A M E R I C A N CO N S E RVATO RY T H E AT E R

Carey Perloff, Artistic Director

P R E S E N T S

The Last Five YearsWritten and Composed by Jason Robert Brown Directed by Michael Berresse

The Geary Theater May 11–June 5, 2016

Words on Plays Volume XXII, No. 7

Simon Hodgson Editor

Shannon Stockwell Associate Editor

Elizabeth Brodersen Director of Education & Community Programs

Michael Paller Resident Dramaturg

Cecilia Padilla Publications Fellow

Made possible byBank of America; Bank of the West; The Bernard Osher Foundation; BNY Mellon Wealth Management; Deloitte; Department of Children, Youth, & Their Families; DeWitt Stern; Farella Braun + Martel; Grants for the Arts/San Francisco Hotel Tax Fund; The Hearst Foundations; The James Irvine Foundation; Jewels of Charity; John & Marcia Goldman Foundation; The Kenneth Rainin Foundation; The Kimball Foundation; Koret Foundation; Leonard and Sophie Davis Fund; McGraw Hill Financial; National Endowment for the Arts; Pacific Gas & Electric Corporation; Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman; San Francisco Neighborhood Arts Collaborative; Sato Foundation; S. H. Cowell Foundation; The Shubert Foundation; Stanley S. Langendorf Foundation; Theatre Forward; U.S. Bank; Valentine Foundation; The Virginia B. Toulmin Foundation; Wallis Foundation; Wells Fargo; The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation

© 2016 AMERICAN CONSERVATORY THEATER, A NONPROFIT ORGANIZATION. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

1 Overview of The Last Five Years

4 Stupid, Impossible, Ridiculous Love A Short Biography of Jason Robert Brown By Shannon Stockwell

9 Playing with Time An Interview with Jason Robert Brown By Simon Hodgson

13 Acting Out Summer Stock Theater in The Last Five Years By Shannon Stockwell

15 Better to Have Loved and Lost An Interview with Director Michael Berresse By Cecilia Padilla

19 A Story of Rhythm and Groove The Music of The Last Five Years By Shannon Stockwell

22 Cathy and Jamie on the Couch An Interview with Psychiatrist Dr. Mason Turner By Shannon Stockwell

27 A Last Five Years Glossary

Table of Contents

COVER Photo by SplitShire. Courtesy Pixabay. Design by Shannon

Stockwell.

OPPOSITE New York City skyline. Photo by William Warby, 2007.

Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

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Overview of The Last Five YearsThe world premiere of The Last Five Years was in 2001 at Northlight Theatre in Skokie, Illinois. It premiered off Broadway at the Minetta Lane Theatre in March 2002. Both productions were directed by Daisy Prince. The off-Broadway production received several awards, including a Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Music and Lyrics and a Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Musical. The film adaptation of The Last Five Years was directed by Richard LaGravenese, starring Anna Kendrick and Jeremy Jordan, and was released in 2014.

Creative TeamMusic Director ............................................................................................ Matt CastleScenic Designer ......................................................................................Tim MackabeeCostume Designer ....................................................................................... Callie Floor Lighting Designer ..................................................................................Robert WierzelSound Designer ............................................................................................Kai Harada

Characters and CastJamie Wellerstein ........................................................................................ Zak ResnickCathy Hiatt ............................................................................................. Margo Seibert

SynopsisThe Last Five Years is the story of Jamie and Cathy’s relationship and is told in two ways. Jamie relates his version from the start of their romance until their breakup. Cathy starts her story at the breakup and works backward over the course of the musical, ending with their first kiss. The split storytelling means that, although the two characters regard each other during their alternating songs, they are not present in the same scene. The only moment they share the same space in real time is in the song “The Next Ten Minutes,” which covers their wedding proposal and marriage.

Cathy, a young actress, wears a wedding ring and stands alone onstage turning an object over and over in her hand—a man’s wedding ring. She sits at a table, reading a note. She has read it many times. She sings about Jamie, her ex-husband. She’s reeling from the breakup.

OPPOSITE Photo by Foundry Co. Courtesy Pixabay.

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Jamie, a young writer, enters. It is five years before the breakup. He is just getting to know Cathy, and he is smitten.

Five years later, Cathy sits on a pier by a river in Ohio, where she is working at a theater for the summer. Jamie (not actually present onstage) has arrived for a visit—somewhat unexpectedly, because their relationship is on the rocks. At first, Cathy is excited to work on their relationship together. But when he informs her that he needs to leave the next day, she is hurt that he’s disregarding her feelings. Throughout the scene, Jamie (in the past) makes a series of phone calls. He successfully gets a literary agent and tells a friend that he’s moving in with Cathy.

Jamie is excited about where his life is going. He sings about moving in with Cathy, and about his career; some might accuse him of moving too fast in both areas (he’s only 23), but he doesn’t care.

Cathy is at Jamie’s book-signing party, sitting while he meets fans. Someone has asked her what it’s like, being married to a famous novelist. She explains that it’s nice when their life is normal, though Jamie sometimes has spells where he focuses on his writing and seems disconnected from her. But when he smiles, she remembers all over again how much she loves him, and she can’t do anything but stay with him.

It is Jamie and Cathy’s first Christmas together. He sings her a story he wrote about a tailor named Schmuel, who longed for the time to make the perfect dress. One night, the clock on the wall granted Schmuel his wish—more time. The clock began to turn backward, and Schmuel was able to make the dress of his dreams. Jamie compares this story to Cathy’s situation—she’s stuck, she can’t find a job as an actor, and she’s working at a temp agency. He encourages her to follow her dreams and gives her a copy of Backstage magazine, a business card for a headshot photographer, and a beautiful watch—the gift of time.

Cathy writes a letter to Jamie, describing what it’s like working at a theater in Ohio for the summer. She sings sarcastically about how wonderful it is. In reality, she hates it and wishes she were with Jamie.

Jamie and Cathy are on a boat on the lake in Central Park, New York City. The song moves from Jamie’s proposal to their marriage, when they pledge their everlasting love for each other—or at least for the next ten minutes.

Jamie is not adjusting well to married life. Because he’s a famous writer, beautiful young women flirt with him all the time, asking him out to coffee or to read their manuscripts. He’s frustrated; he’s trying very hard to be faithful to Cathy, but he is attracted to these women. He convinces himself that everything is fine.

Cathy is at an audition. She’s very nervous and doesn’t do well. The lights shift. She is at dinner with her father, explaining how hard it is to be an actor. Back in an audition, she thinks about all the ways she’s making mistakes, and ends up berating herself and putting down her talent.

Jamie and Cathy are in the middle of a big fight when he tells her to stop talking and to listen to him. He assures her that he believes in her and her potential success, but he’s upset that she doesn’t do the same for him and his work.

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The couple is driving to Ohio to meet Cathy’s parents. She babbles happily, telling him about her past. She’s come a long way since Ohio. She sings about how much she loves Jamie, and about how their lives will be better together.

In bed with his shirt off, Jamie sings to a woman lying beside him. He goes through waves of panic at having cheated on his wife, but he tries to keep calm. He leaves in a hurry; he needs to get to Ohio to visit Cathy.

In the past, Cathy has just kissed Jamie for the first time, and she sings about how wonderful the kiss was and how amazing he is. Jamie (in the future) appears. He writes a note on a yellow pad, saying that he’s leaving her. He admits that they’re both hurting too much, and he has decided that there’s nothing else they can do.

In the beginning of their relationship, Cathy says goodbye to Jamie—until tomorrow. At the end of their marriage, Jamie says goodbye—forever.

Zak Resnick (left) and Margo Seibert in rehearsal for A.C.T.’s 2016 production of The Last Five Years.

Photo by Shannon Stockwell.

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Stupid, Impossible, Ridiculous LoveA Short Biography of Jason Robert Brown

By Shannon Stockwell

In 2014, after the release of the film version of The Last Five Years, an interviewer asked Jason Robert Brown what advice he had for composers who aspire to write musical theater. Brown said:

[Let] me be on record as saying, “Don’t do it.” . . . So, given that I’m now saying to you, “It’s impossible and it’s ridiculous,” the only reason to do it, therefore, is because there’s nothing else—and there was never anything else I could do. And I’ve tried. I tried . . . anything that was not writing Broadway musicals, which is a stupid, impossible, ridiculous job. And unfortunately, there’s no way out, and I’m stuck in it, and I happen to love it, which is also my misfortune. . . . You do it because it is the thing that you burn most in the world to do, and you hope that someone, somewhere, thinks you’re good enough at it to give you a chance.

Billy Joel Dreams

Brown was lucky enough to be given that chance. He was born in 1970 just outside of New York City. He had a love for music from a very young age. When he was seven years old, he demanded a piano. His grandfather had one in the basement, so his parents lugged it upstairs, and the young Jason sat down at it and began to play.

That was the start of a lifelong relationship with music, but it wasn’t pretty. “I don’t want to give the impression that I sat down at the piano at seven years old and started playing Mozart,” recalled Brown in an interview in 1999. “I’d say, ‘Oh, I’ll play! I’ll play!’ And my family would roll their eyes, ‘All right, Jason, you can play something, if you want.’”

But something else happened when he sat at the piano. “It instantly occurred to me that I could write songs on it,” Brown remembers. “At some point, I became a composer.”

Billy Joel was a particular influence on Brown when he was young. “I wanted to be a guy who played the piano and sang while people screamed. That sounded like fun.” He says that he began playing the piano in part because he wanted to show off. “I was a ham. I wanted to be an actor, and I wanted to be a songwriter. They fused into musical theater.”

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After high school, Brown moved on to Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York. But he quickly realized that the philosophy of Eastman didn’t jibe with his personal ambitions; one teacher told him,

“Why do you want to write musicals? Serious music takes time, but a musical you can write in a day.” He knew it was the wrong place for him.

After two years, he left Eastman and went south to New World School of the Arts in Miami, where he spent a year teaching a class and playing piano accompaniment for other classes. After that year, he thought: “It’s time.” He moved to New York City, where he spent three challenging years playing at piano bars and cabarets. An interviewer later asked Brown, “What did you do first when you came to New York City?” Brown said, “Starved.”

A Promise Waiting to Happen

Although Brown had childhood dreams of being Billy Joel, he eventually realized, “The songs I wrote in college didn’t belong on the radio.” Instead, his models became Jimmy Webb and Randy Newman—people who told stories through songs. Brown decided to commit himself to that. The result was A New World, a song cycle made up of 19 songs that each tell a different story but are all connected by a thematic element.

Brown called some of the women he worked with at a piano bar and asked them to perform A New World (which later became Songs for a New World) with him. One of these singers was friends with a woman named Daisy Prince. After the show, Prince had a lot of what Brown thought were excellent suggestions, so he asked her to direct the show as he developed it further. It was only after Prince agreed that Brown realized her father was none other than Harold “Hal” Prince, the Broadway producer and director who had worked on The Phantom of the Opera, A Little Night Music, and Company.

“I ended up being sort of adopted by Hal and . . . Daisy and their family,” says Brown. Harold Prince employed Brown as the rehearsal pianist for Kiss of the Spider Woman, where the young pianist learned that he was in the right place. “Just to be in the middle of that was thrilling and intoxicating,” he says. “But at the same time I wanted so desperately to be in the middle of it more.” Meanwhile, Songs for a New World premiered off Broadway in 1995 to middling reviews; Greg Evans of Variety said Brown’s music was “sturdy if not particularly inventive,” but Brown himself was “a promise waiting to happen.” Songs for a New World has gone on to have a vibrant life since its premiere,

Composer Jason Robert Brown. Photo by

Maia Rosenfeld.

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and has been performed hundreds of times around the world. It is particularly popular among schools, given that the cast size is so changeable. One of the songs, “Stars and the Moon,” has proven especially resonant, having been sung by such stage stars as Audra MacDonald and Betty Buckley.

Following in the Steps of Sondheim

Parade started in the minds of Harold Prince and book writer Alfred Uhry. They wanted to create a musical about Leo Frank, a Jewish man living in Georgia who had been convicted of killing a 13-year-old girl in 1913. The case became the focus of concerns regarding anti-Semitism in the South.

At first, Stephen Sondheim was signed on to do the music, but, according to Brown, he backed out because he wasn’t interested in working on something so dark. Meanwhile, Brown had been practicing Songs for a New World at Daisy Prince’s apartment and her father liked what he heard. In 1994, Harold Prince asked Brown to write a sample song for the musical. While Brown’s offering was not perfect, it was enough to prove that he understood where the musical lived emotionally. He got the job.

When Parade first premiered on Broadway in 1998, critics were skeptical, calling it cold and intellectual. Brown says, “For the vast majority of people, when you say the word ‘musical’ they will only think of something that is endlessly perky and involves sequins and tap dancing. I have nothing against tap dancing . . . but I think it’s infinitely more of an uphill battle to write something that’s not intrinsically happy. . . . That’s a much harder thing to get people to accept.” Nonetheless, the show was praised for its ambitious undertaking, and it won the Tony Award for Best Book of a Musical, and Brown won for Best Score—his first Tony Award. The show’s daring subject matter and intoxicating music has ensured its continuing popularity. Reflecting on the show’s enduring life beyond New York, Brown says, “[Parade] is a story that [theater people] feel is important to tell. We’re not biographers and we’re not newscasters. We make theater, and to make theater out of something we feel was a grave injustice and we feel really matters, that’s what we do. It counts to us, and I think it counts to spread the story that way.”

The Last Five Years

After Parade, Brown was burnt out. “I had been working on [it] for five years and [it] ran for three months,” Brown says. “It was too exhausting and too hard and the therapy cost more than the royalties.” His first instinct was to get out of show business, but as he was planning where to go, Lincoln Center Theater (LCT) called him and said they wanted to commission a piece.

He began to explain an idea he had been working on: an intimate song cycle about the relationship between a man and a woman (the polar opposite of Parade’s 30-odd cast members). And as Brown was explaining, he came up with the idea of the two timelines crossing and meeting in the middle. LCT approved his idea. But Brown found that he

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couldn’t create something that belonged only on a concert stage, like Songs for a New World. “It was at that point—when I was writing about these two people who literally and physically and metaphorically could not get together—I said: ‘You know what? I think it’s a show and I didn’t mean to be doing that, but I guess I am now.’”

In 2001 The Last Five Years opened to rave reviews at Northlight Theatre in Skokie, Illinois, but when it moved to off Broadway, it didn’t do so well. After it closed, Brown became frustrated. “I really didn’t want to be in the business anymore,” he said. “I thought that if this town didn’t know how to support that kind of work, I didn’t need to be here.” He left the city and moved to Los Angeles. It wasn’t until 2008, and the Broadway premiere of 13, that he would have another show in New York.

Despite New York’s reception of The Last Five Years, the show was extremely successful during its national tour. And, although it’s 15 years old, it has remained popular across the country. Brown is not surprised by its success. “I actually did sort of foresee [the success of The Last Five Years],” he says. “It’s a show with two characters, so I knew that people would want to do it. There was no guarantee, but I hoped . . . that it would go out into the world, be shared, and become part of contemporary musical theater vocabulary.”

Triumph on the Stage

In 2003, Brown attended a reading of Honeymoon in Vegas, a potential musical (no music had yet been written) by Andrew Bergman, the screenwriter of the original 1992 movie. Brown was a fan of the film and had already considered writing a musical based on it, so he was excited to write a few songs on spec for what was shaping up to be a traditional American musical comedy. After completing Parade and The Last Five Years, he was in the mood to write something light.

From his new home in Los Angeles, Brown would continue to work on Honeymoon for the next decade. He also tried teaching while in California, but he couldn’t get away from creating musical theater. His new piece, 13, was about a 12-year-old Jewish boy

Composer Jason Robert Brown. Photo by John Pemble, 2015.

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who moves to the Midwest and tries to climb the social ladder at his new school in time for his bar mitzvah. “I always had a lot of teenagers at my concerts, and I really wanted to write something that spoke directly to them,” says Brown.

The Broadway production of 13, which opened in September 2008, closed after 105 performances (his longest-running show on Broadway to date). Written for the young musical theater lovers that populated Brown’s concerts, the show has proven a commercial success and is often licensed by schools. “13 pays my rent,” says Brown.

If there’s anything that’s consistent about Brown’s career, it’s that he’s constantly looking to work on something different from the last piece he did. “I had been working on 13 and Honeymoon in Vegas, these goofy, very light shows, and I really wanted to dig in,” he says. The answer was The Bridges of Madison County, a passionate tearjerker which earned Brown Tony Awards for Best Original Score and Best Orchestrations, and went on to a wildly successful national tour.

After The Bridges of Madison County, Honeymoon in Vegas finally opened on Broadway in November 2014 after more than ten years of work. Brown garnered glowing reviews from critics (“You know you’re listening to the sound of success,” raved New York Times reviewer Ben Brantley), but the show still struggled in the box office. After being in the business for almost 20 years, however, Brown has learned that the long run, rather than Broadway, can be a more satisfying endgame. His music remains beloved by musical theater enthusiasts worldwide, especially among young actors taking their first steps on stage or screen. “What I know now at 45 years old is that there’s always a further life for my shows,” he says. “I’ve never had a show that dropped off the map.”

SOURCES Ben Brantley, “From Ring-a-Ding Swagger to Swooning Romanticism,” The New York Times, October 27, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/12/theater/reviews/honeymoon-in-vegas-opens-at-the-paper-mill-playhouse.html?_r=0 (accessed March 3, 2016); Ben Brantley,

“Stranger in Strange Land: The Acne Years,” The New York Times, October 5, 2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/06/theater/reviews/06bran.html?_r=0 (accessed March 4, 2016); Jackson R. Bryer and Richard A. Davison, ed., The Art of the American Musical: Conversations with the Creators (Rutgers University Press: Piscataway, NJ, 2005); Greg Evans, “Songs for a New World,” Jason Robert Brown, November 6, 1995, http://jasonrobertbrown.com/reviews/songs-for-a-new-world-2/ (accessed March 4, 2016); Suzy Evans, “Bridge of Tears,” Theatre Communications Group, February 2014, http://www.tcg.org/publications/at/issue/featuredstory.cfm?story=4&indexID=41 (accessed March 3, 2016); Suzy Evans, “Jason Robert Brown and Alfred Uhry Reflect on the Legacy of Parade,” American Theatre, February 16, 2015, http://www.americantheatre.org/2015/02/16/jason-robert-brown-and-alfred-uhry-reflect-on-the-legacy-of-parade/ (accessed April 11, 2016); Harry Haun, “Playbill on Opening Night: 13—Puppy-Love in the Afternoon,” Jason Robert Brown, October 6, 2008, http://jasonrobertbrown.com/2008/10/06/playbill-on-opening-night-13-playbill-com-10608/ (accessed March 4, 2016);

“Honeymoon in Vegas: Conversation & Performance with the Cast & Creative Team of the Hit Broadway Show,” 92Y On Demand, March 15, 2015, http://92yondemand.org/honeymoon-in-vegas-broadway-conversation-performance (accessed March 4, 2016); Robert Kahn, “Bridges Review: Romance? They’ve Got it Covered,” NBC New York, http://www.nbcnewyork.com/entertainment/the-scene/bridges-madison-county-review-246357391.html (accessed March 4, 2016); Bonnie Laufer Krebs, “Jason Robert Brown Exclusive Interview: The Last Five Years,” YouTube, September 7, 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eo_3feEG4D0 (accessed March 2, 2016); Mark Shenton, “The Big Interview: Jason Robert Brown,” The Stage, May 24, 2015, https://www.thestage.co.uk/features/interviews/2015/big-interview-jason-robert-brown/ (accessed March 5, 2016)

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Playing with TimeAn Interview with Jason Robert Brown

By Simon Hodgson

The Last Five Years nearly didn’t happen. In 1999, Jason Robert Brown was on the verge of quitting show business, after his show Parade had closed on Broadway with underwhelming box office returns. Then his phone rang with a commission from Lincoln Center Theater. Brown started to explain something he’d been thinking about—a two-person musical, one guy, one girl. As he talked, the structure started to crystallize in his head. Two lovers would tell parallel stories, but whereas his story would be told from first kiss to breakup, her story would run the opposite way. The resulting score wowed audiences when it premiered in Skokie, Illinois, at Northlight Theatre in 2001, and over the last 15 years it has become a sleeper hit nationwide, continuing to win fans in dozens of regional productions and earning a feature-film adaptation (starring Anna Kendrick and Jeremy Jordan) in 2015. We caught up with Brown to talk musicals, marriage, and why he’s tough on the Midwest.

Why do you think The Last Five Years has endured?

I’ll say this: The Last Five Years was, in a lot of ways, an experiment in rigor. There are rules of composition and dramaturgy, which I set out as a challenge to myself at the beginning of the piece, and I insisted on applying them throughout the creation of the show. That rigor extends beyond the formal issues and into the emotional lives of the characters. I forced myself to be honest about who Jamie and Cathy were and how they would react. I think the end result is that there are two very full characters onstage, two people who are filled with recognizable complexity even though we only see them in short snippets of time. Ultimately, I think it is that complexity that has kept the characters compelling and interesting.

Your work pulls from multiple music genres. What’s your process in framing the storytelling through song?

I think of theater music like costumes—the minute a character puts on the music, it should help define that character. Jamie and Cathy are both twentysomethings living in New York City in the 1990s, and that information guides almost all of my musical choices. Cathy is an actress, so her music is a little more showbizzy and extroverted,

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while Jamie is a writer, so his music is more nerdy and complicated. Much of the show is about how their different ethnic and financial backgrounds affect their relationship, and that’s built into the music as well—Cathy’s Celtic roots peek through the texture of many of her songs, and Jamie’s Jewish DNA is coded into several of his pieces. Of course, there’s also enough overlap in their respective sounds to make them believe that they belong together.

What was your thinking behind the reversed storytelling structure?

My main instinct when I started the piece was to write something for two singers, where they could alternate solo songs. I decided early on to have it be a love story, and once I decided that, I was stuck for how to tell the story, until I realized that if I had one character tell the story in reverse while the other told it chronologically, that would keep it more interesting than if I had them both moving in the same direction. When I made that decision I had no idea how much it would bring to the narrative; I’m very grateful for that particular flash of inspiration. I’m surely indebted to Merrily We Roll Along (always one of my favorite musicals) and to Tom Stoppard, whose work often plays with time in deeply emotionally resonant ways.

Do you think this musical is well suited for the screen? Did your artistic intentions translate in the film adaptation?

Honestly, I wouldn’t have the slightest idea what’s well suited for the screen. I’m not a movie artist, I’m a theater artist, and The Last Five Years was designed and executed as a theatrical experience, meant to be performed live on a stage in front of people. However, if a filmmaker has a vision for how to translate my work to the screen, my only questions are whether that vision retains the soul of the piece, and whether the filmmaker has the technique to pull it off. In this case, Richard LaGravenese really understood the story I was telling and the ways I was using music to tell it, and he had a beautiful concept of how to film it and make it work. Ultimately, I’m very proud of the film (and quite surprised that it even exists), but I don’t think that it’s the final or definitive interpretation of the show. It’s just one spectacularly performed and filmed variation on what I wrote for the stage.

Do you think Cathy and Jamie could have or should have saved their relationship?

No, I think they were both young enough to move on from something that was never going to make them both happy. Better to know at their age that they’re not suited for each other than to wait until the kids arrive, or the mortgage is due. I can’t speak for anyone else’s choices, but for these characters, I think they got into something before they really knew what that kind of commitment entailed. The next time, I’m pretty sure they were both much smarter and more realistic about the kind of work that partnering really requires.

OPPOSITE Composer Jason Robert Brown. Photo by Scott Selman, 2014.

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Have your personal feelings about and connections to the themes and issues in The Last Five Years changed since it first premiered?

Oh, sure. I used to think of Jamie and Cathy as my contemporaries, my friends, and I really ached for them and feared for their futures. Now I have an avuncular response to them: “Oh, you poor kids, I know it sucks being in your twenties, but you’ll see it all works out fine.” I spent my twenties in an unhappy marriage, climbing frantically up a very slippery ladder to success. In my forties, I’ve got a wonderful family with beautiful children, a thriving if complicated career, and the general sense that the key to making your life work has something to do with perseverance and endurance.

People tend to blame either Jamie or Cathy for the downfall of the relationship. Do you blame either? Why or why not?

I blame them both, I don’t blame either of them. Marriage is freighted with a lot of meanings—it’s supposed to be a perfect love, the foundation of a family, a support system, a business partnership—but when I was 24, I thought marriage was going to prove to everyone I was a grown-up and should be treated that way. Nobody could have persuaded me that I was going about it wrong. I’m hardly the only stubborn kid who made that mistake; the woman I married made the same one. I don’t blame either of us, and we both should have known better.

What is the narrative purpose of “The Schmuel Song”? Where did you get the inspiration?

First, Jamie is a writer, and he functions by telling stories—that’s how he makes sense of the world and how he controls it. Having Jamie tell Cathy a story as a gift seemed like a good way to show how important storytelling is for him and for them as a couple. And then having the story follow the shape of the old Sholem Aleichem stories [the type of East European shtetl tales that inspired Fiddler on the Roof] was a window into the stories Jamie heard growing up and the philosophies that make up his worldview.

How is American musical theater evolving?

It feels like it’s branching off in (at least) two different directions. There is the very corporate “entertainment”—musicals painted in broad strokes and designed to appeal to the widest possible audience, such as Aladdin and Finding Neverland. Then there is the very personal and cheerfully idiosyncratic approach, which brings us work like Fun Home and Hamilton. I don’t care a whole lot about the first branch, but that second branch is very exciting and that’s the kind of work I’ve been trying to do all along.

Last question. From the song lyrics, it seems like you have a soft spot for New York in The Last Five Years, but what do you have against Ohio?

You know, I pick on the Midwest in The Last Five Years and 13, but I hope I make up for it with The Bridges of Madison County!

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Acting OutSummer Stock Theater in The Last Five Years

By Shannon Stockwell

In The Last Five Years, Cathy regales us with horrid stories of her time at a theater in the Midwest with the song “Summer in Ohio.” She spends the warm months of the year at what is known in the business as summer stock theater. The practice of staging summer theater in rural areas, sometimes referred to as the “straw-hat circuit,” stems back to the beginning of the nineteenth century, when urbanites would escape the stifling heat of the city by traveling to the countryside. Some theater companies fulfilled the city dwellers’ need for entertainment by setting up stages in barns and tents. The tradition of summer stock theater is still going strong, although most summer theaters today have actual performance spaces.

Cathy’s summer is clearly a miserable one, but is Cathy’s experience true to life? Are there any unsung positives to the summer stock experience? In fact, many of A.C.T.’s Master of Fine Arts (M.F.A.) Program actors have cut their teeth at summer stock theater and continue to return, and their stories of summer stock compare and contrast with Cathy’s in striking ways.

One significant thing Cathy doesn’t mention is the grueling pace of summer stock, and the stretching of artistic muscles that results. M.F.A. Program actor Jennifer Apple, who is in her first year at A.C.T., says, “It’s a really intense experience. You usually get one week of rehearsals, maybe one and a half, three if you’re lucky.” Sometimes productions are only up for a week; sometimes they are performed in repertory with other productions throughout the summer. No matter the schedule, actors are in for a demanding, rewarding summer, one that will give them a year’s worth of experience in just three months. “One of the things that summer stock helps you achieve is flexibility,” says Apple. “You have to be ready for anything at all times. That’s an incredibly useful skill to have as an actor.”

For M.F.A. Program actor Emily Brown, who is in her second year at A.C.T., summer stock has the feeling of work, but also has a bit of a summer-camp atmosphere. “It’s a tight-knit group that comes together for a few weeks to a few months, often in a remote location,” says Brown. “Actors and other artists find themselves spending a lot of time together and exploring the area in their time off. It tends to result in deep bonds with new friends, fun nights out, silly memories, and adventures, much like the experience one would have at a summer camp—but with some work thrown in for good measure.”

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“I think Cathy had a harder time with her summer stock experience than I had,” says Brown, “although I definitely had my own run-ins with cockroaches, depressing dorm rooms, and long-distance-relationship pining along the way. Actually, my wackiest story is probably from when I played Maria in West Side Story at the Forestburgh Playhouse (in New York), and I was housed in a hunting cabin full of mounted animal carcasses that smelled like formaldehyde. Despite the rustic conditions, intensive work expectations, and low pay, I have made some of my best friends during experiences at summer stock.” Brown also points to the way summer stock productions can boost the career prospects of emerging actors. “I received many of my EMC [Equity Membership Candidate] points and early professional experiences working on summer stock stages.”

It seems like the summer stock experience isn’t as bad as Cathy makes it out to be. “I feel like, because Cathy wants success (which, for her, means fame like her husband’s), summer stock is beneath her,” says second-year M.F.A. Program actor Albert Rubio, who has spent time at his fair share of summer stocks. “The song paints a pretty grim picture of summer stock in general, which I feel is because of Cathy’s mental state in the story and her own self-doubts about feeling unsuccessful. In terms of getting work as an actor, she is successful; she just hasn’t achieved something that would make her ‘famous’ and therefore equal to her husband.”

In reality, the summer stock experience—while it has its downsides—proves positive overall. Despite Cathy’s terrible season, summer stock remains an important aspect of American theater, a place where growing and professional artists can thrive together.

SOURCES Jennifer Apple (A.C.T. M.F.A. Program actor), in conversation with Shannon Stockwell, March 4, 2016; Gerald Bordman and Thomas S. Hischak, ed., “Summer Stock,” The Oxford Companion to American Theatre (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004); Emily Brown (A.C.T. M.F.A. Program actor), in conversation with Shannon Stockwell, March 7, 2016; Albert Rubio (A.C.T. M.F.A. Program actor), in conversation with Shannon Stockwell, March 2, 2016

Berkshire Theatre Festival, a summer stock theater in western Massachusetts. Photo by John Phelan,

2010. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

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Better to Have Loved and LostAn Interview with Director Michael Berresse

By Cecilia Padilla

“The Geary is one of my favorite stages in the country,” says The Last Five Years director Michael Berresse. He has performed on countless Broadway stages in shows like Chicago; Kiss Me, Kate; The Light in the Piazza; A Chorus Line; Damn Yankees; and Guys and Dolls, so the fact that The Geary ranks so highly for him really says something about its magic. “The history and the quality of work at A.C.T. is extraordinary, and I’m so proud to be continuing that legacy,” he says.

Berresse came to A.C.T. in 2012 while performing in the national tour of The Normal Heart, and he is delighted to return to the Bay Area—this time as an accomplished director. “Looking back at my directorial career,” says Berresse, “I see that a number of shows I’ve worked on have had complicated or nonlinear structures. There’s something about the puzzle of them and the way my own mind works that draws me to that kind of material.” Some of the works Berresse has puzzled over include Peter and the Starcatcher, the original Broadway production of [title of show], and Now. Here. This., the last of which follows a group of friends on a tour of a natural history museum where the exhibits inspire a time-travel adventure.

With its unique structure in which one character’s story is told from ending to beginning, and the other’s from beginning to end, The Last Five Years has been another puzzle for the director to solve. We sat down with Berresse to talk about the challenges and the joys of directing The Last Five Years.

What’s it like being both an actor and a director?

I love them both for very different reasons. As an actor, my responsibility is more limited, and I can relate to an audience in a very visible, personal way. As a director, I have more comprehensive responsibility but without the direct relationship to an audience. Nevertheless, directing comes with a very different kind of personal investment and reward. And my experience with and empathy for the whole process of acting informs many things about the way I direct. For example, when I start a new project, it helps me to imagine how it might feel to speak the words or live the circumstances before I start exploring how to tell the story from the outside. It not only gives me a strong emotional

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OPPOSITE Director Michael Berresse in rehearsal for A.C.T.’s 2016 production of The Last Five Years.

Photo by Shannon Stockwell.

base, it also helps me develop that external point of view in very practical ways, like how the rhythm of the language or music translates into design, or how the emotional content translates into staging.

One of my favorite parts of the directing process is seeing how an actor’s instincts differ from mine. I find it so exciting and moving when they discover things that never occurred to me. I also think that my being an actor can help with communication and trust. For instance, in The Last Five Years, the actors know that I intimately understand the experience of being on the Geary stage myself.

How are you bringing your music and dance experience to the show’s direction?

My experience as a musical theater actor makes me especially conscious of rhythm and movement, not just in terms of songs or steps, but also in terms of the story as a whole—the connective tissue, the transitions, the music of how the pieces fit together. Theater is hugely collaborative and for me, it is most satisfying when all the pieces work together to make something more impactful than the individual parts. In addition to its glorious individual elements, I think of the entirety of The Last Five Years as a dance that has a consistency and continuity all its own.

This musical has been produced many times. How do you go about making it feel original and fresh?

Whenever you look at telling a story, whether it’s a new idea altogether or something that’s been done many times, you have to invest in some relevant big-picture priority. Whether it’s friendship or freedom or loss or redemption or a combination of many things, when I risk exposing those personal priorities in the context of a story, it shows up in the production in a unique and original way.

Specifically for The Last Five Years, I believe that regardless of how a love affair plays out, the risk is as important and powerful as the outcome. “Better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all,” as the adage goes. I hope to show a little nod toward the future in the arc of Cathy and Jamie’s relationship, a moment of perspective at the end of the play that’s not necessarily written in the text. We often get stuck in the hurt of things and miss the opportunity for gratitude and growth. It helps that these characters are very complex, flexible portraits and we have such gifted actors.

Another thing that is unique and exciting about this production is the sheer fact that this small but mighty musical will be playing in such an expansive house.

Why is Jason Robert Brown’s work so beloved and enduring?

I had the extraordinary experience of working with Jason while appearing in a production of Parade at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles. I will never forget the day he sat down at the piano in the rehearsal room and started playing his own music for

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us. He stopped being the composer/lyricist, the pianist, and he started being the music. When I hear his music now, I see him and feel him playing it. He puts his whole soul into his work. I think the listener can feel that instinctively.

What kinds of conversations have you had with the designers?

The designers and I spoke extensively not just about the story arc but also the nature of the storytelling. Part of the challenge of this show is that it often shifts or overlaps between multiple environments and timelines. It felt neither possible nor appropriate to create literal versions of bookstores or apartments or a pier by a river in Ohio. Also, the show is quite intimate and very music driven so I felt nothing should overwhelm the actors and the score. We arrived at a more minimalistic and metaphoric design that would still allow for enough furnishings and gestures to help with clarity and specificity.

I also wanted the design to feel almost porous, as a reflection of the overlapping quality of the story structure. There’s something very exciting about that lack of literalness, because it leaves room for a more personal experience for the audience and the actors. Personally, I find the elegance and simplicity of the design breathtaking.

What are the challenges of directing The Last Five Years?

In addition to the unconventional timeline, this show is unique in that it’s a two-character musical with very little interaction between Jamie and Cathy. Although they will share the stage at various times, there is only one moment when they actually sing together. The bulk of the show is performed without a scene partner, which is very atypical for a musical. That presentational quality is a challenge in the staging as well as the design, but on the flip side, it creates a particularly intimate, almost confidential, relationship between the audience and the actors. The lack of busyness really helps focus the attention on the lyrics and the emotional journey of the characters.

What do you want audiences to take away from this show?

As it charts the ups and downs of one couple’s relationship through these truly remarkable songs, I see this show as an opportunity to reconsider the ways we perceive our own adventures in love, what we label as good, bad, generous, selfish, a success, a failure. There is both great joy and great heartbreak in Cathy and Jamie’s story, but for me, The Last Five Years is an opportunity to say, at the end of the day, how lucky we are to find each other at all, to invest in and care about and love one another, through both the joy and the loss. I hope people leave The Last Five Years feeling that the risk is as rewarding as the outcome. If you’re feeling, you’re alive.

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A Story of Rhythm and GrooveThe Music of The Last Five Years

By Shannon Stockwell

For musical theater actors, there’s something magnetic about the music of Jason Robert Brown. “If you studied musical theater any time after 2000, chances are you memorized the original cast recording of Jason Robert Brown’s The Last Five Years,” says Huffington Post journalist Suzy Evans. The composer’s work has such a gravitational pull on this peer group of musical theater enthusiasts that Evans refers to it as the “Jason Robert Brown generation.”

Just what is it about Brown’s music that has defined a generation? “Jason is a master of making pop-song forms work in a musical theater context,” says Matt Castle, music director for A.C.T.’s 2016 production of The Last Five Years. “To me, pop music feels like a suspended, single feeling. But a theater song can’t be that, because there has to be something at risk in a scene, something that changes over the course of the song.” Brown’s music, Castle explains, has all of the infectious rhythm and groove of a pop song, but he uses the songs to move the story forward. “So many try and few do it as well as he can,” says Castle. Brown explains, “The complicating factor in the theater is that characters, as a rule, can’t sit in one place emotionally while they’re singing—music is such a dynamic force that it pushes characters out of one state of mind and into another; theatrical music, by mere dint of its presence, is active.”

Brown’s composing process is largely instinctual and improvisational. “What I do first is I come up with a title, which I’ll generally throw out halfway through,” he said in a 1999 interview. “I have a title, and I’ll sit at the piano, and I’ll just come up with some chord that makes me happy, and I’ll sing the title. And I’ll sing it over and over again until I have another line to come after the title. And then I’ll find lines that come around the title, until I’ve got a structure that I can just start playing with.” In 2011, he affirmed his improvisational attitude toward writing music when he said, “I tend to write the music and the lyrics almost simultaneously; the words generate a melodic idea, and then the melody goes somewhere else and I need words to fill it.”

Musical theater scholar Ian Nisbet points out that, while Brown’s process may come from the heart, his musical instincts are actually very sophisticated. “[Brown’s] music is representative of a vibrant compositional tradition that has been marginalized by the broader academic discourse surrounding musical research,” says Nisbet. Just judging

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from the sheer difficulty of the music, Castle would agree that Brown’s music is highly intellectual. “Rhythmically, as flowing and natural and funky and groovy as it feels for the audience, it’s much easier for the audience to take it in than it is for the two actors to execute,” says Castle. “It seems so natural because the rhythms are all based on how a person speaks. And he’s built so much structure of meter and rhyme into the lyrics, so there’s a lot of help. There’s a logic to it. But it’s just a bitch to learn.”

The storytelling of The Last Five Years feels straightforward: just one plotline, told in two different directions, about two people. But Brown uses thoughtful and complex musical devices to tell the tale of Jamie and Cathy. Nisbet says, “He regularly uses highly structured melodic cells [small bits of music that can stand on their own] when creating his melodic lines; repeatedly employs dissonance when his characters are experiencing fear, nervousness, or regret; and uses consonance and unison as dramatic symbols in his love duets.” Nisbet points out that the last note of “The Next Ten Minutes,” in which we go from Jamie’s marriage proposal to their wedding, is in unison between the two of them. This musically symbolizes that, for once, the characters are with each other, both in time and in tune.

To Castle, the most important device comes from the unique nonlinear structure of the musical. “Each of their stories starts with up-tempo songs and modulates toward an

Photo by Elliott Billings, 2013. Courtesy Flickr.

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end point of reflective ballads,” he says. “When you cross the two streams, it means that there’s an alternation between ballads and up-tempo songs throughout the whole show, which is an ingenious way to create the variety that helps make each song distinct from the ones surrounding it.”

Brown also repeats certain musical motifs to underline the impact of specific moments. For example, there is a waltz theme (in 3/4 time) that is heard three times: instrumentally in the beginning of the show before anyone sings, which leads directly into “I’m Still Hurting”; instrumentally again during the proposal/wedding scene; and at the end of the show, when Jamie sings: “I could never rescue you / All you ever wanted / But I could never rescue you / No matter how I tried / All I could do was love you hard / And let you go.” The repetition of this theme reveals the interconnectedness and importance of these specific, life-altering moments in Jamie’s and Cathy’s lives.

It’s too soon to tell whether Brown’s compositions have secured a place in American musical theater history alongside key shows that have changed the course of the art form for good—shows like Show Boat (1927), the first musical to include songs that further the plot, or West Side Story (1957), which uses dance as a storytelling technique alongside score and script. Castle points out that it’s hard to predict how Brown’s music will be remembered, because his body of work is so varied. “I don’t even know what kind of pattern I could form between Parade and 13 and The Bridges of Madison County and The Last Five Years,” Castle says. “They’re all over the place. I don’t know what we’ll all have to say about Jason Robert Brown in another 50 years.” If Brown’s work can be labeled as eclectic, he’s also productive, and it will be intriguing to see what he creates in the next ten years. For the moment, however, there’s no denying that his music has staying power in the minds of everyone who hears it.

SOURCES “2011 Brings New Worlds for Jason Robert Brown,” Stage Whispers, January/February 2011, http://www.stagewhispers.com.au/news/2011-brings-new-worlds-jason-robert-brown (accessed March 30, 2016); Jason Robert Brown, “What I Think about Writing Music for the Theater,” Jason Robert Brown, March 6, 2016, http://jasonrobertbrown.com/2016/03/06/essay-writing-music-for-the-theater/ (accessed March 27, 2016); Matt Castle (music director of The Last Five Years), in conversation with Shannon Stockwell, March 25, 2016; Sara Coen,

“Research Note by Note,” Australian Catholic University, December 16, 2015, http://www.acu.edu.au/576025 (accessed March 27, 2016); Suzy Evans, “The Jason Robert Brown Generation,” Huffington Post, February 18, 2014, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/suzy-evans/the-jason-robert-brown-ge_b_4808636.html (accessed March 27, 2016); Ian Nisbet, “‘Don’t Ya Think That’s Pretty Music?’ Jason Robert Brown’s Melodic Construction from Songs for a New World to The Last Five Years,” 2014, https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bw1hIQJP3lkoM0Vkb1BIa1hLNlU/view (accessed March 28, 2016); Mark Robinson, “Musical Milestones: When the Theatre Reinvents Itself,” Mark Robinson Writes, October 21, 2015, http://www.markrobinsonwrites.com/the-music-that-makes-me-dance/2015/10/21/musical-milestones-when-the-theatre-reinvents-itself (accessed March 28, 2016)

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Cathy and Jamie on the CouchAn Interview with Psychiatrist Dr. Mason Turner

By Shannon Stockwell

For each A.C.T. mainstage production, Dr. Mason Turner, chief of psychiatry at Kaiser Permanente San Francisco Medical Center, stays after a performance to discuss with the audience that classic psychological question: How did that make you feel? Theater on the Couch—a free event at the theater that takes place on the Friday after opening night—has been going strong at A.C.T. for 12 years, and there couldn’t be a better leader of the discussion than Dr. Turner. “I’m a psychiatrist,” he says. “I’m a physician and trained in psychiatry. But I also have a side to me that really enjoys writing and the theater. I was a pianist in a previous life and I enjoy the arts quite a bit. I like to see how psychological themes weave themselves through theater in particular. I find those themes really inform a lot of artists in what they create.” At Theater on the Couch talkbacks, Dr. Turner and the audience together explore the question: How can we connect our own psychology to what the author was trying to say?

Because The Last Five Years is essentially a musical exploration of the psychology of two individuals and their relationship, we asked Dr. Turner for his perspective on this intricate and introspective play.

The Last Five Years has an unusual construct of time. What effect will that have on the audience?

We’re very used to seeing stories about relationships that fail. I mean, frankly, that’s what makes up a lot of movies and television. What’s unique about this play is that, because it goes back and forth in time, you have to simultaneously hold both the tragic end of a relationship with the youthful indulgence and exuberance that you have at the beginning of a relationship. That is going to be very jarring. We’re not used to thinking about relationships that way.

What will be very interesting is that some people watching this play will be having relationship issues themselves. They could be at the tragic end or at the exuberant beginning. One of the things I like about this play is that you can see a lot of yourself in it.

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What do you think the main issues are in Cathy and Jamie’s relationship?

There are some very universal themes in relationships that are explored in the play, but they are couched in this specific question of how to balance one partner’s career over the other.

What do you make of that problem?

It’s a reflection of where our society is in terms of thinking about equality in relationships. If you look back 50 or 60 years, roles in marriages were very set. That was very limiting. There was no flexibility. Of course, for good reason and thankfully, that is not the way things are today. But as we’ve moved more toward relationship equality, there are issues that we face, because relationships are not always going to be equal. There are times when spouses have to make decisions about who’s going to stay at home and maybe suspend their career while the other spouse continues to work. In a relationship where equality is very important, those issues will create some conflict.

Image by Tumisu. Courtesy Pixabay.

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Can two artists be in a relationship together? Should they?

I’m reminded of a thing my grandmother used to say: “Opposites attract but should never marry.” I think that relationships work because the two people are complementary in some ways, but they challenge each other and limit each other in other ways. The health of a relationship is dependent on how well the two partners work together and how well they understand how each person fills in gaps for the other person. In this play, having two artists in a relationship is interesting—less because it’s two artists, but more because one has made a successful go of it with his art while the other is struggling.

One of the biggest differences between Jamie and Cathy is that he is very successful, very early in life and seemingly without trying very hard, while Cathy is trying very hard and can’t seem to be successful. Jamie has trouble wrapping his head around why his wife can’t be successful. She has trouble supporting him because she has a degree of jealousy.

One of the psychological things we’ll see in the play is how we use empathy in a relationship. And by empathy, I mean how we put ourselves in someone else’s shoes when we have not had that experience.

In a really strong relationship, Jamie could understand what it’s like to not be as successful and would try to understand how he can help Cathy. She could step into his shoes and ask, “What’s it like if I’m going to be critical of his success because I’m jealous?”

It’s also interesting how the topic of infidelity figures into that empathy as well. Is the infidelity a symptom of the failing marriage, or is the infidelity something else?

I think the infidelity comes from a lot of places. It comes from the failing marriage, it comes from who Jamie is as a person.

It also comes as a part of success. He has women who are very interested in him because of his success, and he doesn’t know what to do with that. I hope that, instead of just saying, “Oh, he’s a bad husband because he cheated,” someone in the audience is able to think about why he would cheat on her, to think about what the act means for him.

When people see this play, they tend to assign blame to one of the two characters. Why do people feel the need to assign blame in situations like this?

We first assign blame in situations where we have personal experience. Secondly, we usually have a tendency to blame the person we perceive to be the perpetrator and to sympathize or empathize more with the victim. I can easily understand why one could see Cathy as the victim and Jamie as the perpetrator of the breakup. But the way the playwright develops these two characters, it’s not quite that clear.

Often, when members of a relationship know the relationship is failing in some way, and they don’t know what to do about it, they will try to accelerate or bring the

OPPOSITE Photo by Katie Tegtmeyer, 2007. Courtesy Flickr.

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relationship issues to a denouement. With many people that I’ve worked with over the years, cheating is a way to do that. It brings the relationship issues front and center and gets the relationship moving toward either improvement or an end.

Do you think Cathy and Jamie’s relationship should have been saved?

That’s a question a lot of couples go through as they’re considering a breakup. As someone who’s worked with couples in situations like this before, part of my role in that situation is to help the couple decide whether or not the relationship needs to end. Therapists are typically agnostic about that. We come into that encounter saying, “Let’s figure out whether you want to save your marriage or not.”

Sometimes a marriage needs to end. You figure that out by understanding what compromises you are willing to make for the relationship. If the compromises you’re making are too difficult, it needs to end. If the compromises are outweighed by the benefits, then it should continue.

What makes a marriage last?

That’s a philosophical question we don’t know the answer to. Recently, I was chatting with somebody who said, “We’ve done 35 years of research and we now know exactly what makes relationships last.” And I was like, “Wow! After however many years of human evolution, we’ve now come to the point of understanding why relationships persist in just 35 years of research? Great! Please do share it!” [Laughs.]

But I think there are core facets about relationships that strengthen the foundation they’re built upon. How well can you communicate? That’s one of the most important. How easily can the two of you compromise? What are the societal and environmental ties that hold you together? I think that’s actually one of the biggest things affecting relationships. The more plugged in you are as a couple to a social network, the stronger your relationship is.

Anything else you’d like to say?

This is my fifth season with A.C.T. doing Theater on the Couch, and every play is a little bit different in terms of how I approach it or think about it. This one in particular strikes me as being very different, because it has such universal themes, and it appeals to every single person in the audience in various ways. Hopefully people will see this show as being therapeutic. That’s the way I look at it.

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A Last Five Years Glossary

Anita is a character in the 1957 musical West Side Story (book by Arthur Laurents, music by Leonard Bernstein, lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, conception and choreography by Jerome Robbins). The musical tells the story of Maria and Tony, two young New Yorkers who fall in love despite the fact that they are affiliated with rival gangs. Anita is Maria’s friend, who sings the songs “America,” “A Boy Like That,” and “I Have a Love.”

Aphrodite is the Greek goddess of love, beauty, and fertility.

The Atlantic Monthly, today known simply as the Atlantic, is a magazine founded in 1857 in Boston, Massachusetts. It is known for publishing fiction and poetry, and for introducing and encouraging the work of many early-career authors.

Backstage is a company that provides publications for people working in the entertainment industry. It publishes a magazine with information about the industry, which includes casting calls.

Borders was an international retail chain that sold books, movies, and music. The company filed for bankruptcy and closed in 2011.

Chewing on tin foil is notorious for causing pain in the teeth, especially where there are metal fillings. This pain comes from two different types of metal touching, which—using saliva as a conductor—creates a small electric shock called a galvanic shock. When the electric charge flows to the nerve of the tooth, the brain interprets the charge as pain.

Columbia University is an institution of higher learning in New York City with a renowned creative writing program. Its alumni include such authors as Federico García Lorca, Carson McCullers, Eudora Welty, Jack Kerouac, Langston Hughes, and Allen Ginsberg.

Crate & Barrel is an American chain of retail stores that sells home goods, housewares, and furniture.

Daisy Mae Yokum is one of the main characters in Al Capp’s comic strip Li’l Abner, a satire on the lives of hillbillies that ran in American newspapers from 1934 to 1977. She wore a low-cut polka-dot top with ruffled shoulders. This could also be a reference to Daisy Mae Duke, a character on the TV show The Dukes of Hazzard (1979–85), who wore a flannel shirt tied in the front.

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The Dakota is a cooperative apartment building located on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, New York City. It is best known as the home of musician and former Beatle John Lennon (born 1940) from 1973 until his murder in 1980. Three blocks north is the San Remo, a 27-floor cooperative luxury apartment building. The San Remo has been home to many celebrities, including Stephen Sondheim, Tiger Woods, Demi Moore, Glenn Close, Diane Keaton, and Steve Martin.

Draw a bead means to take aim. A “bead” is a small knob that forms a gun’s front sight.

Duran Duran is a British band, formed in 1978. Its musical style is new wave/synthpop. Some of the band’s most famous songs are “Hungry Like the Wolf ” (1982), “Rio” (1982), “Ordinary World” (1993), “Save a Prayer” (1982), and “The Wild Boys” (1984).

The Gotti clan refers to John Gotti Jr. (1940–2002), who was the boss of the Gambino crime family in New York City. The Gambino crime empire was founded in 1910 and is still operating today.

Goyisha is a Yiddish word describing a woman who is not Jewish.

Grand fromage is French for big cheese, an idiom referring to the most important person.

JCC stands for Jewish Community Center, an organization that provides social and recreational activities for Jewish people in a number of cities. It was founded as the Hebrew Young Men’s Literary Association in 1854, which had the mission to help Jewish immigrants when they came to America. It was renamed the Jewish Community Center in the early 1900s.

The lake in Central Park in New York, with the San Remo and the Dakota apartment buildings visible

in the background. Photo by Daniel Case, 2009. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

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Jerry Seinfeld (born 1954) is a comedian and actor, most famous for his sitcom Seinfeld (1989–98), which was set on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Seinfeld himself lived on the Upper West Side for many years.

John Updike (1932–2009) was a novelist, poet, and literary critic. He is one of three people who have won the Pulitzer Prize twice; his winning novels were Rabbit Is Rich (1982) and Rabbit at Rest (1990). His literary criticism is much revered; three hundred of his reviews have appeared in the New Yorker, a cultural magazine first published in 1925. It features articles about current events, as well as reviews of literature, film, theater, and media. It also publishes short fiction, poetry, and artwork.

Leave It to Beaver was a television sitcom that ran from 1957 to 1963. It chronicled the adventures of Theodore “The Beaver” Cleaver as he navigated school and home life. The Cleavers have achieved an iconic status in cultural history as the archetype of the ideal American family.

Linda Blair (born 1959) is an actress best known for her role as Regan, the young girl in The Exorcist (1973). In 1997, she was a replacement for the role of Rizzo in the 1994–98 Broadway revival of Grease. In the 2014 film version of The Last Five Years, the line “These are the people who cast Linda Blair in a musical” was changed to “These are the people who cast Russell Crowe in a musical.” This was in reference to Crowe’s role in the film version of Les Misérables, for which he received notoriously bad reviews. There are very few mentions of Blair’s performance in

Grease, since she was a replacement, but due to Jason Robert Brown’s reference, one can only assume that it had a similarly poor reception.

Minsk is the capital (and largest) city of the Eastern European Republic of Belarus.

Mister Ed was a television sitcom that ran from 1961 to 1966. It was about the adventures of a talking horse.

Mona Lisa is the subject of a sixteenth-century painting by Leonardo da Vinci. The painting is notorious for the subject’s enigmatic smile.

The museum that Cathy and Jamie mention is most likely the American Museum of Natural History, based on their references to seeing dinosaurs. The museum’s collection includes the skeletons of many prehistoric creatures. It is located on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, near Central Park.

Nirvana is frequently interpreted as the Buddhist version of heaven, but that’s not quite true. Literally, the word nirvana is Sanskrit for becoming extinguished. In the Buddhist religion, nirvana is the ultimate goal of the Buddhist path. It doesn’t necessarily occur after death; it is the state of being that comes with the cessation of suffering and its causes. In the Western lexicon, however, it has come to refer to a state of heavenly bliss.

Odessa is a city in the Eastern European country Ukraine.

Porgy is one of the principal characters in the 1934 musical Porgy and Bess, composed by George Gershwin with a libretto by

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OPPOSITE The balcony scene in West Side Story. Photo by Fred Fehl, 1957. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

DuBose Heyward and Ira Gershwin. Porgy and Bess takes place in Catfish Row, a fictional African American neighborhood in South Carolina, where Porgy, a disabled beggar, falls in love with the beautiful prostitute and drug addict Bess.

Prosciutto is a kind of Italian ham that is dry-cured, thinly sliced, and served uncooked.

Random House was a publishing house founded in 1925 by Bennett Cerf and Donald S. Klopfer. It became very suc-cessful and acquired many other pub-lishing firms, including Alfred A. Knopf, Pantheon Books, and Ballantine Books. In 2012, the company announced that it would merge with Penguin Books, and the company became Penguin Random House in 2013.

Seventy-Third Street in New York City runs east–west in Manhattan through the neighborhoods of the Upper East Side and the Upper West Side, interrupted by Central Park.

Seville is a city in Andalusia, Spain. Located on the Guadalquivir River, Seville is a popular tourist destination notable for its historic architecture and its Moorish heritage.

Shiksa is a Yiddish word for a woman who is not Jewish, or who is Jewish but does not practice the religion.

A skein is a length of coiled-up yarn, string, or thread.

Sonny Mehta is the editor-in-chief of Alfred A. Knopf, a publishing company founded in 1915.

Spring Valley is a village in Rockland County, New York, about 20 miles north of Manhattan.

Tango is a style of ballroom dance that originated in the 1880s in Buenos Aires, Argentina. It was influenced by Spanish flamenco dance and milonga, a fast and sensual Argentinian style of dance. By 1915, the dance was a craze in Europe and remains popular in Western culture today.

Tevye is the principal character of the 1964 musical Fiddler on the Roof (music by Jerry Bock, lyrics by Sheldon Harnick, book by Joseph Stein). Tevye struggles to keep Jewish tradition and heritage alive in his family against the backdrop of the 1905 Russian Revolution.

Tom Cruise (born 1962) is an actor best known for his roles in the Mission: Impossible films (1996–present), Risky Business (1983), Minority Report (2002), and The Last Samurai (2003). Since the premiere of The Last Five Years in 2002, Cruise has also become known for promoting the Church of Scientology. In the film version of The Last Five Years, the line “Met a guy in a class I was taking who you might say looked like Tom Cruise” was changed to “Met a guy in a class I was taking with some very well-placed tattoos.”

Tsuris is a Yiddish word that means aggravation or trouble.

Washington Heights is a neighborhood in Manhattan, New York City. It was once known for having a large population of Jewish residents.

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Questions to Consider1. What effect does the nonlinear structure of The Last Five Years have on the story being told?

2. If all the words were removed from the show, do you think the music would still tell the story? How so?

3. With whom did you sympathize more, Jamie or Cathy? Why?

4. How do you think American musical theater is evolving?

5. Why do you think The Last Five Years has endured over the years?

6. Director Michael Berresse says, “A few well-placed theatrical moments are what make live theater so special.” What are some of the best-placed theatrical moments in The Last Five Years? What makes them theatrical?

7. Why does Jamie cheat on Cathy?

For Further Information . . .Brown, Jason Robert. 13. Sh-K-Boom Records, 2009. CD.

———. The Bridges of Madison County. Sh-K-Boom Records, 2014. CD.

———. Jason Robert Brown. http://www.jasonrobertbrown.com/. 2016.

———. The Last Five Years. Sh-K-Boom Records, 2002. CD.

———. Parade. Masterworks Broadway, 1999. CD.

———. Songs for a New World. Masterworks Broadway, 1997. CD.

———. Wearing Someone Else’s Clothes. Sh-K-Boom Records, 2005. CD.

Bryer, Jackson R. and Richard A. Davison, ed. The Art of the American Musical: Conversations with the Creators. Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004.

The Last Five Years. Directed by Richard LaGravenese. Troy, MI: Anchor Bay Entertainment, 2015. DVD.