Review The Last Five Years

The Last Five Years
by Jason Robert Brown

A Final Chapter
https://www.stjamestheatre.co.uk

The Last Five Years is a gauzy ribboned confection with a bitter pill underneath the wrapping. This two-hander charting the coupledom of novelist Jamie (Jonathan Bailey) and actress Cathy (Samantha Barks), an almost totally sung-through American musical, first performed in 2001, after an intial stumble has become a worldwide success.

It's a piece for a post-war generation - that is post Vietnam War and the many conflicts since then, all boiled down to the short-lived marriage of writer and aspiring actress in New York whose lives and careers are structurally opposed within the piece.

In some ways, this is a modern version of Romeo and Juliet, with the death of love rather than the lovers and an unintended career war between an agented published writer and a performer still on the audition roundabout. A portion of each of the couple's souls are sliced, diced and wither by the undoubted success of Jewish author Jamie and the relative career failure of Irish Catholic Cathy. 

Directed by the composer Jason Robert-Brown, the scenery is minimal. With musicians led by musical director Torquil Munroe on scaffolding above, loft apartment brickwork slide open to bring forward a desk, a door, at one instance a boat and nicely understated use of video footage (Jeff Sugg).

Samantha Barks brings heartrending and humorous soaring vocals to the role of Cathy. She's well-matched by Jonathan Bailey's Jamie whose initial infectious charm and over-confidence hardens into darker ambition and infidelity. 

Like Harold Pinter's Betrayal and Stephen Sondheim and George Furth's Merrily We Roll Along  (the song Moving Too Fast perhaps has an oblique reference to the latter), we're given a rewind, as well as a play forward, of the romance and rupture.

Cathy is the musical's catalyst. The first song is her realisation Jamie her husband has left her, Still Hurting, "Jamie decides it’s his right to decide/Jamie’s got secrets he doesn’t confide/ And I’m still hurting.” Her story runs backwards to the dawn of love when life seemed far more straightforward.

From the first, despite the beauty of the songs in a range of styles,  there's sour with the sweet. Principally it's Jamie, whose story runs in chronological order, who is allowed to inscribe his version to the outside world. Even if it is Cathy who catches the complexity of tone at the beginning, realising how lies and authorship interact and now characterise her life.

For throughout the relationship, it is male writer Jamie telling female actress Cathy who she is. From the simple  crassness where, nevertheless, his energy provides wit, of Shiksa Goddess  "I'd say, 'Hey! Hey! Shiksa goddess!/I've been waiting for someone like.../You, breaking the circle/You, taking the light/You, you are the story/I should write/I have to write!'.

Jamie even assumes the garb of secular rabbidom (there are sly glimpses of Fiddler On The Roof in the musical arrangements and staging) combined with a fairy storyteller in Tbe Schmeul Song.

There he spins a Danny Kaye/Sylvia Fine-type yarn (although the song sweetly stands on its two feet without knowing that) by the light of a fully decked-out Christmas tree, apparently instructing Cathy what she should do to succeed.

The couple only come together musically on stage in a marriage duet "The Next 10 minutes" on a Central Park boating lake where the moment after there's a touch of The Lady Of Shalott drifting off to Camelot as Cathy is sent off in the boat alone.

At the same time Jamie's "If I Didn't Believe" just misses crossing with Cathy's disappointment with her audition in "Climbing Uphill" and marks the point when his glib career-politicking and domestic life merge, as he distances himself from her and what he sees as failure.

The tale of the one left behind is not of course original: A Star Is Born being a prime example. But this piece juxtaposes and sets at odds two separate but not unrelated professions, author and performer.

Maybe the individual stories are not always a tight metaphorical fit but there is more than enough wit and romance in the one-act 90-minute score and book for performers to scoop up and make them their own without the audience having to worry about that.  It's a green light for a tender, bittersweet intimate tale of love and betrayal with a steely core at its centre. 

Review Titanic

Titanic

Music and Lyrics by Maury Yeston

Book by Peter Stone

And The Band Plays On

http://www.charingcrosstheatre.co.uk/show/26/Titanic+

Watching the ever-enduring history of the Titanic passenger liner in this musical, which originally opened several months before the 1997 release of the  Oscar winning movie,  a thought began to form. What if this version of the famous story, music and lyrics by Maury Yeston, book by Peter Stone, had bundled together echos of other tales of overweening pride snd technological innovation followed by disaster?

For whatever the truth about the Titanic, and the musical follows a traditional trajectory taking on board what may be newspaper embellishments and legal fictions of the official enquiry's many vested interests, this is an archetypal Icarus story.

It charts the history of the passenger ship's ill-fated  transatlantic journey when it hit an iceberg on its maiden voyage in 1912 with the loss of over 1,500 lives. Meanwhile the chairman of the company who was on board, Bruce Ismay (a sonorous David Bardsley)  lived on to be cast in real life as the villain of the piece, an Icarus who survived.

From the start in the Yeston/Stone version, the over-confident executive boasts the qualities of the new ship as much for competitive commercial reasons as pride - a floating city to compare with the wonders of the world, but unlike them, soon to be set free from its moorings to sail the ocean.

Nevertheless listening closely to Yeston's lyrics and Stone's book, there  were delicate echoes of other stories. Fritz Lang's movie tale of technology run rampant, Metropolis and HG Wells's stock exchange fable,Tono-Bungay with the talk of "cornering the market". 

Or maybe (should we whisper it?) even the perilous and expensive act of putting on a full-scale new musical underpinned by a crazy paving of financial, intertwined with artistic, interests - and a possible closing night blame game.   

The current run is a revival of director Thom Southerland's 2013 Southwark Playhouse production,  a cut-down chamber version of the original musical with a seven man (and woman).band of strings and percussion and a 20-strong cast, some of whom double up.

David Woodhead's two tiered set of riveted metal panelling, white railings and laddered crow's nest on wheels ingeniously also uses both the stage and circle balcony to evoke the sides and different decks of the  luxurious ship. We are in the midst of a vessel's first voyage from Southampton but also what had become a habitual journey for the ultra rich and a once-in-a-lifetime experience for the moderately well-off and those, mostly poor,  seeking new lives in America.

Yet the musical is also a waterlogged dream, as conjured up by the smoke gray blue rivetted panels, plus the grainy lighting (Howard  Hudson) poking through  the portholes and the eerie ship's hums and rumbles (sound by Andrew Johnson) in the opening moments.

The ship's builder Thomas Andrews (Siôn Lloyd) sits calmily perusing his blueprints of the Titanic's brave new world  for all those seeking the fruits of an age of progress, where the future could only be  larger, cleaner, faster.

The lives of those on board are brought to the fore, with their own ties to land, either in solos, duets or choral set pieces. There's the miner Barrett (Niall Sheehy), who could have stepped out of a DH Lawrence novel, turned ship's stoker. He finds an unlikely ally in the perfectionist Marconi wireless operator Bride (Matthew Crowe). 

The latter who out of kindness and pride in his work, but maybe also in an unwitting revelation about the Royal Mail contracted ship, offers Barrett a hundred percent  "commercial discount" to send a message back to his girlfriend.  This culminates in a delightful duet as he  translates Barrett's love letter into Morse code dots and dashes.

It felt to us by sticking to the stories which circulated about the sinking, whether true or not, the feel of the instability of the legend comes through. The First Officer Murdoch (Scott Cripps), the second in command and on the bridge when the ship struck the iceberg,  confessed near the beginning  to shying away from commanding a vessel because of the responsibility involved.

The captain (Philip Rham), the master of the ship, who holds the lives of those on the Belfast-built vessel in the palm of his hand, and despite forbidding alcohol on the bridge, seems increasingly sucked into the louche partying on board and loses, literarally and metaphorically, his bearings. Yet it is Murdoch who takes the blame, as if he were bailing out water on one side, little knowing it would pour in on another, and he ends his life as if he were a guilty man.

With memorable work from the wide-eyed steward Etches (James Gant), social climbing but startling realistic Alice Beane (Claire Machin) and the three "Kates", Irish immigrant girls (Victoria Serra, Jessica Paul and Scarlett Courtney), there is a high standard of singing,  acting and dancing (musical stager Cressida Carré) from all the cast.

The world of brash overconfidence, the super wealthy, the aspirational poor looking towards a land of opportunity still exists. The stirring symphonic score spans twentieth century musical styles with hints of Gilbert and Sullivan, Irving Berlin, Rogers & Hammerstein and Stephen Sondheim amongst others. 

The angle on the well-known story presented in the musical Titanic still inhabits a recognizable world in our post 9/11, post Concorde, post credit crunch, post invasion twenty first century age. Even if it may be hubris to think that a mere musical carries such a heavy burden. 

The book of  almost documentary precision highlights how  keeping to the story as reported,  can, in a very natural way, reflect on other man-made events and disasters the audience knows to be in the future. A green light for a thoughtful and resonant ensemble piece.