The Last Five Years: big ambitions
Your Plank Panel willing to take on any musical adventure:
*Ingrid Nilson*: who first listened to this musical five years ago
*Tobias Slezak*: who first joined Facebook five years ago (that’s when it started, anyway)
Who journeyed to the Jericho Arts Centre to tap their toes to "The Last Five Years":http://www.naomidayneswood.com/last5years/index.html
*Tobias:* Until recently, my understanding of musical theatre was pretty basic. Take a story, bring it to life with a fantastic display of costuming, set decoration, song and dance, and you get a synergistic pulse of humanity that brings us all to our feet. Part of the beauty of this kind of musical is that it travels well – it can be equally successful in a huge venue or a small space provided the actors are committed, enthusiastic and relatively in tune.
I have just learned that *The Last Five Years* is not this kind of musical. Two lonely actors take the stage and, except for a few moments in the middle of the show, they don’t even interact. They simply wind their way through the story of their failed relationship with one another. “Cathy” (Naomi Dayneswood) starts at the end and sings her way to their hopeful beginning, while “Jamie” (Jesse Donaldson) does the opposite. Before tonight I had heard the original soundtrack and found it to be a haunting portrayal of ill-fated love. But here at the Jericho Arts Centre I wished for a more traditional kind of musical. The two young actors have not yet developed into performers capable of carrying such pithy themes and technical music, and there is no chorus line to save them.
*Ingrid:* Efforts do have to be recognized. In this case, they were extremely obvious. As a genre, musicals sometimes get a bad name for the jazz hands and turn, turn, kick-turn style in which they are often performed. In *The Last Five Years*, the writing is anti-cheese but the performances in this production did not seem to be on the same page as the material. Jazz hands and box steps were in conflict with the realistic story being told. As an appreciator of musical theatre, you may love the intricate and intimate beauty of Jason Robert Brown’s Tony Award winning scores but as a pianist, they are sure to leave your fingers sore. Kudos to the six musicians who pulled at our heartstrings while playing their strings … hopefully not pulling a finger muscle in the process.
The musicians were getting a workout and so were the performers, both of them. The odds were stacked against the singers: they battle to be heard over the band for the duration of the show. It was six against one and probability won. As a result we lost out on a lot of the lyrics, the wit of which make the show special. I mean, you gotta love the nuance in the score – the dissonant piano accompaniment is made to sound like a Klezmer band when Jamie sings of his newfound love for a _Shiksa Goddess_ (a mock-pejorative term for a non-Jewish woman). It becomes heavenly for musical theatre nuts when combined with Jewish musings in lyrics like “I've had Shabbas dinners on Friday nights/With every Shapiro in Washington Heights”. But where major laughs might have been, there was silence…or just the sound of a very talented albeit overpowering orchestra.
_The Last Five Years written & composed by Jason Robert Brown; Director: Chris Robson: Musical Director: Gordon Roberts; Featuring Naomi Dayneswood as Cathy & Jesse Donaldson as Jamie. Running at the Jericho Arts Centre January 26 - February 11, Mondays – Wednesdays at 8pm. For more information high kick_ "here":http://www.naomidayneswood.com/last5years/index.html