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The Last Five Years starring Rachel Zegler and Ben Platt (London Palladium, West End) - ★★★ REVIEW
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ACAST powers the World's best Podcasts. Here's a show that we recommend. Hey, it's Christy and I'm Kelly. You might remember us as the OG Partners in Crime from Dance Moms. Well, this is Back to the Bar, the podcast where we drag out every insane, chaotic and iconic moment from the show. We're spilling the tea, calling out all the BS and sharing stuff you definitely didn't see on tv. New episodes drop every week and yes, we're laughing through the drama for once. Follow, grab a drink and join us as we go back to the bar. ACAST helps creators launch, grow and monetize their podcasts everywhere. Acast.com I realized that this is my third time talking about a different production of the last five years in the last one year. And I knew. I knew heading into the concert this evening at the London Palladium that it was EAS going to exceed my enjoyment of the Broadway production last year at the Hudson Theatre in New York. However, what I wasn't necessarily anticipating was that I would still leave the theatre feeling tangibly disappointed. And that is simply because, the talent of these two performers notwithstanding, I know for a fact, as someone very familiar with this material, that we can and should do better than that. Let me tell you a little bit more about why. But first, a quick introduction to me, particularly for those of you meeting me for the very first time. Oh my God. Hey, welcome to my theatre themed YouTube channel. Or hello to you if you are listening to this on podcast platforms. My name is Mickey Jo and I'm obsessed with all things theatre. I'm a full time theatre critic and content creator here on social media and this evening I booked myself a ticket to go and see the Last Five Years in Concert at the London Palladium starring Rachel Zegler and Ben Platt. This production is playing here for a week at the London Palladium before heading on to Radio City Music hall and the Hollywood bowl in the us and it's a semi staged version of the seminal contemporary musical theatre song cycle, directed and piano conducted by its composer and rumoured autobiographical subject Jason Robert Brown. Also the only musical theatre composer I've ever fist bumped in a bar. I mean, thus far, I guess. This concert is produced by Lambert Jackson and there is plenty to say about the very idea of doing the last five years in concert and doing it in a large space. And that is one of many things that I'm going to be talking today. I'm going to be sharing with you my thoughts about this production, but many of you will probably have seen it for yourselves or will go on to see it when it heads stateside. So do please share all of your thoughts and feelings in the comments section down below. If you have also had the chance to see this version of the show, and if you would like to hear more of my thoughts about all things Theatre and more of my reviews, make sure that you're subscribed here on YouTube or following me on your preferred podcast platform. This forthcoming week is a very exciting one for London openings. There will be plenty of big reviews shared here, and if you want to make sure you don't miss any anything that I share across the Internet, you can sign up for my free weekly substack newsletter at the link in the description. And while you're busying yourselves with all of that, I am going to begin telling you what I thought of the Last five Years in concert. Now, I saw one of the final performances of this week at the London Palladium and I've heard already very mixed things, so some people will resonate with the feelings I've already shared in the title and the thumbnail of this. I may have surprised some of the rest of you, and I think a fairly clear point of division here might be your prior experience with the Last five years. I don't mean to say that in a gatekeeper way, but whether or not you've actually seen it on stage before versus just experiencing it as material or as the movie, because I think this was actually A decent enough way to experience the show for the first time. I mean, you had two really extraordinary vocalists and musical theatre stars. The great thing about this casting at this time, and I said this recently with my thoughts on the Legally Blonde UK tour, is that these two grew up with this material and loving this material. And it's kind of taken that many years to have performers who would have been singing the last five years in their bedrooms with their friends and falling in love with this cast recording. And so when they perform it, they exude a love of it and a familiarity of it, and they're just excited to get to do it on stage. And we all get to share in that. It feels less like a serious concert production and more like a theatre kid conference at the London Palladium. And because of the nature of this material and the way that it moves in two different directions. For those of you who may be persevering through this review despite not knowing the last five years, let me quickly put you out of your misery. It charts a five year relationship in either direction. So Kathy begins at the moment of breakup and then moves backwards in time. Her final moment in the show is one of their earliest meetings and she is optimistic about their future together, while Jamie's story, her husb, moves forward. So we begin with the moment when he meets her and we end with him exiting the relationship. So we see each of their perspective on the relationship, but moving in different directions. And if you've only ever listened to cast recordings, that's a very satisfying thing to see an experience on stage for the very first time. It's also a hell of a novelty to have the brilliant musical theatre composer Jason Robert Brown there playing his own fiendishly difficult piano parts. And yet, when it comes to the perfect way to experience the last five years, this ain't really it. Because the show, which premiered off Broadway in the early 2000s at the Manettlene Theatre in New York, has always been best enjoyed in a smaller, more intimate environment. That is the natural scale of the material. I mean, hell, last summer we said that the Hudson Theatre was too big for this story, potentially, that the stage was too big, that the auditorium was too big. To then put this at the London Palladium, which is even larger, feels like, you know, we're only moving further in that foolish direction. I cannot even imagine how this going to play in Radio City Music hall or the Hollywood Bowl. And this isn't the first time I've leveled that particular criticism at Lambert Jackson Productions, because I said the same thing. About once when they did that at the London Palladium. And when you have casting that you know is going to sell tickets in a popular show, I get it. I would also like making money in that position. It's why they're charging £10 for a program that doesn't have that many pages on that subject. I do think that this is an audience that would have bought merchandise had any been manufactured. And I have been waiting. I have been waiting for. Of the last five years brave enough to make a Wayne the Snake plush. The upshot of all of this is that it's very difficult to conjure a sense of romance in a production which separates its protagonists for almost the entirety of the duration. They have to sustain this thing individually, and they only have one brief moment of coming together. And to try and make the story emotive and romantic in spite of that is challenging enough when they're not on a huge, empty stage trying to communicate meaningful, naturalistic, emotional authenticity to the back row of the balcony. And allow me, if I may, to say something perhaps even more controversial, which is that I don't think the last five years actually makes a particularly good concert. And we say concert. The way these things have begun to spiral in London is that they're almost never semi staged. It's essentially a fully staged concert. They're not holding scripts, they're not performing at music stands. There's an entire playing space. It's just not particularly attired. They wear different costumes. They're not using hand handheld microphones. But they are doing staging. They have set pieces, they get changed, they appear in different places. They are doing what passes as choreography. When it's the last five years, Rachel briefly does a kick line with a monkey, which may sound confusing out of context. Fear not, I'll circle back. But the thing is, is obviously we're not going to get a full run of this show with these two. And that's a big part of why you do it in concert. But the best part of any of these concert productions is to really uplift and celebrate the score. And I love this score, and I know a lot of us really, really love this score. But there is something inherently dissatisfying about doing this particular show in a concert setting. Because it's not of the scale that you expect it to be. Because it is actually an intimate story, and because it demands acting through song, its requirements in terms of emotional storytelling are enormous. And the whole thing can be a little bit of a downer, which, when you arrive with the giddy enthusiasm of oh, my gosh. Rachel Zegler. Oh, my gosh, Ben Platt. Oh, my gosh. We all love this song. We all love this show. It's the last five years. It feels like theater kids in our teenage bedroom singing along to that cast recording kind of deflates the energy that you brought into the thing. And it's fine for Rachel Zegler because she gets to have fun doing Summer in Ohio, and I can do better than that. And, you know, we cheer along to those. And it's like she's giving us a little bit of her own personality in there as well. And she's doing the audition moment and Jason's playing the audition pianist, and it's fun. Ben's material is not fun, particularly because it gets bleaker for him as the show goes on. But even at the beginning, there's no Ben Platt in there, really. Like, he's a Jewish actor playing the role of Jamie, so there's some cultural connection. But he's also trying to pass for straight, essentially. And I don't want to make a whole big deal about whether or not that is convincing. I will say that these two feel like cute friends. They never really feel like a convincing couple. I couldn't imagine them in each other's scenes. And then when they have the moment of coming together, the romantic chemistry wasn't really there, which, as much as anything else, may be an indication of the fact that the whole thing has been sort of lightly directed in terms of the emotional storytelling. And it's really more about the music being performed. It's been directed, after all, by Jason Robert Brown, who has directed the show before. He directed an Off Broadway revival about a decade ago. And like I said, it's not that I'm suggesting it's a problem that Ben doesn't pass for straight. I also did a production of this show at university, and, you know, people in gay houses certainly shouldn't throw stones. I don't think that my Jamie was convincingly heterosexual. It's more that it prohibits us from being able to connect to Ben Platt on stage. And I think we may even have had more fun if they sang a handful of the songs from the last five years, but a bunch of other musical theater songs as well. If this had just been a concert with Rachel Zegler and Ben Platt, would we have all had a better time and a longer evening at the theater? This was only 90 minutes, and five of those are spent reading that horrible section of his book, which every single time evokes nothing short of a trauma response in me I even have an alternative suggestion if we are determined to do the last five years in concert, which is to feature more than just two perform and have like five different pairs. You could even use real life musical theater couples. There are enough of them and though I know Jason Robert Brown doesn't want this, you could also add in a little bit of a queer element as well. I thought it would have been hilarious given that initially they only announced these two names. In the last five years, if we all turned up and Ben started singing Still Hurting and it materialized they were actually doing it the other way around, that would have been fun. What we got was the serious version that wasn't emotionally connecting enough. If you're gonna really go for it, I need to feel things and I didn't feel anything. And that in and of itself may sound controversial. Let me tell you a little bit more about my thoughts on the this
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episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever find yourself playing the budgeting game? Well, with the name your price tool from Progressive you can find options that fit your budget and potentially lower your bills. Try it@progressive.com Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates Price and coverage match Limited by state law not available in all states.
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The Bleacher Report app is your destination for sports right now. The NBA is heating up, March Madness is here and MLB is almost back. Every day there's a new headline, a new highlight, a new moment you've got to see for yourself. That's why I stay locked in with the Bleacher Report app. For me, it's about staying connected to my sports. I can follow the teams I care about, get real time scores, breaking news and highlights all in one place.
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Performances. Now here is what I need to make abundantly clear. I love Rachel. I love Ben. I think they are both incredible talents who I have enjoyed previously on multiple stages. Each of them receives a disproportionate and undeserved amount of Internet criticism that I can't really fathom because they're largely just well meaning, talented young people who really like musical theater. And for any anyone who just started typing well actually in the comments, spare me the indignity of having to delete whatever it is that you come up with. What I will say was very nice was seeing a production of the last five years where Jamie can hold his own vocally alongside Kathy. That is almost never what we get in any version of this show. I have seen a handful of versions of this, where you have really outstanding Kathy's who beat out a lot of tough competition alongside men who were available or, you know, men who are going to sell tickets because they're about to become Disney legends. But these two were perfectly suited to these roles, vocally sounded sensational, if not necessarily perfectly suited to each other. I feel like Rachel would be in a great production of the last five years opposite a different Jamie. Likewise for Ben. I think he'd be a great Jamie with a different Kathy. I don't know that they necessarily suited each other in that way. And that's because his Jamie felt a little less obnoxious, a little more thoughtful even from the beginning, a little less sort of outgoingly charismatic in some of the earlier numbers. In Shiksa Goddess. In Moving Too Fast, it felt as though the success that he was beginning to find as a writer was slightly more a surprise to him. And he was this really conscientious and thoughtful character moving through the show who had this real guilt when he had to come to terms with his own shortcomings and the mistakes that he'd made in the relationship. Unsurprisingly, the best material for Ben Platt in this show is all the stuff that comes towards the end. We know this already. We know from Dear Evan Hansen and Parade that he is going to do really fantastic acting through song work with a mournful, sorrowful ballad. So when we get to if I didn't believe in you when we get to Nobody needs to know. It's beautiful. He also does a great job of the Schmules song. I just wanted even more commitment to it. He does this fun, recurring little bit of clock choreography. And this is where I think we needed really clear and strong direction to just bring clarity to what was happening. Each of these numbers was sort of happening in a different location. A couple of them moved around, but it felt as though they were partially left to their own devices. Because we had the kind of musical theater cabaret thing where we had a lot of repetitive hand gestures and a lot of. Of sort of somewhere between a not hand gesture and a full gesture and a decent amount of sort of nervous energy without conviction. It was as though there wasn't really a sense of, are we doing a concert version of this or are we really just doing the thing? And on that subject, I did have an issue with vocal delivery and affectation that I thought was obstructing a little bit of the meaning in the lyric. I will say I have seen Ben Platt perform in concert before performing his own album Which I loved. It was great. I love that album. Album. I have seen him performing in Parade, and he was brilliant. And he sings differently in those contexts. There is a Ben Platt concert vocal that you get, which has a sort of a creeping, sort of a Streisand, sort of a Cher kind of an affectation. I think he's a brilliant vocalist, and I think it's important to be able to develop a different pop sound. When you take a musical theater voice into a pop album, that's not going to be successful. When you take a pop voice into the musical theater world, there are other challenges. And, you know, when he sang in Parade, it was a limited or entirely removed quantity of that affectation. This evening, that affectation was in full force. And, you know, it feels like someone who sang this song in their bedroom and who listened to this music an awful lot and knows these songs and has performed them before and hasn't necessarily been afforded the rehearsal time or the meaningful kind of a creative process to go back to the lyrics, to go back to the material and really scrutinize it and approach it so that you can convincingly sing it as if thinking the thought for the first time. And that's what separates us from being able to really articulate, you know, maybe I can't follow through versus maybe I can follow through, where it could be anything. He could be singing in Swedish and I would be no clearer on what he's actually trying to tell me. Even though I could understand the lyrics that he was saying, I just wasn't getting any of the emotional meaning and I found myself disconnecting from it and even losing focus in the performance as a result. I will say that wasn't exclusively in Ben's moments either. It was kind of a characteristic of a couple of moments of the evening. It's something which I think performers who grew up with contemporary musical theatre increasingly have to be aware of. I say the same thing about Wicked often and songs like the wizard and I. When you'll hear a performer saying, like, feeling things I have never felt, and they're just singing that iconic part and they're, like, choosing between different vocal choices that have been made by previous Green women and not actually thinking about, you know, things that they've never felt. Meanwhile, let's talk about Rachel's performance. As Kathy and I described Ben's Jamie as being thoughtful and conscientious and a little less outgoingly confident in those opening moments. And that doesn't necessarily pair well with how forcefully and assertively she played Kathy no bad thing, but it just doesn't make them particularly well matched to each other. You can't imagine these two getting together and lasting for more than a couple months. And had there been a different director, I imagine there may have been a conversation around her performance of Still Hurting, which is the introductory number of the show. It's our first window into the emotional storytelling, and it was played with force and with anger and frustration. And there's an element in there, you know, it's a song which lyrically moves through different moods, and you can hear that in the music as well. It starts with these slower, separated passages as she's coming to terms still with the realization of what's happened to her. Jamie is over and Jamie is gone. Jamie's decided it's time to move on, and she's just slowly realizing and sort of affirming her emotional state before eventually getting into, like, go and ride the sun away, that's when the anger comes into it. But when you play the whole thing with bitter frustration, you have nowhere to go. When you then take one chronological step back and try and perform see, I'm Smiling, because that's when we really see her at the height of the relationship's frustration. And there is no one right way to sing a song like Still Hurting. But so much that's there in the composition, in the lyric, in the orchestration, is informing the kind of bleak, devastated, empty sorrow that ought to be present. Admittedly, you know, there is some confusion when you dress her in a black boiler suit for that number. If I was playing Kathy and you gave me that costume for Still Hurting rather than like a sad long sleeve jumper, I would think that you wanted me to belt the whole thing angrily, too. And evidently, Rachel proved the critics wrong, who suggested that she was too young to play Eva Peron convincingly in Evita. She definitely comes into her own more so with Kathy's younger material. Her performance of A Summer in Ohio, specifically, highlight of the entire evening, absolutely inspired choices because they were playful and they were fun. The vocals were gorgeous. I continue to thoroughly enjoy the healthy mix that she brings to a lot of these roles. I think it's a really great way to inspire the next generation to sing healthily and to not have to scream, belt the entire thing. No shade to performers who have done it previously. I just love that she's able to navigate scores like this, this with such a healthy placement. But her Summer in Ohio, much of which she sings while lying on a picnic blanket on the floor of the London Palladium stage, by the way, is so giddily wonderful. She has a little monkey that she puppeteers when she's talking about Richard who wants her but isn't going to get her. You know him, you know him well before sort of puppet molesting herself and launching into the aforementioned kick line. There are a couple of interesting new rift choices and opt ups for those of you who are interested in that sort of of thing. There are also a handful of fun moments where you can really hear the lasting impact and influence of the phrasing of Norbert, Leah Butts and Sherry Renee Scott on the original cast recording, like when Ben sings Don't we get to Be Happy Kathy? Also, somehow I was wildly unprepared for how brilliant it would be to have Rachel Zegler, who of course came to prominence playing the role of Maria in the recent film remake of west side Story, singing I play Anita at the matinee with a more distinct pause than I have ever heard before after playing Anita before delivering at the matinee. As can be expected, her version of I Can Do Better Than that. Also fantastic. Every single note of this score beautifully sung by these two. And if it didn't require so much emotional weight and buy in and storytelling, I think this is a harder show to get right than people give it credit for. I'm noticing that over my various reviews of the last five years, if it hadn't been for all of that, if it had been an evening of like these two and a couple others sing, Jason Robert Brown, it would have been perfect. Sensational. I'd have had a thoroughly remarkable time. But for that to happen on this occasion, I had to buy who she was, which I did. I had to buy who he was, which I did. But I had to also buy that the two of them were singing about a relationship with each other over half a decade, which I didn't at any point.
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This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever think about switching insurance companies to see if you could save some cash? Progressive makes it easy to see if you could save when you bundle your home and auto policies. Try it@progressive.com Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states.
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The Bleacher Report app is your destination for sports right now. The NBA is heating up, March Madness is here, and MLB is almost back. Every day there's a new headline, a new highlight, a new moment. You've got got to see for yourself. That's why I stay locked in with the Bleacher Report app for me, it's about staying connected to my sports. I can follow the teams I care about, get real time scores, breaking news and highlights all in one place. Download the Bleacher Report app today so you never miss a moment.
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Let's conclude by talking about some of the creative choices. I want to talk about the band on stage and this slightly expanded orchestration which I gather is perhaps the same one that we heard on Broadway at the Hudson Theatre last year with a couple of changes. The section in Climbing Uphill no longer sounded quite so much like Pirates of the Caribbean, though I think that is something of an inherent byproduct when you add a five piece string section to the existing score. I counted nine musicians on stage, but I have further details here and they all played the hell out of this score under the leadership of Jason Robert Brown. So let me tell you their names. Yes, eight additional musicians here. That's Jamie Eblen on drums, percussion, Tommy Emerton on guitar, Loz Garrett on bass. Elaine Ambridge was violin one, Rebecca Bill, violin two Freya Hicks, viola, violin three Rachel Lander, cello one and Dompature, cello two. Apologies if I've mispronounced any of those names, but they were fabulous musicians and I like the new orchestrations. They were my favorite thing about the Broadway production and in a truly out of context setting, I would have no problem with them with stronger performances with less confusing storytelling. That being the problem of last year's Broadway version, I did start to wonder if the sound of the whole thing was beginning to exceed again the emotional scale of the story and the natural size of it. Just like we fight against the scaling down of the orchestrations of a lot of classic lush shows. I wonder if there aren't contemporary scores and intimate shows that seem to inherently defy being enlarged in the same way. You know, Les Mis wouldn't be nearly as satisfying played only with a four piece band. And we should reject the idea that it might be the last five years may sound best with a smaller group of musicians in a smaller theater. I can only say that so many times. You may be curious what this production actually looked like. And they had these sort of pieces of staging across two levels with a couple of staircases coming down and band members scattered across four different different sections of this Jason and a guitarist on one side, the drums up behind some screens at the top, another guitarist up there, and then the string quintet down on the opposite corner. There were some doors through which a couple of set pieces emerged. On the lower level a bed rolls out for nobody needs to know a couple of car chairs roll out with Rachel sat on one of them for I can do better than that. But the vibe of the staging essentially is pick a spot and deliver the song. There are occasional costume changes, though they occasionally revert to costumes that they have worn previously. And you do think for a concert of this scale, if we're trying to justify the size and the ticket price, you could probably at least give them different generic clothes to wear for each individual number, so long as they have the opportunity to get changed. There were a handful of windows hanging behind all of this, which changed colour somewhat, and a little bit of lighting, mostly to the tune of make sure that they're lit while they're singing these songs. None of the visuals of the production were anything that I would describe as particularly impactful or interesting. I do want to talk about changes to the material because this is a show which has had little lyric changes here and there. I spoke about many of them last year, and some of those most recent changes have been retained for this production, others have been discarded and we've reverted back to earlier lyrics. We have a couple of what I perceive to be entirely new lyrics. At the end of Shiksa Goddess, the line if you once were in jail, all you once were a man and father connected to the Gotti clan now culminates in a line about your father having nostalgia for the Civil War, and the once were a man bit is gone. Unsurprisingly, I don't really mind about any of the lyric changes, although I do wonder why we retained the ones in A Miracle Could Happen, which opens with this dizzying change. Originally, it's everybody tells you that the minute you get married, every other woman in the world suddenly finds you attractive. Well, that's not true. It only affects the kind of women you always wanted to sleep with with, but they wouldn't give you the time of day before. And the new version is somebody told me that the minute you get married, every other woman in the world suddenly finds you attractive, but that's not true. It only affects some women, not all women, but some women. And I don't know why we would even bother trying to remove the objectification of women from that song when a few lines later, he's going to continue to, as he always has, sing, A pair of brave breasts walks by and smiles at you. And you think that's not fair, which, to his credit, Ben Platt got a laugh for. And while we're on the subject of to his credit, let's talk about that book section that he reads, which is my personal Vietnam. And unless I've begun to actually block out sections of it like a memory I'm trying to slowly burn piece by piece. I think there were actually new lines in there. There were a couple of sentences. I don't recall being part of this moment of text in otherwise mostly sung through show. And I suspect I'm the only person in the auditorium who cared. But if. If that is true and we are updating the book section, I do wonder why we couldn't just cut the thing. I'm not saying that just because it's a long chunk of dialogue in an otherwise fast paced, exciting contemporary musical theatre show, I actually have dramaturgical reasons why I think it doesn't make sense for him to be so perceptive about their relationship in an allegory that he writes about it in his very successful book, but not enough to implement that in terms of their actual communication. This is part of a longer conversation about who's really the villain in the last five years. But none of you are ready to have that yet, so we're gonna move on. What remains clear is that the Last five years is a show that works regardless of whether we're singing about Linda Blair or Russell Crowe or Nene Leakes. For what it's worth, we went back to Linda Blair this evening. Missed opportunity to sing about Megan Thee stallion, I thought. Although the scansion is challenging for a London special that rhymes with the original lyric, I do think Rachel could have sung. These are the people who put Paddington Bear in a musical. That's my personal favorite option. But like I said, regardless of these little choices, the Last five Years is a show whose material works if you just get out of its way. We don't need heavy handed storytelling techniques to make sure that the audience are figuring it out at every step. The light sort of ticking metronome clock motif that was running through the sound design of this production was intriguing enough. What we would have benefited from, as I've mentioned before, was a little stronger direction in terms of the emotional storytelling and the connectivity between these performers. Ironically, they don't actually connect that much on stage, but we have to be able to believe that they're singing about the same relationship. And you know, perhaps ultimately, if you're seeing them from the front few rows and having what is essentially an intimate theatrical experience as the show was originally designed for, then you may have been better engaged with the nuance of their characterization. If you're seeing it from the back row, then best of luck. To you. For now. Sounded great but didn't mean much and definitely couldn't make me cry is all I have to say about the last five years in concert. By the time you're seeing this, the run at the London Palladium will have ended, but they will be heading to Radio City Music hall and the Hollywood Bowl. If you see the show there, I'm very curious to hear what you think as well as if you saw it in London. Let me know all of your thoughts and feelings in the comments section down below. As always, thank you for listening to this review. I hope you enjoyed There are are so many coming out over the next couple of weeks, so make sure you're staying tuned, make sure you're subscribed, and until then I hope that everyone is staying safe and that you have a Stagey day for 10 more seconds, I'm Mickey Jo Theater oh my God. Hey, thanks for watching. Have a stagey day. Subscribe
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this episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever think about switching insurance companies to see if you could save some cash? Progressive makes it easy to see if you could save when you bundle your home and auto policies. Try it@progressive.com Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states.
- [32:39]
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The Bleacher Report app is your destination for sports right now. The NBA is heating up, March Madness is here and MLB is almost back. Every day there's a new headline, a new highlight, a new moment you've got to see for yourself. That's why I stay locked in with the Bleacher Report app. For me, it's about staying connected to my sports. I can follow the teams I care about, get real time scores, breaking news and highlights all in one place. Download the Bleacher Report app today so you never miss a moment.