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Friday, November 2, 2007
‘The Last Five Years’ @ Actor’s Express
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
THEATER REVIEW: Grade: B-
“The Last Five Years” is Jason Robert Brown’s sung-through musical about a couple’s brief eternity together. It’s a tussle of love, loss and anger mismanagement — a contemporary opera structured as a kind of a tit-for-tat for two.
The score — by the Tony Award winning composer of the Leo Frank saga “Parade” — is lush and lovely, the material is smart and comically buoyant, and the chronology is counterclockwise, so that we see the romance of successful novelist Jamie Wellerstein and his “shiksa goddess”/actress/wife Catherine Hiatt fall apart before it begins. Time, it seems, is not on their side.
Beautifully written and gorgeously sung in a new Actor’s Express production directed by Kate Warner, “The Last Five Years” falls in that handy black hole that ambivalent observers rely on when they have a mixed response to a work of art: It’s a noble failure.
But where love can’t abide in this emotional welter of insecurity and stubbornness, the performances do — for the most part.
Musical director Ann-Carol Pence elicits sumptuous sounds from the band, and Natasha Drena, who plays Catherine, makes the case that she’s the freshest breeze to blow our way in a long time.
A sure shot in the title role of Aurora Theatre’s recent “Annie Get Your Gun,” Drena reinvents herself here as a person who is equal parts adorable (“See I’m Smiling”), vulnerable (“The Next Ten Minutes”), neurotic (“Climbing Uphill”) and funny (“A Summer in Ohio”). That last song is an ode to the quirky summer-stock season in which this gypsy actress has to share a room with a “former” stripper with a pet snake named Wayne and appear onstage with a “a gay midget named Karl” who plays Tevye and Porgy. Drena matches strong and emotive vocalizing with an impressive arsenal of authentic acting details. Catherine’s joy is delightful, and her splintering love is horrifically shrill.
As Jamie, Jonathan MacQueen has a lustrous and captivating tone but seems less sure of what to do in terms of movement and shading. He’s got the goods; he just needs a director who can draw them out.
Most of the humor of “Shiksa Goddess,” for instance, never materializes; and “The Schmuel Song” — a Jacques Brel-like folk tale emphasizing the themes of time and ambition — seems endless. Much better, though a little late in the game, is Jamie’s song of betrayal, “Nobody Needs to Know.”
In the same way that Brown introduces prosaic references to Crate and Barrel, Tom Cruise and Sonny Mehta, costume designer Jamie Bullins makes sartorial decisions that inform his characters. Unlike the unfussy clothes, however, Derek Kinsler’s overdecorated set is clunky: Too much furniture for such a small space.
At the end of the day, we should be grateful to Actor’s Express artistic director Freddie Ashley for substituting his predecessor’s choice, “The Fantasticks,” with this flawed but important piece of musical literature. “The Last Five Years” sags in the middle and never quite coheres. But emotionally, this tale of the bitter aftertaste of success has considerable depth.
