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    ‘The Last Five Years’ Review: Nick Jonas and Adrienne Warren Star in a Muddy Revival

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    Nick Jonas and Adrienne Warren star in a muddy revival of Jason Robert Brown’s still-scathing musical.Leave aside its seriousness, its intimacy, its wit. Leave aside, too, its relative obscurity, despite being frequently performed. (Without really trying, I’ve seen it six times, including the 2014 film.) Even apart from any of that, “The Last Five Years,” by Jason Robert Brown, is still the ur-nerdical — nerdical being a term I made up to describe shows, like “Fun Home,” “The Band’s Visit” and “Kimberly Akimbo,” that are too good to stay in the very small theater-geek niche they arose from. Turns out they can speak, and sing, to anyone.What really makes “The Last Five Years,” which debuted Off Broadway in 2002, look like the father of that family of choice, is its baroque structure. Doubling down (and doing a backflip) on reverse-chronology narratives like the ones in “Betrayal” and “Merrily We Roll Along,” it presents the story of Jamie Wellerstein, a suddenly successful young novelist, and Cathy Hiatt, a slowly sinking young actor, in two timelines. Jamie’s moves forward, from the day he falls headlong for Cathy to the day, five years later, he resentfully leaves her. Cathy’s moves backward, from despair over Jamie’s betrayal to exhilaration over the first stirrings of his love.The structure is no mere appliqué, decorating the surface of the show like a doodle. It is how “The Last Five Years” expresses its truth. One arc always going up, one down, there’s sadness waiting whenever there’s joy and joy whenever there’s sadness. Seen alternately in separate scenes, the lovers never touch, let alone share Brown’s pyrotechnical songs, except halfway through, on the day they marry. Whether the story has a happy ending thus depends on how you look at it.Instead of staying out of each other’s scenes, the actors in this production are often thrown together: one singing, one reacting to the song in mime.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBut 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.With material so precision-made, it takes just one mistake to do big damage. Instead of keeping the characters out of each other’s scenes as Brown’s libretto indicates, the director, Whitney White, often throws them together: one singing, one reacting to the song in mime. They make faces, make contact and even make out. As a result — follow me with a protractor if you must — each inhabits the other’s arc, thus disturbing their own. The individual timelines no longer track.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      In Chicago, 3 Shows That Keep the Audience in Mind and Engaged

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      Musical adaptations of “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil” and “The Lord of the Rings” as well as a new Samuel D. Hunter play were on our critic’s itinerary.The musical adaptation of “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil” that’s playing at the Goodman Theater incorporates quite a bit of crowd work. In a final coup de théâtre that felt both radical and exhilarating, a character leads theatergoers in a communal use of their Playbills.While the three shows I saw during a recent weekend trip to Chicago were wildly different from one another, my mind kept returning to their relationship with their respective audience. Seeing “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil” first set me off on that train of thought.Based on John Berendt’s best-selling retelling of a true crime in 1980s Savannah, Ga., the musical, which is running through Aug. 11, has edited out some colorful figures (goodbye, Joe Odom) and condensed the events (the legal wranglings taking up a good chunk of Berendt’s book whiz by in a few minutes). But the biggest move is a bold change in perspective for the show, which has a book by Taylor Mac and a score by Jason Robert Brown.Berendt’s omnipresent chronicler is now us, the theatergoers, whom the characters often address directly from the stage. This will particularly resonate with those familiar with Mac’s way of integrating the audience into a narrative (as Mac did most notably with the 2016 epic “A 24-Decade History of Popular Music”). Another key Mac preoccupation is the haunting of America by its past, something particularly relevant when it comes to Savannah’s self-mythologizing of its lineage. “Get out of my head, dirty demons of historical pain!” the Lady Chablis (J. Harrison Ghee, a Tony Award winner for “Some Like It Hot”) says at one point. She’s referring to her own history, but it’s hard not to hear a wider reference.Chablis, an exuberant entertainer and insuppressible life force, has moved from the book’s periphery to the show’s center, and Ghee’s performance, languid yet sharply angled, is a delight. The nightclub number “Let There Be Light” could use a little more voltage, but then the director Rob Ashford and the choreographer Tanya Birl-Torres are overall too timid in the splashier scenes.The show’s other focal point is Jim Williams (Tom Hewitt), the wealthy antique dealer and furniture restorer who kills his younger lover, Danny Hansford (Austin Colby). In effect, Mac’s book is structured around two ways of being queer in the South 40 years ago. The outsider Chablis is Savannah’s very own Puck, spreading joyful bedlam and ladling out truths; Jim is both accepted and resented by the city’s elite — personified by the Ladies Preservation League, led by Emma Dawes (Sierra Boggess, revealing previously underused comedic chops).We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Nick Jonas and Adrienne Warren to Star in ‘Last Five Years’ on Broadway

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      Whitney White will direct the first Broadway production of Jason Robert Brown’s popular musical, which plans to open next spring.Nick Jonas and Adrienne Warren are planning to star in a production of “The Last Five Years” on Broadway next spring.Jonas appeared in several Broadway shows as a child; his one starring role was in 2012, when he stepped into a production of “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying,” and his most recent appearance on Broadway was for a Jonas Brothers concert stand last year.Warren is a Tony Award winner for playing the title role in “Tina.” She also had roles in Broadway productions of “Shuffle Along, or the Making of the Musical Sensation of 1921 and All That Followed” and “Bring It On.”“The Last Five Years,” by Jason Robert Brown, is about the breakup of a marriage. Critics have rarely warmed to it, but it has a huge fan base, and is widely staged. It has never been on Broadway, in part because it is so small — just two characters and one act. The show also has an unusual structure: the male protagonist, a novelist named Jamie, tells the story from beginning to end, while the female protagonist, an actress named Cathy, tells it in reverse chronological order.It was first staged in Illinois, at Northlight Theater, in 2001, with Norbert Leo Butz and Lauren Kennedy, and then had an Off Broadway run at the Minetta Lane Theater in 2002, with Butz and Sherie Rene Scott. In the decades since, there have been numerous national and international productions and adaptations. There was a film adaptation, starring Anna Kendrick and Jeremy Jordan, in 2015. More recently, Cynthia Erivo and Joshua Henry starred in a concert version in 2016, and at the height of the pandemic Out of the Box Theatrics and Holmdel Theater Company staged a memorable streaming production filmed inside an apartment with Nicholas Edwards and Nasia Thomas. (The number of licensed productions of the show doubled during the pandemic because the small cast and idiosyncratic narrative structure made it conducive to social distancing.)The Broadway production, directed by Whitney White (a Tony nominee for “Jaja’s African Hair Braiding”), will be produced by Seaview, an increasingly prolific producing entity run by Greg Nobile; ATG Productions, a subsidiary of British theater owner ATG Entertainment; and the Season, which is the new producing entity of theater marketers Mike Karns and Steven Tartick. More

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      ‘The Connector,’ a Show That Asks: Should News Feel True or Be True?

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      A new musical from Jason Robert Brown, Daisy Prince and Jonathan Marc Sherman explores the diverging trajectories of two young writers in the late 1990s.The director Daisy Prince had a flash of inspiration for a new show nearly 20 years ago: She wanted to explore the fallout from a string of partially or entirely fabricated news articles (by writers like Stephen Glass and Jayson Blair). The show would be set at a New York City magazine with a storied history — a publication much like The New Yorker. Also, it would be a musical.“I had become somewhat fixated on all these falsified news stories — these larger questions about fact, truth and story,” said Prince, who directed Jason Robert Brown’s “The Last Five Years” and “Songs for a New World.”She jotted the thought down in her great big notebook of ideas. But by the time she finally returned to it, around 2010, she was certain she had missed out.“I thought by the time we were going to be able to tell this story, it would no longer be relevant,” she said.But then the Trump presidency arrived, along with his strategy of labeling unfavorable coverage as fake news — and the premise only became more timely. Now the show, titled “The Connector,” conceived and directed by Prince with music and lyrics by Brown and a book by Jonathan Marc Sherman, is premiering Off Broadway at MCC Theater, where it is set to open Feb. 6.Ben Levi Ross, left, as Ethan Dobson and Hannah Cruz as Robin Martinez in the musical.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More