Broadwayis no stranger to stunt casting, as much a diss in New York theater as it is de rigueur – and controversial enough to crack a joke at producers’ expense in The Last Five Years, when aspiring actor Cathy, played by Adrienne Warren, derides “the people who cast NeNe Leakes in a musical”. (That would be the Real Housewife of Atlanta, in 2014’s Cinderella).
You could make the case that the term applies to Warren’s co-star Nick Jonas, as one half of a doomed couple in the firstBroadwayrun of Jason Robert Brown’s cult-favorite musical, which traces the arc of a five-year relationship between New York creatives in their 20s. Though Jonas has actually performed in several Broadway productions, mostly as a child actor, he is (very) famous as one of three boyband brothers beloved by a swath of millennials, myself included, who grew up on the Disney Channel. A solo pop star in his own right, Jonas possesses, at 32, still-boyish charisma and the seemingly inexhaustible energy of a former teen star, and he brings an inherent nostalgia factor to any performance – but not the robust singing voice typically demanded by musical theater, a fact which has generated some skepticism over how the cult-favorite musical, a two-hander almost entirely free of dialogue, would fare.
One needn’t worry too much. Though The Last Five Years has its issues – dual timelines that can be difficult to follow, questionable set design, a stacked deck of sympathy – casting isn’t one of them. Jonas’s voice is decidedly pop – though he has clearly worked to buff out the nasal quality from some of his most famous songs – but it works well enough. In part because his Jamie, an up-and-coming writer, is the shiftier, more successful but less sparkly half of a tenuous whole, and Jonas, a former teen actor, excels at the show’s outsized comic bits; his physicality, bounding from bed to desk to blocking, buzzing with nervous energy, occasionally busting out a familiar concert move, compensates for singing that occasionally drops the lower notes (though improves considerably over the course of the 90-minute show). And it improves a character who, well, should come off as more of a cad.
And in part because his other half is so stunning. Warren, aTony winner in 2021for the Tina Turner musical, wields a magnificent voice – honeyed, lustrous, arresting when allowed to bloom. Her Cathy may be a struggling actor who, at least according to the book, does not have thick enough skin for the business, but though Warren imbues her with pain and vulnerability, none of it reads as weakness, or naivety. She might seem like an odd fit for Jamie, but that matters less when the musical largely keeps them separate. Their love story is a tragic one from the first note – Cathy’s version of events begins at the end, once Jamie has left her with nothing but a note and pain, and travels backwards in time to their first date five years earlier; Jamie’s moves chronologically from giddy infatuation at 23 to frustration, infidelity and divorce.
The oppositional timelines are at once the show’s great coup – it’s impressive that it works at all – and its achilles heel. There can only be so much chemistry when the plot requires some mental math and the leads meet for just one true duet – a beautiful wedding night serenade, at the show’s midpoint – though director Whitney White thankfully keeps the two quietly in each other’s orbits. There’s a curious unspecificity to a show whose lyrics detail Jamie’s price per word for the New Yorker; the set, designed by David Zinn, feels split between New York and New Orleans – half apartment stoop with a precariously overhanging AC unit, half iron balcony housing the show’s live band, never less than sumptuous. And though styled loosely for the present, not the 90s (the show premiered in Chicago in 2001), Dede Ayite’s millennial costumes, the presence of Jonas or the idea of a novelist making it big by 28 gives the proceedings a vague sense of mid-2010s.
But that’s nitpicking – even more than its distillation of a failed relationship, the reason to see this full-length duet of a show is for the singing, and on that account, The Last Five Years delivers. Warren may blow Jonas out of the water, at least in terms of vocal prowess, but both have a solid grasp of their characters in isolation, if not together. In a season of overhyped shows, the evident sincerity, the effort, the fervent belief in character – and Warren’s occasional transcendence – feels refreshing.