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The Last Five Years starring Nick Jonas and Adrienne Warren (Hudson Theatre, Broadway) - ★★ REVIEW
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Mickey Jo
You may already have heard of the next 10 minutes. Well get ready for some of the worst 90 minutes you have ever spent in a theatre. I recently saw the Broadway production of the Last Five Years starring Nick Jonas and Adrian Warren and I'm still hurting. Oh my God. Hey, welcome back to my theatre themed YouTube channel. Or hello to you if you are listening on podcast platforms. My name is Mickey Jo and I am obsessed with all things theatre. I am a professional theatre critic here on social media, usually based in the UK but traveling frequently to New York to report on as many Broadway and Off Broadway shows as I can, including the Broadway arrival of Jason Robert Brown's iconic contemporary musical theatre song cycle the Last Five Years. This show charts the commencement and demise of a five year relationship between a young, successful author named Jamie Wellerstein and a struggling actress named Kathy Hyatt. The interesting thing about it is that they take turns telling their story in opposite narrative directions. We see his progressing further forwards and we see hers in reverse, starting with their breakup. The musical was first seen in the early 2000s regionally and then Off Broadway with Sherry Renee Scott and Norbert Leo Butz, and has subsequently been produced many, many times. It also contains what was at the time and honestly still is, some of the most groundbreakingly exciting writing for contemporary musical theater by Jason Robert Brown, with each of these songs representing vocally and emotionally challenging musical monologues that proved a rich gift to any performer, which I guess is a big part of why people love this show so much. It has done everywhere. It's been done in New York, subsequently it's been done in London, but it's never been produced on Broadway. Perhaps because of its limited length and its two person cast. It is not a show that necessarily screams Great White Way in terms of its scale, but for whatever reason, it has finally arrived on Broadway with a production at the Hudson Theatre starring Nick Jonas and Adrian Warren. Slightly puzzling casting from the outset, but both of whom have been seen on stage before. Would they prove themselves capable in this challenging show? That is what we are here to discuss today. I recently had the CH to attend a press performance for this production and I'm going to tell you all about it from my 10 to 12 pages of notes that I have written right here. I was tempted to do this as an utter stream of consciousness with my chronological thoughts through the show, but for the sake of your sanity and mine, I'm going to try and organize them somewhat into the different parts of why this doesn't work. Spoiler alert. I hated this and not because I don't love the Last five Years. I actually love the last five years. I have been in a production of the Last Five Years A Student Won and it's perhaps because I think the material is so strong that I had such issues with the utter mess that was its technical Broadway debut. Let's talk about it. But just before I do, if you have also seen this production of the last five years, I would love to know what you thought in the comments section down below. Particularly if you disagree with anything that I have to say, let us know why you liked this production. Finally, if you do enjoy this review and you would like to hear more from me, make sure you're subscribed to my theatre themed YouTube channel or following me on podcast platforms. There will be many more Broadway reviews coming imminently. Oh, also, apologies if I sound sniffly throughout this. I'm experiencing some light seasonal allergies, I am allergic to tree pollen and bad theatre. In the meantime, let's talk about the last five years and why nobody needs to go so I'm not going to inundate you with context about the show and the material here. I think the Last five Years is a brilliant piece of theatre and I've told you about the main concept, with Jamie's timeline moving forwards and Kathy's moving in reverse. That's important to know not only for the production, but also for for this review in particular, because that, I think is the biggest problem with this interpretation of the show. Directed by Whitney White, whose work I don't believe I've seen on stage before, but has come highly recommended from many of my most trusted theatre going friends. Actually, I lied. I did see Whitney White's production of the Secret Life of Bees at the Almeida, which I thoroughly enjoyed. But this, for whatever reason, is not only blandly directed, it is entirely a mess. And for someone to get the last five years so wrong feels like an almost deliberate achievement. If I was a conspiracy theorist, I would suggest that Whitney White may have some strong dislike for an investor who has money in this production and wants the thing to fail because it feels almost actively sabotaged. So after this initial preset and curtain, which is about as bland as the show's entire marketing approach, we have this slightly puzzling graphic in which they project the words his and hers like you're shopping for towels at a department store. But really, it's some desperate sense of suggesting to the audience what is actually happening here. For those people in the room who don't know what the story of the Five years is and don't know how to engage with this show. You have to imagine at this point in the show's life, there are a lot of people seeing it on Broadway who already know that hers is moving backwards, his is moving forwards. But for those that don't, they're about to spend a very puzzling 90 minutes. And that's because all of the traditional storytelling tools which have been deployed in order to convey this to the audience without ever telling them in the script and allowing them to infer from context are absent from this production or actively undermined in the original staging. There was this clock motif. The whole stage was a revolving circle. I've seen it done before, with mirrored surfaces on either side of the stage and a very clear divide down the middle, segregating them to their own timelines and storylines. Key to this show is the idea that they never perceive each other and they only interact when their stories overlap. In the middle, he's going forwards, she's going backwards. So there's a point in the very middle of the show when they sing a song called the next 10 minutes. It begins with him alone. They then sing a duet together that is representative of the moment of their marriage. It's been conceived as, like, a proposal before. It's been conceived as an actual act of marriage before. And then at the end of the song, we hear her singing a response to the solo section he sang at the beginning, which is sort of beautifully heartbreaking because already we know that that moment of togetherness has passed by and they're moving off in different directions. It feels not dissimilar to the current West End production of the Curious Case of Benjamin Button in that way. Interestingly enough, that moment is pretty butchered in this production, but we will get to that a little further down the line. What usually makes it special is the fact that this is the only coming together that they have. There is a vocal overlap right towards the end of the show that juxtaposes her early enthusiasm for the relationship because she's back at the start, meeting him for the first time while we hear him breaking up with her, essentially. But in this production, they interact and perceive each other and touch each other and even sing with each other constantly, which a makes the next 10 minutes, which is objectively probably the weakest song in a very strong score, far less impactful, but also confuses the audience to no end. The Schmule song is the biggest example of this because she is there with him the entire time. They have him, like, wrapping presents and Then she comes back from presumably a stressful day. She's not in the mood. He's trying to cheer her up and encourage her about her career. That's always what the Shmuel song has been. It's a story that he tells as a writer, the moral of which is for Kathy not to put too much pressure on herself and to believe in herself and to take her time. He very heavy handedly gives her a watch as he sings the lyric, take your time. Traditionally, he's the only person we see on stage when he is singing this, even though we know that he is singing it to Kathy. In this version, we see her there alongside him, sat on the bed. She even finishes the sentence for him at one point and says, shmuel. It then ends with the two of them, like cuddling, falling onto the bed together. And she jumps straight up, keeps on the outfit that she's wearing, walks to the front of the stage, and then sings some more. In O.J. ohio. The problem is it feels like this could be so sequential because he's just given her this professional buoyancy and said, believe in yourself. And she then sings a song about doing theater in Ohio for the summer, and it not being ideal, but the enduring message of which is that her love for him gives her strength and confidence during this time. It's a very optimistic song about a reasonably frustrating professional situation. And it makes it seem utterly like she goes from that one moment to the next, even though that's not what's happening here at all. There are several more examples of this, but that feels like the most egregious. It's also bizarrely inconsistent. Sometimes we just see a sort of a flash of her as he is referring to her. This happens a little bit towards the opening, but as we get further through it, they're able to perceive and interact with each other more and more. And the show breaks its own rules countless times over, which is one of my biggest theatrical gripes with anything. Because when it comes to something abstract and conceptual like this, clarity and consistency are key. Now, I mentioned that the show was actively trying to explain itself to the audience, and they now use this projected graphic and it says, like his story and her story and the start and the end, which only really explains the beginning to us. During previews, they apparently had this voiceover where they were like the first year and then the last year, which makes no sense because it's only explaining where one of them is. There is really no voiceover that can consistently explain what's happening in the last five years. But if you let the material speak for itself, it's pretty obvious. But if you go to the trouble of having to explain it because your staging has made it so confusing, then the only thing you can say via voiceover is he's at the start and she's at the end, and he's. You just. You end up having to tell them the whole thing, which they should be able to infer if you don't make it actively hard for them to do so. This direction gets in the material's way, and the material has always been good enough to stand by itself. You could have two people just sing through the show at microphones and the audience would get what's going on. But here it makes it harder. To that end, they also distribute this little I'm going to show you this little piece of paper. For those of you listening on podcast platforms, this is a song list that confusingly tries to show the how the show works in terms of the journey from year one to year five and the order in which you hear the songs. Somebody who was seeing the same performance as me, who I met via a mutual friend that night, pointed out that they don't label the X or Y axis, which is an excellent point that, as a former maths teacher, I have a lot of time for, because this is why you have to label your axes. Because this document makes as much sense as the show, which is not much. And it's worth saying there have always been sections of the show where she breaks during her song and we hear dialogue from him and she's in like year four and he's in like year two of their relationship. And it seemed like they were going to do a good job of representing this, because during her second song, See I'm Smiling, there is this inexplicable cloud backdrop that's been brought down behind her. We'll talk about the creative choices in a moment, but we see him through that sort of a gauze screen, so he's not really there. There is some separation between the two of them, but then we get to Shmuel and there's no separation between the two of them. It's almost like Whitney White doesn't really understand what's happening in this show. I don't believe that's the case because she's a demonstrably very talented theater maker. But what are these choices? What is this inconsistency? And finally, before we do move on to talk about the creative choices, there is another moment where they share the space together that I think is diabolically unhelpful because it's another song that he sings to her. This song is towards the end of their relationship from his perspective. And he sings a song called if I Didn't Believe in youn. It's a really, really great song. It's a gift for an actor. We'll talk about Nick's performance later on, but it's the two of them having a fight. And it's implied in the lyrics that she is interrupting him, that the situation is contentious, and he is trying, to his credit, to reassure her that he does believe in. Ultimately, he says entirely the wrong thing. And through the song he's getting more and more heightened emotionally. He's singing lyrics, just hang on and you'll see but don't make me wait till you do to be happy with you Will you listen to me? And so implying that either she's not listening or that she's actively trying to interrupt him, which is kind of where the song comes from the beginning when he's saying, kathy, stop. Can you please just stop? Just listen to this. And what they choose to do here is they have Adrian on stage immediately after Kathy has had this huge professional setback and she's looking miserable and we really feel for her in that moment. He comes on, successful author, telling her about this party that he's about to go to. Again, these two moments should not be sequential. But she's there looking sad and saying nothing this entire time. So he's just screaming at her, getting more and more angry, and she looks miserable. She's not ignoring him and she's not interrupting him. She's just taking it. So she looks like this entirely emotionally abused woman and he looks awful. Like, I know it's the prevailing opinion that Jamie is by far the more toxic of the two. I think they both have their problems, but we'll get to that. This feels almost like a very one sided production that puts across the case that Kathy is a beautiful angel who has done nothing wrong in her entire life. And Jamie is an evil, awful man with a significant anger management problem because she's just standing there and he's getting himself more and more worked up, screaming at her. It really undermines him as a character to represent it that way. The upshot of the whole thing is that, like I said, I've done this show, I've actually done a production of this show that had its oddities, that had an interval and had the next 10 minutes performed twice either side of the interval and had an ensemble of all things. And even though I know the material well, I was progressively getting more and more confused about where things were meant to be happening because of the way that it was staged. I know less about this show coming out of this production that I did going in. Let's carry on, then, and talk about the creative choices of Whitney White and the entire creative. So the set design is really bizarre. There is this one little platform area. There is a raised section in which you can see the band on stage, which I'm happy to. I'm happy to see the band. They really want to feature the musicians in this one. And composer Jason Robert Brown has created new orchestrations, which I will say absolutely slap. The new orchestrations sound great. The bowers music. The exit music at the end of the show. Stay for that. Because that sounds really cool. To the point that I can almost forgive the dramaturgical oddity of really spotlighting the musicians during a couple of moments, some of which are whimsical and some of which really just take us out of the whole thing. Because the guitarist moves towards the front of the band area and stands up and is lit during a guitar solo. Later, when the pianist appears on stage as the audition pianist during Kathy's many audition moments, that's a little bit more forgivable. I think my favorite orchestration moment while we're on the subject may have been the beginning of climbing uphill, when it's like. Because it felt like there were more strings in it than usual. I don't know if it's been a little bit expanded for, you know, its first ever Broadway production, but it made it sound like Pirates of the Caribbean, which I thought was fun. I will say I do kind of miss the impossibly difficult piano ending to moving too fast. Whereas I got a singular impression that bit, like when it's democratized among various instruments, it just doesn't feel quite as frenetic. Anyway, back to the set. There is this small representation of the New York skyline way upstage stage right, with these few little buildings, one of which moves forwards at one point, sort of suggesting that they'll take turns to. But that's the only one that ever comes forward. And it is, I guess, their apartment building. And they also use it as a step to get onto the platform at some points. I don't know, because the timelines are different, whether it's meant to move forward at the moment they move in together. But obviously that's only true for one of them and not for the other. Similarly, there's an entire Florist that moves on in the upstage left corner that appears and then goes back again and then appears for other moments. And I'm trying to wrap my head as I'm seeing this around, like, are we now back in time enough that the florist is back? Did they live next to a florist? And then the like. Is this about gentrification? Is this meant to say something? Was there a florist next to their building that went away? Or is that like, before they moved in together? Did she live next to a florist? At one point he buys flowers and we see her with those flowers. So that's a nice enough parallel, but there is not nearly enough of that. And also it doesn't work because they overlap so much that it's impossible to distinguish and clarify the two separate timelines. There's a whole array of lights on the back wall making up for what is a pretty empty looking playing space. The show still does not feel big enough for a Broadway stage, and these performances don't do enough to make up for that. Certainly the production doesn't. There are a couple of pieces of moving scenery. There are beds that get brought on when Nick Jonas is performing. Nobody needs to know which Spoiler alert is a song towards the end of their relationship. From his perspective, when we find out that he's just had affair, possibly not for the first time, and he's waking up with a woman who isn't Kathy in their bed, we don't see her represented, which is a little bit of inconsistency because we saw the audition pianist. But, you know, I don't need them to hire a super numerary on stage just to be the girl, just to be mistress in bed who then gets up and walks away. Because I think, you know, that's a pretty degrading job to have on Broadway. The strangest set choice, however, is this flat that gets brought down behind Adrian as Kathy whenever she is in Ohio, which happens twice. It happens during a summer in Ohio. And also see I'm Smiling, which gets to be a relatively emotionally devastating song. And it's this blue sky full of clouds and that's it. And to have that behind her going to the foot of the stage is an odd visual. It sort of seems like she's on the stage of the summer stock production and it's just a generic backdrop. And perhaps that's what they're going for somewhere between, like, she's in Ohio and it's nice weather there and like, she's in, like, A cute, summer, stocky theater, and they have, like, a generic sky set piece happening. Really. It just made me think of the simpsons, which I guess is set in Ohio. So maybe that's inexplicably the reference that they're going for. I don't know how I've got myself to this place dramaturgically, but that's the conversation we're now having. Are they actively pulling from the Simpsons, of all things, to inspire the aesthetic for this production? At one point, a plain black screen flies in behind Nick Jonas while he's singing if I didn't believe in you. I hated it when they did it at the Hudson for once upon a mattress, and I hate it here as well. The scenic design is by David zinn. The costumes are by Didi Ayite. I enjoyed the costumes. By and large, Adrian Warren wears a pair of shoes towards the end of the show after she's done climbing uphill, which contains the lyric, not at these shoes. Don't look at these shoes. I hate these effing shoes. Why did I pick these shoes? And then she puts on the wedges afterwards, and I'm like, you hated those shoes, really? Cody Spencer has done the sound design, which was pretty plagued with problems, although whether that's the sound design or the voices involved is anybody's guess. Me and Neil did the wig and hair design. Now, I was initially excited for this because Adrienne as Kathy has a wig change between still hurting and see, I'm smiling. And I was like, oh, is there going to be a whole progression? Is she going to wear a bunch of different wigs throughout this show? That would be so exciting. But she then keeps the same wig for a long time and then changes back to the still hurting wig. And so there's no sense of chronology or timeline at play here, really. That's really just one more squandered opportunity in terms of something that could have conveyed a sense of progression and chronology to the audience that didn't. Stacey derozier did the lighting design. They love blue and red. And again, I was trying to infer some sort of meaning. I was trying to pull something here in terms of like is one the start of their relationship with, like, reds and warm tones, and then, like, it cools to blue by the end. But there was no consistency to this either. And they so often used the two together in juxtaposition from opposing angles with these flashes of blue and red. And it just looked like a crime scene because of, like, police cars. And in many ways, it was Occasionally there are moments where the overhead lighting is so heavy and so orange that it actually looks like they're being beamed up to the Enterprise. But the most inexplicable addition to this creative team is Jeff and Rick Cooperman, the Cooperman Brothers, who you may know for their work in the Outsiders, last year's Tony Award winning Best New musical, which has some thrilling sections of movement and this whole amazing combat sequence in the rain in the show's second act. And so when they were announced for this, many of us were thinking, like, are Kathy and Jamie gonna be fighting in the rain? Like, what possibly could the Cooperman brothers be needed for in the last five years of all shows? And Kathy has a few sections of choreography. She does a little cutesy but wholly unnecessary dance combination during her audition performances. In fact, she does more and more choreo as the show moves forward, as she is moving backwards in time, suggesting that eventually she does away with it entirely and just stands there and sings the song, which is a great choice, but beyond that and a little bit of choreo that she does during a summer in Ohio. It's really just a waltz between the two of them during the instrumental part of the climax of the next 10 minutes. And I'm watching it thinking, like, this is lovely enough, but you don't need two separate people to choreograph a waltz. Now, before I tell you about the performances by Nick Jonas and Adrian Warren, let's talk about some of the changes to the text, to the book, to the lyrics for this production, because I think you may find that interesting. Now, the first lyric change that I noted happened during the song Shiksa Goddess. The former lyric was, if you once were in jail or you once were a man. Jamie is listing a whole bunch of things that he wouldn't care about as. As Kathy isn't Jewish because he's only been dating Jewish girls up to this point. He is Jewish, so he's not just wildly anti Semitic. Although the whole lyric has changed to, if you once were in jail, I would not be upset. Now, if you once were a man, used to rhyme with that powerful connection to the Gotti clan. And it's now, if your father sold Viagra on the Internet, which is a decent enough change, but I do think that anyone would be a douchebag for considering that to be a red flag. Like, who's having that conversation? Like, this just isn't gonna work. The next one came during a section of dialogue when Nick as Jamie pitching his book via a phone call. And he used to say, what's your address? And he now says, what's your email address? It's just a cute little updating. There's not a very strong sense of when the show is set. Time wise, it doesn't super matter. You could probably infer it from some of the uses of technology and references like that, as well as another one that's coming later when Kathy during Climbing uphill the lyric originally was, why am I working so hard? These are the people who cast Linda Blair in a musical, referring to her being cast in the like 90s Broadway revival of Grease. For the film version starring Anna Kendrick and Jeremy Jordan, this was changed to these are the people who cast Russell Crowe in a musical, appropriate because he was cast in a movie musical, just like that was as Javert in Les Mis. Now she sings. These are the people who cast Nene Leakes in a musical, which is a more recent reference. When Nene was cast in the Broadway revival of Rodgers and Hammerstein's Cinderella, that actually got a laugh out of me. That may have been the one time I smiled during this production. In other words, see, I'm smiling. I guess that lyric was okay. Interestingly enough, Jamie gets a pay rise in this production because in the song Moving Too Fast, which is a banger, he used to sing the Atlantic Monthly sprint in my first chapter, 2000 bucks with every rhyme in one word. And it's now 4,000 bucks because I guess that's now the going rate. Times have changed. I like that the lyrics have been adjusted for inflation. Although the fact that we can change that and not change their ages. I'm not talking about the performances yet, but do either of them ever seem 23 in this show? Not really. He at no point seems anything less than 30, I'll be honest. And also this is my first time experiencing the last five years being older than either of them ever get in the show. Because I guess, I mean, he's between 23 and 28, it's suggested. So I always assume that she's around the same age. But at this point I'm like, these 25 year olds should absolutely not be getting married. This just seems like a bad idea. Like that never really entered my mind before. And now that I'm 29, I'm thinking this. I mean, it's a hugely toxic relationship, but my goodness, they're also both too young in that same song. Just moments after the Atlantic Monthly lyric. The lyric used to be, I wrote a book and Sunny Mater read it and now it's Salman Rushdie read it. There's a weird one in Shmuel that I'm only like 60%. I was getting correct, but it used to be the hands moved left on the old clock's face. I'm sure that used to be the lyric. That's what I sang when I did the show. The lyric is now the hands reversed on the old clock's face, which puts it more plainly. I'm sort of concerned that that suggests that they're worried that contemporary audiences don't know which way the hands move on a clock. Then we get to a summer in Ohio, which previously contains the lyric, a gay midget named Carl playing Tevye and Porgy, which I never really questioned before, but obviously there's language in that that isn't really considered politically corre today's age. And I'm, you know, all on board with changing that. I hadn't really mentally unpacked the concept of him playing Tevye and Porgy. And, you know, Sammy Davis Jr. Was a black Jew, so there are possibilities. It's also summer stock in Ohio. Interestingly enough, pre New York, when the show had a regional world premiere, when Lauren Kennedy was playing the role of Kathy, I believe the lyric used to be a gay midget named Karl playing Stanley Kowalski, which I actually think is a funnier joke than Tevye and Porgy. In any case, Carl still may be a person of short stature, but it isn't necessarily confirmed because he is now referred to as a gay dentist named Carl, who evidently just also does summer stock. Later in the song, when Kathy previously went to a borders in Kentucky, she now goes to a target in Kentucky. And funnily enough, when she does the impression of Richard, who was with her, who gets uncharacteristically quiet, he now has a thick, thick accent. All things considered, I guess you don't have to buy it. That's kind of what we're going for. That's actually a pretty cute comedic choice, as is the moment when she climbs into the trunk that she's been pulling props out of, closes it on top of her and screams. There are decent choices everywhere. They're just surrounded by props. But I'm getting a little ahead of myself because here comes the strangest new lyric in the show. This is at the start of the song, a miracle would happen, which happens for Jamie after he has just been married to Kathy, and it's him singing about how now every other woman in the world is suddenly throwing themselves at him because he's a married man and it's unfair and impossible for him. It's probably his weakest song in the show in terms of the score, although it has a lovely little bit on the end. Now, the lyric used to be, everyone tells you that the minute you get married, every other woman in the world suddenly finds you att. Well, that's not true. It only affects the kind of women you always wanted to sleep with. And the lyric is, now somebody told me that the minute you get married. Not everyone, just somebody. Just one person. Every other woman in the world suddenly finds you attractive. Well, that's not true. And then he sings, it's not all women, just some women. Not all women. Like he says it twice. Hashtag notallwomen. I guess I don't know why it's replacing the lyric. It only affects the kind of women you always wanted to sleep with. I don't know if it's making him seem less sleazy because he still immediately afterwards sings a pair of breasts walks by and smile smiles at you. And you're like, that's not fair. Finally, there used to be a pretty dated reference when he would sing, every girl would look like Mr. Ed. He now sings, every girl would crumble into dust. But I have left you hanging long enough. I know you want to hear about these performances. How are Adrian Warren and Nick Jonas in these roles? Let's talk about it. So the first thing to talk about here is that Nick Jonas is obviously what we refer to as a stunt cast. He is there because. Because he is selling tickets, because he has a little bit of profile. If rumors are to be believed, this revival was originally conceived for a West End opening, directed by Old Vic artistic director Matthew Warchus, with a different Jonas brother, Joe Jonas, set to star in it. That's what I heard at least. And then they had to do a pivot because he was then having a very public divorce, which was playing out in the media. And it would be objectively impossible to do a high profile musical about the end of a relationship, while his relationship of, I believe a similar duration, was also a ending. And Nick is no stranger to the stage. He was on Broadway in How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying in a production originated by Daniel Radcliffe, who was just at the same theatre, the Hudson Theatre in Merrily We Roll Along. Darren Criss also appeared in that. Who is down the street from Nick right now in maybe Happy Ending at the Belasco. Nick was also in the 25th anniversary concert of Les Mis. He was a Gavroche as a child. He was in that Jersey Boys pro shot that may never see the light of day. And now I feel like I know why. Because honestly, as an adult and in this role in particular, doing contemporary musical theatre and having to really deliver of acting through song, he falls wildly short. It is an utterly disappointing, objectively abysmal performance from him. He sounds capable enough in terms of the range. He can hit the notes, he can't sustain the long notes. That's embarrassing. He also has relatively incapable vocal technique, and he brings a kind of a boy band pop quality to a lot of the score. And it's contemporary musical theater. It's not classical, so that doesn't sound like it would be the worst thing. But there are too many moments where it distracts from the acting intention and the emotion behind it. His Nobody Needs to Know, I think, is one of his stronger moments vocally. But him putting it is diabolical. It's utterly, utterly unforgivable. And we learn pretty quickly in the show that he has no real depth to his vocal when he's singing I'm Breaking My Mother's Heart. It's such a thin sound that he is producing. The tone is not satisfying whatsoever. He has to do vowel modifications in order to sing the last note of that song. Rather than singing like you, it becomes like you. But his bigger problem is the acting through song and the emotional delivery, or the lack thereof, because not only does he have this one static facial expression, but it's a very tense one. His entire physicality is very rigid and very intense the entire time. And he's singing about being delighted about finally finding a girl that he is attracted to, having never liked any of these Jewish girls that he had to date beforehand. And it sort of feels like it's sung with the intensity of a man who's about to kill her, which is unhelpfully coupled with the fact that if you miss the JCC of Spring Valley lyric at the beginning, and if you don't already know the show and know that he's meant to be a Jewish character, then he does just sound, like, really bigoted for a long time. When he's singing, like, all these Jewish names and saying, as long as you're not from Hebrew school, like, if you don't know what a JCC is, a Jewish community center, or if you don't hear the lyric because his diction is not great and he doesn't really mean any of the words that he's saying because he's just making noise noises, then I fear that you may have the Wrong impression of this man. Which is an unintentionally funny quality of this production, surpassed only when Kathy is holding a holy Bible during I can do better than that and tying his tie and handing it to her Jewish boyfriend while singing the lyric, we can do better. We can do better than that with the subtext being read the New Testament or pretend to for my parents. He does have to his credit some decent comic timing. I think even more so in the spoken sections. I think those moments of dialogue are actually some of his best. I think he can act when he's talking. He just stops being able to when he's singing the thing. I also think in moving too fast, they do too much to let him try and be cool and boy bandy and sexy. And in Shmuel as well. Like he sings and the clock said in the Shmuel song like it's sexy. And the Schmule song is many things, but it's not sexy, I'm so sorry to tell you. And he can, he can be attractive and, you know, he can be confident, but at the same time, he's also a really successful novelist. And that is the field that he's going like. He's not a rock star. He's a rock star in the world of young novelists, which is not a particularly sexy one. I apologize to all of the, all of the novelists out there, but they have him grabbing a stool and sitting on it and cracking a beer open on the stage. And it feels a little bit disingenuous, like I'm not there for a Jonas Brothers concert moment. Although I know a lot of people may, may be now when he does Shmuel, I feel like this alongside Shiksa Goddess is the height of the moments. He may feel more conspicuous for not being a Jewish actor, which, you know, Norbert Leo Butz wasn't. Jeremy Jordan was. Adam Cantor was in one of the more high profile Off Broadway revivals. I don't think Jonathan Bailey is Jewish, but there are of course, many, many Jewish actors who could be playing this role in New York. They don't all have the same profile as a Nick Jonas. They aren't all going to sell as many tickets. But Nick Jonas is really very removed from that cultural. From a pretty uber Christian background. So I think smartly, he doesn't do too much physicality with the Schmule song because I think that could come across as offensive, especially in New York, especially on this major stage. The bigger problem for me is that he just doesn't really have a sense of fun and whimsy in this very fun and silly song. Maybe Adrian has to be on stage with him because there's nothing he can really do there by himself. His brow is so furrowed the entire time. He looks so intense and focused. Focused. And the Shmuel song is charming nonsense. Nonsense that I don't think he can put across particularly well. He's not a brilliant theatrical storyteller, I'm sorry to say. His vowel shaping makes everything sound kind of like an. And I think there's a bigger problem to him not landing Shmuel, which is coupled with her being on stage during if I Didn't Believe in youn, he becomes completely and utterly unlikable. Because Shmuel is one of his most beautiful moments of selflessness. He creates this whole story. He sings this whole song to try and build her confidence and convey to her the right way that he has such faith in her career and her talent and her success. And when we don't get charmed by that, when it kind of just seems like he's trying to get her into bed because she's there, and that's what happens at the end of the song. It doesn't feel selfless or genuine. There is a fleeting moment, a fleeting moment where he takes his glasses off during if I didn't believe in you and says, this is the life I choose. And I almost felt something for just a passing second. But for so much of it, he doesn't seem to really be communicating anything. Not with his face, not with his words. He's adding too many little vocal licks. These sound like songs that he is simply singing and that he isn't really feeling. Now, let's move on and talk about Adrian Warren, who, you know, demonstrably has had far more experience as a stage performer and who is exceptionally talented and is capable of delivering all of this material and who I think may have been fatally misdirected in this role. Or. It does seem like there's this agenda at play here, and I'm not trying to be a Jamie in the last five years apologist, but there is no sense of compromise in the way that she is portrayed during this show. She is only ever ecstatically happy and clearly in love or desperately sad, either about the relationship or about him or about her own career. And there are moments of frustration and rage that show us a little more of her qualities and maybe a little more of her own jealousy and a little bit of toxicity. Toxicity there as well, which I think it's only fair to Illustrate so that the whole thing is two sided, that she just doesn't rise to and still hurting. The whole thing is played as really emotionally devastated. And there's, you know, the possibility to rise and to move with the grief of the ending of that relationship. In that song, when she's singing go and hide and run away, we should see anger there. But she's just devoted, devastated. It's only really sorrow and it feels like she isn't using the material to its full capabilities, which makes it confusing. Then when we get to see I'm smiling and she plays the first half of it so happy and then goes to sad. And there's a section which is, you know, it's really capable of allowing her to dig into frustration when she's saying, you know what makes me crazy, I'm sorry, can I say this? You know, what makes me nuts. And then she delivers this full rant at him, which you know, is pretty well deserved because he's leaving her on her birthday. He's not staying to even see her in the show. We come to find out why later from his perspective that he's holding all of this guilt and all of these things that he isn't telling her. And really the relationship has already ended for him emotionally. But even then I don't think she rises to the full extent of the anger that she could. And that I would like to see from Adrian Warren here. I would like to see a little bit more passion about the relationship rather than this kind of emotionally fragile girl who just really loves him and then is really sad when he says that he's leaving. I think it doesn't really correspond to the version of her that we hear about from his perspective when he keeps saying, no, I'm not having an affair, I'm not having an affair. And then he finally does. She also doesn't really play that moment of surprise where in the instrumental it's implied that he tells her that he's not staying to watch the show, she's happy, and then she goes immediately to sad rather than being taken aback by the news. Once we get to a summer in Ohio, I think this is one of her strongest numbers. I really like a lot of the choices in the way that it's staged. Having the feather boa as the snake didn't really work for me. It didn't really get a laugh. And it's not worth Gwen verdoning yourself with feathers flying all around for the sake of a bit that doesn't really go anywhere. I do wonder when they do come together for the next 10 minutes. And she's wearing this inexplicable mullet dress that I think, you know, only exists so that she can kneel comfortably on the bed without having to hike up the dress or do anything. But is a bizarre choice. It starts to feel a little bit like a game of tennis, where her game might be suffering because of the opponent that. That she's playing with, because everything that she's delivering in that number is kind of one dimensional. She's only ever giving us happy or sad throughout the show. Like I've said, she's a very uncomplicated Kathy, and that's not something that I want from an actress as skilled as Adrienne Warren. I do like what she does with the audition moments, particularly because, and this is one of the few great choices in the show, we see her at first having a really positive response. We see her really celebrating in the audition room after singing just a very earnest and lovely version of. Of her audition song. As the thing progresses, sadly, as we're moving backwards in time, we see that getting less and less successful because that has been the audition where finally she got a yes. And I guess it's where she booked Ohio. It's a lot of enthusiasm for Ohio, but I'm happy for her. She gets to be Anita at the matinee. It's in those subsequent auditions that we see her doing more and more choreography, not really singing the thing as well, not really presenting herself in the best way that she could, which I guess is the message that they're sending. But there's lot of great comic and emotional choices made here. There's a bit with the pianist where she's kind of fixing her pitch with his support while she's sustaining this long note. She does a brilliant angry look to the pianist at one point after he started playing the accompaniment in the wrong key. I really did feel something when she got rejected at the end of one of these audition moments that really was effective. But ultimately, even though she sings the hell out of this score, particularly at the end of We Can Do Better Than that, and she really brings a fantastic, thrilling vocal to it. Her Kathy is even in those moments of confidence, all attitude and need, but no real heart. Overall, the problem with this show is that as a piece of theatrical storytelling, it's really bad. But simply as a showcase of the score, it's also disappointing, and I could almost excuse a production this deeply confusing if the two of them sounded great and were giving great performances. But I don't think either of them are. Neither of them are giving the best version of the last five years that we've seen on stage age ever. For a show that's been this beloved for this long, it really does deserve better. And there are brief moments that suggest what this production could have been. There's a juxtaposition of the two of them where he's sad and she's happy and there's an exchange of flowers. But if we haven't been effectively playing juxtaposition the whole time, if we've been breaking all of our own rules left, right and center, then we can't have that at the last minute as a Hail Mary of what could have been. This is a show that did not work work. But of course, as always, that is just my opinion and I would love to hear yours. Let us all know what you thought of this production of the last five years on Broadway in the comments section down below. And if you enjoyed this review and would like to see or hear more of what I have to say about theatre around the world, make sure that you are subscribed to my theatre themed YouTube channel or following me on podcast platforms for many more Broadway and West End reviews coming very soon. I hope that everyone is staying safe and that you have a Stagey Day. For 10 more seconds. I'm Mickey Jo Theatre. Oh my God. Hey, thanks for watching. Have a Stagey day. Subscribe.