The Last Five Years - Review

Garrick Theatre, London

***

Music, lyrics and book by Jason Robert Brown

Directed by Jonathan O'Boyle

Molly Lynch

For The Last Five Years, the last eighteen months have seen this show albeit skewered by the pandemic, transfer from a glorious run on London’s fringe at the Southwark Playhouse to the commercial bear-pit of the West End, taking up a month’s residence at the Garrick.

The artistic genius of its performers remains. Slightly matured from their south London opening, Molly Lynch and Oli Higginson remain excellent as time-crossed lovers Cathy and Jamie, famously charting their five year relationship in opposing time dimensions. As Jamie moves forward from impetuous passion to duplicitous deceit, so does Cathy follow a reverse arc, opening with the grief of a shattered marriage and closing with her deliriously sincere and hopeful Goodbye Until Tomorrow. 

Molly and Oli are indeed magnificent - but not for no reason has this curiosity of a show struggled to even open on Broadway. The intense magic of Jonathan O’Boyle’s work at Southwark dissipates under the scrutiny of a multi-tiered West End house, its cast now removed to behind their proscenium arch. What this production defines is that The Last 5 Years is essentially a chamber work and that Brown’s ingenious dissection of a love’s birth and subsequent demise is best savoured up-close. While some of his show’s numbers are barnstorming roofraisers (Lynch delivers a knockout I Can Do Better Than That) overall, the piece struggles to captivate.

This Garrick production is one for the fans, undoubtedly a gathering of genius in both its cast and creative crew. But much like Jamie and Cathy’s love, something has died here.

Click here to read my 5* review of this production at Southwark Playhouse 

Runs until 17th October

Phot credit: Helen Maybanks

The Last Five Years - Review

Southwark Playhouse, London


*****


Music, lyrics and book by Jason Robert Brown
Directed by Jonathan O'Boyle

Molly Lynch

In one of the show’s finest versions in recent years, Jonathan O’Boyle’s take on The Last Five Years makes for an evening of simply exquisite musical theatre in what has to be a definitive production of this complex and unusual work.

The narrative is simple but mind bending - Jason Robert Brown, the show’s creator projects a doomed five-year romance from two conflicting timelines. Jamie’s arc follows a natural timeline from first date right up to closing down the couple’s shared bank account. Cathy, by contrast, is introduced to us picking up the pieces of her shattered marriage and from there Brown plays with his audience. Cathy sings her life in reverse, ending on the excruciatingly painful number – to us at least - of her delirious joy following her first date with Jamie.

Oli Higginson

With its complex conceits, the show is not everyone’s cup of tea and indeed has yet to enjoy a run on Broadway. But at the Southwark Playhouse, O’Boyle much like an alchemist, fuses an array of brilliant base elements into a truly splendid show.

A grand piano sits on a revolve as the two performers Molly Lynch and Oli Higginson deliver the piece. The actors not only both play the instrument (and Lynch the ukulele and Higginson the guitar too) but dance upon and around the piano too. The magnificent Yamaha also proves a deceptively common denominator to the audience, cruelly appearing to unite these two out-of-lovers, when in reality there arms are only linked to perform some neatly arranged 4-handed interpretations of Brown’s slickly intuitive melodies.

Lynch’s performing skills have long been held in awe by this website and for a woman whose name sets ridiculously high levels of anticipation even before the curtain goes up, at the Southwark Playhouse she exceeds those expectations by a country mile. Capturing both passion and pathos, Lynch stuns us with her belt in A Summer In Ohio, yet breaks our hearts at both the show’s open and closing moments, as she so convincingly plays a woman who has either either seen, or is destined to see, love crumble and slip through her fingers. Elegant in white, Lynch is every inch the young out-of-towner transformed into a sassy yet vulnerable Manhattanite.

Barely graduated from the Guildhall School Of Music And Drama, Higginson displays a maturity beyond his years in his inhabiting of Jewish Jamie’s crotch-driven persona. As Jamie’s deceit becomes apparent one is left wondering if the man is ever capable of sincere love, with Higginson capturing not only his passion and lies, but also that complex puppy-like charm that endears him to the audience in the show’s early numbers, but which starts to evaporate as soon as the wedding band is around his finger.

The range of musical styles that Brown has included within the 90minute one-act delight are a treat for all. This is not a show bogged down in introspective balladry, but rather a feast of melodies that range from rock and blues through to klezmer and with as much a sprinkling of humour as well as tragedy thrown in too. Complementing the two on-stage pianists, above the proceedings George Dyer, who has also orchestrated this revival, leads his 4 piece band immaculately.

O’Boyle’s direction is ingenious and economic. With both players on stage for almost the entire piece, every glance and nuance is perfectly posed to reflect their realtime non-interaction with each other, save for the show’s centrepiece, The Next Ten Minutes, that sees the pair marry in Central Park.

Lee Newby’s simple striking set is elegant and underplayed – slick and jazzy with a marquee of "L5Y" as a backdrop, but which seems to soften in the productions more melancholy moments. Likewise, Jamie Platt’s lighting plots are equally and as imaginatively, effective.

This take on The Last Five Years is one of the most gorgeously presented pieces of musical theatre to be found in London right now. Actors and creatives at the very top of their game, it is unmissable!

Runs until 28th March

Photo credit: Pamela Raith