I feel like the musical theatre fans among us all have a particular musical that captured their imagination without ever really intending to. You know what I mean – a friend recommends something to you, and you’re not entirely sold on it, but you give it a shot anyway and accidentally end up falling in love completely. That’s how I feel about The Last Five Years. Recommended to me by a friend (shoutout to Annie!) who had also discovered it completely by chance through one of their friends, and so on. This show is a hidden gem that deserves all the spotlight it is about to receive.
It’s bold of me to assign the title of ‘favourite musical’ to something that I had never seen on stage until September 2021. My heart had been captured by the 2014 adaptation of The Last Five Years starring Anna Kendrick as Cathy and Jeremy Jordan as Jamie, again after being heavily recommended to me by Annie (the Anna Kendrick fangirl that she was during university), but unfortunately for me this show hadn’t been performed in London’s West End for over a decade. The chances of it ever going on a UK tour as well are very slim because the cost of putting on the production would greatly outweigh the profits. So, instead, I just had to wait patiently in the hope that one day I would get a chance to see it in person.
Written by Jason Robert Brown (Parade, The Bridges of Madison County) and directed by Jonathan O’Boyle (Hair, Pippin), the West End revival of The Last Five Years opened on the September 17th at the Garrick Theatre. Starring Molly Lynch (Sweeney Todd, Fiddler on the Roof) as Cathy and Oli Higginson (Julius Caesar, Napoleon Blown Apart) as Jamie, the show follows the story of two individuals as they navigate the highs and lows of love and loss over the course of a five-year relationship. Each character’s story is told not only from an alternative perspective, but chronologically reverse to the other.
Throughout the show, Cathy’s story gets happier as she tells the tale from the breakdown of the relationship to the first meeting, where as Jamie tells the story from the beginning of the relationship to the split. There is a moment in the middle of the show during the song The Next Ten Minutes where the two characters meet and interact directly with each other, during Jamie’s proposal and their wedding. This is a bittersweet moment, as we have already seen the route that their relationship takes.
Now, you’re probably thinking just what I thought when I first heard about this show – how on earth does a musical with only two cast members work? The film adaptation naturally adds in extras and background characters to help guide the narrative, but how would that translate onto the stage? I found myself asking the same question when I bought my tickets to see the show. After growing so familiar with the film I had no idea how the staging of the revival would play out and how something that needed to be so intimate would fill a theatre like the Garrick.
The stage is set with a grand piano as the main focal point, slowly rotating on the stage under a single spotlight as you enter the theatre. It isn’t until the lights go down and the curtain goes up that we see the rest of the staging – giant L 5 Y lights reminiscent of the theatre billboards of New York deck the back of the stage with risers used by the cast throughout the musical. The choice to set this story in New York (although never explicitly mentioned) is a deliberate one; it represents a dreamer’s city; a creative city; a city that everyone goes to in order to ‘make it’. The presence of the city felt from the moment that you walk into the Garrick Theatre. You’re surrounded by the American Dream from the moment you sit down in your seat.
The simplicity of the set creates an intimate feel to the show as we dive into the lives of Jamie and Cathy, whilst also contrasting starkly with the life ambitions of both. Jamie is a writer and Cathy is an aspiring actress; both characters exist in worlds which are over the top and extravagant at the best of times. Not only this, but the pair seek fame and fortune, and only one is able to achieve that.
With nothing more than a piano and a handful of props to tell a story about the overwhelming pursuit of love, happiness, but also achievement in your mid-twenties, we see both the highs and lows of what happens when the goal you crave has been reached.
As the story moves forward (or backward depending on how you look at things), gradually props are used to set the scene and communicate the stage in time that the snapshot of the relationship is taking place. These props remain on the stage throughout the rest of the show, at times used by one character alone and at other times reprised for use of another character later in the show. It’s a great communication of the messy collection of memories and physical things collected from relationships, and how we as humans cling on to reminders of times gone by even when they’re sometimes reminders of the negatives.
I also feel like this decision to leave props out on stage represents the messy nature of being a young adult in general. Yes, relationships are chaotic, but so is trying to navigate your twenties when everyone appears to be moving at a different pace to yourself. This theme is something that could be easily overlooked in this show, but I firmly believe that Cathy not only represents every person who has been wronged in a relationship, but she represents every young person who has seen their peers racing towards success and achieving their goals while they seemingly feel like their life is stationary.
Cathy is lost- she knows what she wants to achieve, and she has big dreams of success, but she just can’t quite seem to reach them. She feels jealous, whether intentionally or unintentionally, of Jamie for achieving his goals. Jamie, on the other hand, is a representation of those people who always seem to win in life, who have possibly had everything fall into their lap. As soon as he is faced with a challenge, or as soon as life beings to feel stagnant however, he panics and instead of addressing the situation simply removes himself from it completely. At some point in our young adult lives, we’ve all been a Cathy or a Jamie, or have known one.
The key song in which this becomes abundantly clear is during If I Didn’t Believe in You, where Jamie is begging Cathy to attend a party that his publishers are throwing on his behalf. At first Jamie seems sincere, wanting Cathy to open up to him and tell him why she’s hurting, but quickly turns into a criticism of her. This song mirrors Cathy’s earlier number I’m a Part of That, where she feels not only somewhat on the outside of the relationship but of the world that Jamie is living in. The song starts with her praising his creativity and his ability to invent whole new worlds and how she is his partner in all of that, but quickly turns into her almost having to convince herself that she had not only a role within his life but within the world outside of this. She’s lost and isn’t quite sure where she fits in, giving us a glimpse into what is to come for this couple.
This show is about so much more than just a relationship. At the surface level we can approach this story with the question “who is at fault for the relationship breaking down?” (it’s Jamie), but we can also see that it’s not always as nuanced as that. While Cathy didn’t cheat, her lack of self confidence ends up clashing with Jamie’s over confidence to a point where neither party would ever really be happy long term. Jamie would always believe Cathy wasn’t happy for his success, and Cathy would always believe that she wasn’t ‘good enough’ for Jamie. Neither of these characters were willing to compromise.
That being said, “I will not fail so you can be comfortable, I will not lose because you can’t win” is a brutal take from Jamie’s side so I’m team Cathy all the way.
From a theatre point of view, one of the most interesting things about this show was how numbers feed into one another somewhat seamlessly and often without a pause for applause in between. Still Hurting, the opening number to the show, and Shiksa Goddess are two very contrasting songs. They represent different points in both character’s timelines but also contrast in their tempo. However, we transition from one into the other without a chance to applaud Molly Lynch on her flawless delivery of the heartbreaking opening number. This is a structural choice that seems to continue throughout the show, with the songs broken down into groups of two. This made the performance feel somewhat like a conversation between the characters, each getting their own opportunity to give their take on things before moving on.
Both Molly Lynch and Oli Higginson were flawless in their performances, with the right amount of energy at the right time. Each individual commanded the attention of the theatre confidently and with an impressive strength that makes you almost forget that there are no other cast members. With other musicals, sometimes there is a lull in the action where dialogue needs to be added to move the story along, or a big song and dance (metaphorically and literally) needs to be included to make sure that the audience is still paying attention. There is no interval, due to the run time only being 90 minutes in total, which does help keep the attention of the audience. There’s no need to ‘close’ one half and then ‘reopen’ the next half to remind the audience of what has happened. Instead, the story flows seamlessly from one song into another.
The Last Five Years is a brilliant take on the turbulence of adult life and the relationships that we encounter while navigating the confusing years of our mid-twenties. Unique and captivating, this intimate musical should be on the top of everyone’s theatre bucket list.
