The Last Five Years @ Dobama Theatre 4/23 Start with an award-winning intimate (small) musical, add in two of Northeast Ohio’s best singing actors, Sandra Simon and Scott Plate, mix well with an award-winning director and professor of Musical Theatre, Victoria Bussert of Great Lakes Theater Festival and Baldwin-Wallace (and elsewhere) and if you’re lucky, you’ll end up with The Last Five Years as currently seen at Dobama Theatre. Jason Robert Brown is a most unusual phenomenon in theatre—he does it ALL by himself. He writes the words, the music, the book. It all fits, it all works, and very well, too.

This is the story of two people who fall in love, get married, fall out of love, and get divorced. Some would have it that it is the story of Mr. Brown and his failed marriage, but he says not. Whatever, it IS accurate, even if the way it is constructed is most unusual. Each character tells his or her own story, simultaneously (but not together), but with a twist. Jamie (Scott Plate) tells his version from the beginning to the end, whereas Cathy (Sandra Simon) begins at the end and works back to the beginning. They meet only once in the middle for a duet, celebrating their marriage, otherwise the songs are all sung in solo fashion.

Jamie is a young writer from New York, Jewish, about to become a best-selling author. Cathy is Catholic and Irish, from Ohio, and a would-be star of musical theater. Each of them gets a turn explaining the insecurities of their chosen field, his while trying to describe his book to an agent, in “Moving Too Fast”; hers in an hilarious audition sequence—“Climbing Uphill”. Not surprisingly, Jamie gets the best of it from the playwright; he is generally of a happier nature than Cathy, who comes across at times as a bit of a shrew.

The fourteen songs are a mixture of styles and rhythms, from boogie to blues to waltz to a smidgen of Klezmer, yet remain eminently singable. The lyrics have bite, while being witty and oh, so, accurate whether describing the advent or the loss of love. Director Bussert uses every bit of the stage area at Dobama and then some, however, the actors nearly always face the center of the thrust space, leaving the sides somewhat adrift at times. Music director and pianist Nancy Maier keeps all things musical moving briskly, with the able assistance of violinist Morgan Scagliotti and cellist Saeunn Thorsteinsdottir, who are seated at the rear of center stage. The to-begin-with set is merely a backdrop of empty picture frames, designed by Jeff Hermann, who also did the lights. Over time, bits of furniture are brought on stage: a table and chairs, a sofa, a park bench and finally a bed, providing the actors with the opportunity to do more than just stand there and sing. The realistic costumes are by Terry Pieritz, and sound by Stan Kozak. Overall, however, a musical lives or dies by its actors. This one lives. The Last Five Years isn’t necessarily a happy-ever-after type of musical theatre, but then, neither is life. from Cool Cleveland contributor Kelly Ferjutz (:divend:)