[NEohioPAL] Review of "The Last Five Years" at Lakeland Civic Theatre

[Bob Abelman via NEohioPAL]

Lakeland’s ‘The Last Five Years’ is charming in spite of itself



Bob Abelman

Cleveland Jewish News, The News Herald, The Morning Journal

Member, International Association of Theatre Critics

  

At the heart of Jason Robert Brown’s intensely personal musical “The Last Five Years” is a simple story about a singular event: The failed marriage between Cathy Hiatt, a young, aspiring but unaccomplished New York actress, and Jamie Wellerstein, a highly successful first novelist.  



The play begins with Cathy at the depressing end of the relationship, where she sings the tender-to-the touch torch song “Still Hurting.” Jamie is at the relationship’s joyful beginning, singing about a girl he just met in the up-beat “Shiksa Goddess.”  As the play progresses, their respective timelines converge, cross, and once again careen in opposite directions, leaving Cathy at the conception of the relationship and Jamie at its conclusion as the lights fade to black.  



This remarkable piece of slice-of-life storytelling, first staged in Chicago in 2001 and then produced Off-Broadway in 2002, is told exclusively through songs that run the gamut in range, tempo and temperament.  Nearly every one of them is an intricate and strenuous vocal callisthenic that tests the metal of the performers.



Neely Gevaart and Jason Leupold possess all of these qualities in this enchanting Lakeland Civic Theatre production.



For more of this review, go to www.clevelandjewishnews.com/columnists/. 
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