Review of Loft Theatre Company production of The Last Five Years (2012)

This little-known sung-through piece begins with a seemingly endless dirge in which struggling actress Cathy bemoans the break-up of her marriage to successful author Jamie.

It then proceeds to tell her story backwards and his story forwards, with the two characters’ only actual on-stage contact at their wedding in the middle. Clever idea.... but unfortunately there are a lot more dirges along the way interspersed with irrelevant comic interludes.

The fact of being ‘little-known’ carries its own resonance. Plenty of shows deserve to come out of the shadows and this is nowhere near the top of that pile. Apart from its basic structure, it is tedious and unoriginal, every lyric and tune sounding like a rehash of Sondheim, Leonard Bernstein or even Lloyd Webber with Tell Me on a Sunday.

Director Chris Mead works hard trying to make it impassioned. The band is good and visually there are some striking images achieved through shadows and silhouettes. The two performers, Nathan Dowling and Joanne Richards, do their best to pull out the stops but have to cope with lyrics which are endlessly repetitive and relentlessly predictable.

Writer Jason Robert Brown’s tired rehash of so many different theatrical themes does not provide an auspicious start to the Loft’s new season.

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Peter McGarry is an experienced, independent professional theatre critic who has agreed to review Loft Theatre Company productions.

The agreement with the Loft is that Peter is free to express his opinions for good or ill. The Loft Theatre Company has no control whatsoever over the content of these reviews and will never comment publicly on what he writes.