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Austin360 blogs > Austin Arts: Seeing Things > Archives > 2009 > January > 12 > Entry
Review: ‘The Last Five Years’
It’s a little early in the year to be calling out bests, but Penfold Theatre’s production of “The Last Five Years” will undoubtedly be on my list by the time all things are said and done.
In fact, I was close to that point in the first few minutes when Annika Johannsson’s Cathy draws her leg up to sit on a chair and read the goodbye letter left by David Gallagher’s Jamie to the first strains of a violin melody. It’s a simple, sad moment, and if you don’t get goose bumps, something’s broken.
The five years in the title are the whole of Jamie and Cathy’s relationship. As the only characters in the story, you get to know them well, but never together. Writer and composer Jason Robert Brown puts them at odds both in love and in time. We see Cathy’s story work backwards from the moment she finds Jamie’s wedding ring on the kitchen table to end on their first date while Jamie’s moves forward.
While the two share the stage with melting chemistry, they rarely interact. It’s part of the written chronology, but stage and musical director Michael McKelvey uses it to great effect. Jamie, a wunderkind novelist, sings a holiday fable while Cathy, a Christmas or two ahead of him, sits idly at the table. She then sings about coming home from her unsuccessful musical auditions to a loving home while staring straight past an unaffected Jamie. The staging tweaks the already heartbreaking performances with bittersweet irony.
In fact, the only duet comes when couples time lines converge at their wedding. It’s clear that life is moving in opposite directions. The only question is whether, in those rare and beautiful moments, when it synchs up, everything becomes worth it. The only other bit of shared song at the end when each says goodbye to the other, Cathy until their second date and Jamie forever, leaves that open to both optimistic hope and pessimistic hindsight.
That the distance between Jamie and Cathy is so palpable is surprising in the tiny Larry L. King theater. With audience seating surrounding the stage on two sides and the scaled down orchestra, lacking nothing with Steve Saugey on the keyboard and Amy Harris violin, on the third, it’s easy for us to feel closer to the characters than they are to each other.
In that small space, warmly appointed by set designer David Utley as a New York artist’s apartment, Johansson and Gallagher excel. At close range every moment of pain, love, and humor is broadcast at almost overwhelming force without losing any nuance. With no amplification between their voices and our ears, Gallagher’s energetic rendition of the bouncy tunes and Johansson’s riveting, emotional takes on Cathy’s loss are even stronger.
Forgive me for gushing, but this is the sort of production that audiences are lucky to see: unique, intimate, beautiful, painful and wonderful.
(“The Last Five Years” continues Wednesdays-Saturdays at 8 p.m, Sunday, Jan. 18, at 5 and 8 p.m., Jan. 24, at 2 and 10:30 p.m., and Jan. 25, at 8 p.m. at the Austin Playhouse, Larry L. King Theatre, 3601 S. Congress, Bldg. C. $10-$20. 476-0084, penfoldtheatre.org.)
Joey Seiler is an American-Statesman freelance theater critic.
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