith Scott Lynn presents the Los Angeles premiere of Jason Robert Brown’s The Last Five Years, directed by Calvin Remsberg with Musical Direction by Tom Griffin.

The Last Five Years is an intimate, two-person musical that tells the compelling story of Jamie, a nice Jewish boy, and Catherine, 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 Kathleen is a struggling actress having trouble hitting it big, making their musical duet by turns wildly funny and crushingly sad.

Brown uses an unusual temporal shift for the piece, with Catherine starting at the end of the marriage and working her way back, and Jamie beginning on their first date, working his way forward. Only once do they sing together, at their wedding in the middle of the play. This allows the audience to understand cause and effect, as two people whose love for one another cannot overcome their cultural differences and divergent dreams. Musically, Brown’s score navigates the mine fields of love and marriage through soulful, soaring music and lyrics that evoke contemporary pop songwriters like Joni Mitchell and Paul Simon, with the theatrical styles of Stephen Sondheim and Leonard Bernstein. Traditional Jewish and Irish musical themes are played against the sounds, pace and complexity of contemporary life in New York City.