We round up the reviews for the first Broadway production of Jason Robert Brown’s musical…
WhatsOnStage: “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.”
The Guardian: **** “Warren, a Tony winner in 2021 for the Tina Turner musical, wields a magnificent voice – honeyed, lustrous, arresting when allowed to bloom. Her Cathy may be a struggling actor who, at least according to the book, does not have thick enough skin for the business, but though Warren imbues her with pain and vulnerability, none of it reads as weakness, or naivety.”
Time Out: “The Last Five Years’s agile, animated and intelligently crafted score is beloved by musical-theater performers, partly because many of the numbers, whether funny or sad, excerpt well as stand-alone story songs. When presented in sequence, though, successive monologues run a risk of monotony despite the variety of Brown’s writing, and the show’s ambitious format and unflinching honesty don’t always make the journey easy on the audience.”
New York Times: “But in the show’s first Broadway incarnation, starring the resplendent Adrienne Warren and an underpowered Nick Jonas, the structure (along with the balance) has been compromised. The production, which opened on Sunday at the Hudson Theater, muddies the show’s temporal ironies and flattens its emotional topography. Its meaning and thus its impact are short-circuited.”
amny.com: “Unfortunately, this long-awaited debut is a frustrating misfire — overproduced, emotionally hollow, and fundamentally at odds with the delicate intimacy that makes the musical so beloved.”
The Wrap: ” This musical finds its clever balance in the music. While she’s singing downbeat songs as the relationship disintegrates, he’s being very upbeat in the first throes of love; that dynamic is reversed in the show’s second half.”
New York Post: ” But, perhaps because of who Warren is onstage with and what she’s been told to do there, her Cathy is not as deep or intriguing as the character could be. She’s poised and unshakeable, and never neurotic or fragile — qualities you’d sooner expect of a down-on-her-luck actress in frenetic New York who constantly faces rejection. Warren borders on bland.
Nevertheless, she builds more of a character than Jonas. Which is to say, she builds a character.”
Entertainment Weekly: “Jonas is funny, playing up Jamie’s arrogance as he winks at the audience. Warren is captivating, making the material her own with soaring vocals. But big songs also demand big emotion — which Warren effortlessly achieves. It’s a well-considered, layered performance. Even through the backwards progression, Cathy feels whole, consistent. In that regard, Jonas is walking shakier ground.”
Deadline: “No, the problem with The Last Five Years, even with White’s sensitive direction, splendid orchestrations that lean heavy on piano, percussion, guitar and some gorgeous cello, and an impressionistic New York streetscape set, is the play itself, too confusing to offer clarity when clarity is needed – is Cathy a good actress or just a pipe-dreamer? Is Jamie a narcissist or just a writer who wants to write?”
Daily Beast: “Warren’s voice is powerful and resonant. She and Jonas share a subtle rather than powerful chemistry. This is thorny terrain in a show that insists on its principals not truly interacting—yet expecting them to build a believable enough relationship that we feel their joy and pain. Jonas and Warren try as hard as they can to animate Jamie and Cathy, but they are more plausible as solo, self-explaining units than as a two-person relationship in formation and freefall. Their shared stage time sometimes scrambles the points in time we are supposed to be in—his present or her past.”
New York Theater: “Far more likely to have a direct effect on the credibility of their casting and the plausibility of their characters’ relationship is, ironically enough, Adrienne Warren’s talent. Warren won her Tony for her powerhouse performance in the title role of “Tina.” Tina Turner, the character she played, was a natural talent, and it is easy to see Warren that way as well. She puts her all into several of the songs that Cathy sings. But Cathy is supposed to be an insecure performer who is apparently so much the opposite of a natural talent that Jamie has to keep on encouraging her. Indeed, several of her songs are meant to be auditions that she’s failing. As I said, this disparity is meant to be part of the tension between the two. But, if anything, the disparity is reversed: Warren’s voice was stronger, and her delivery of the lyrics more crisp.”
New York Stage: *** “This Broadway incarnation is well worth taking in, but its fulfillment – just like that of the connection between Cathy and Jamie itself – remains tantalizingly, yet undeniably, just out of reach.”
New York Theatre Guide: “In The Last Five Years‘s series of alternating solos, every number mustn’t be performed as a showstopper. But that happens here, so the songs became more about the actors than the characters, and the emotional connection dries up — just like tear ducts.”
Theatrely.com: “White has crafted an intriguing and intellectually ambitious revival, one that embraces the brutal emotional honesty of Brown’s source material.”
To find out more about the production visit: https://thelastfiveyearsbroadway.com/