Arts

Nick Jonas and Adrienne Warren sing better than their characters connect in the new Broadway musical “The Last Five Years.”

Reverse chronology can, when successfully executed, be an emotionally piercing way to tell a story: Begin at the end, and see where it all went wrong and right, following the story back to its beginning. It’s the core of Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along, its narrative trickery made masterful sense of by the 2022/3 Tony-winning production starring Daniel Radcliffe, Jonathan Groff, and Lindsay Mendez.

In The Last Five Years (Hudson Theatre, booking to June 22), starring Tony winner Adrienne Warren and pop star Nick Jonas, we observe the story of the five-year relationship between Jamie Wellerstein, a writer, and his partner-then-wife Cathy Hiatt, an actor. Jamie sings his songs from the beginning of their relationship to its extremely bitter end, while Cathy begins at that bitter end and traces her story back to their happier getting together.

It’s almost entirely sung (with Warren as stunning as she was playing Tina Turner on Broadway), with the actors occasionally orbiting and glancing at one another on stage. They only truly interact in a scene of their wedding night where the two timelines intersect. Then off they go, spinning meaningfully away from each other. The show is finally having its Broadway debut over 20 years since it premiered in 2001, its flame kept alive by a much-loved cast album featuring Norbert Leo Butz and Sherie Rene Scott and a 2014 movie starring Anna Kendrick and Jeremy Jordan.

The story behind the show is as tangled as Jamie and Cathy’s ill-fated relationship. Its basis was its creator Jason Robert Brown’s marriage and separation from wife Theresa O’Neill. The musical became a legal battle between the two—O’Neill claiming it used details about her, violating non-disparagement and non-disclosure agreements within their divorce agreement, and Brown claiming she was interfering with his creative process.

While that was ultimately resolved, its pall—a kind of he said; what he said she said—hangs over The Last Five Years. Even without knowing its messy real-life drama, you wonder about Brown’s interpretation of what the female character is really thinking and feeling, principally because Jamie’s own self-justifications as rendered in song seem like creepily gaslighting BS.

In this sense, brave Broadway role choice, Nick Jonas! The handsome pop star sings a solid and thankless role with a tuneful determination, with Jonas’ easy-going good-guy image crashing hard against songs he has to sing that make Jamie out to be a complete and utter a-hole.

As well as tracing the dissolution of a marriage, the musical charts Jamie’s growing success as a writer contrasted to Cathy’s failing career as an actor. In song, Jamie criticizes Cathy, who is feeling despondent after a series of unsuccessful auditions, for bringing him down; he congratulates himself for not sleeping with other women, with the far-from humblebrag that he could have done if he wanted to; and then he cheats on her, and blames Cathy for his doing so! Pretty much every time Jamie opens his mouth is either to bash Cathy or blame her, and this with her already depressed over her flailing career.

In response, the brilliant Warren and director Whitney White give Cathy a vivid presence in showstopper songs like “Ohio,” in which Cathy heads off on tour to that state, trunk of crazy anecdotes in hand. The volume and intensity of the audience applause after each solo song tells its own story about whose side they are on between Jamie and Cathy.

Warren’s voice is powerful and resonant. She and Jonas share a subtle rather than powerful chemistry. This is thorny terrain in a show that insists on its principals not truly interacting—yet expecting them to build a believable enough relationship that we feel their joy and pain. Jonas and Warren try as hard as they can to animate Jamie and Cathy, but they are more plausible as solo, self-explaining units than as a two-person relationship in formation and freefall. Their shared stage time sometimes scrambles the points in time we are supposed to be in—his present or her past.

Jamie’s egotistical and selfish behavior siphons off much of the audience’s care for him; he seems sadistically cruel, thoughtless, and selfish in both present and past. His and Cathy’s lovely, sexy wedding night scene is a midway oasis for both characters and audience. On either side of it you don’t really buy these two would ever have been together; you don’t really understand why they got together. Throughout, you absolutely do understand why it didn’t work out.

Adding to this emotionally distancing puzzle is a confusing and fiddly set that features a cumbersome platform that Jonas must clamber on to to get to…a desk, and a dolls-house sized apartment building that the characters sometimes stand on.

More winning—and revealing—are the banks of bright spotlights designed by Stacey Derosier at the back at the stage and fringing the upper stage platforms upon which the excellent band is playing. The lights make the show into what it makes most sense as: a concert that at different moments showcases the best of Adrienne Warren and Nick Jonas’ voices.