The Last Five Years (2023)

Saw a small three-weekend local run of The Last Five Years, which was apparently successful enough to be extended for two more weekends! I've always been curious about the staging, so this was really neat!

The cast is the same leads (well, two of the three leads) of Mula Sa Buwan's (Cyrano de Bergerac musical retelling) 2022 run, the run that I also managed to watch once live and another time when they streamed a recording. Here's an excerpt of one of the songs with English subs:

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I watched the movie-musical version of The Last Five Years with Anna Kendrick and Jeremy Jordan a while back, which I thought was more sympathetic to Cathy (I found of Jamie insufferable haha though The Schmuel Song lyrically had me by the throat in its tenderness), and it wasn't until I saw the show that I saw its true intentions—the individual perspectives, and the way they'd become out of sync and were talking over each other across different planes of time. The scales were more evenly tipped, the marriage and its failures more well characterized, and the beautifully structured sadness finally revealed fully to me.

Btw this was what our stage/theater looked like:


I'm not sure if the acoustics weren't calibrated very well, or if it's just my position in the theater, of it's an issue of projection and enunciation, but I really struggled with making out the words—Jamie in particular. :( At some point I was just filling in the songs with my memory of the lyrics. It doesn't help that the musical's references are very, very American. ^^; I'm not confident I would have been able to follow this musical at all if I didn't already have prior knowledge.

In terms of casting, I didn't enjoy Jamie's actor as much as I did in the last show I saw him in. Besides the projection/enunciation issue—especially for fast songs with louder instrumentation—his moments of liveliness and vivaciousness felt a bit stiff to me, especially compared to Cathy's actor who embodied the role more naturally (and thus I have no notes about her haha). But he did nail Nobody Needs to Know and I liked his choice to only do voices for the clock in The Schmuel Song.

I was also amused to see the maple leaves from Mula sa Buwan be reused here. XD The very tragic autumn leaves that distracted me with how impossibly unseasonable they were finally fit the scenery in a musical set in the US. :P

I'm still curious about other stage productions, if they're just as minimalist with the expectation of the audience being able to imagine the various background settings, or if they have more sets and props. Overall, very enjoyable! It was very, very hot outside, but the aircon inside the theater was very, very cold lol.

PS. Here's a sample of Still Hurting.

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