What's the most important element of a musical? The story? The acting? The directing? No. As every original cast recording from Oklahoma! to Chicago will tell you, it's the music. And this production of Jason Robert Brown's millennial melodrama The Last Five Years is a musical masterclass.
One glance at the programme is enough to prove just how much expertise has gone into the musicianship and vocal performances for this show. The director, producer, sound designer and two of the four actors are full-time music students (and a third performed in West End musicals before coming to Oxford). Director Louis Benneyworth is Resident Conductor with the OU Sinfonietta, and his original score for A View From The Bridge will be heard on the Playhouse stage a few weeks from now. Rebekah Devlin, who played Cathy at the performance I saw, spent ten years training at Belfast School of Performing Arts before coming to Oxford (in fact, with so much focus on the performers’ credentials, I was surprised to see that they’d neglected to credit the playwright himself.).
Anyway, the musical pedigree is impeccable - and it shows. Voices are clear, resonant, expertly trilled and pitched. Instruments are in tune, in time and out of sight. Even the sound design, an area so prone to screwing up the most well-intentioned of productions, is tight as a tenor's tuxedo.
And this is all vitally important, because The Last Five Years is a completely sung show. Half concert, half operetta, it has not a spoken word in it. It's an ostensibly simple, and actionably autobiographical*, story about a boy and a girl, Jamie and Cathy, who meet, fall in love, marry, fall apart and separate within a five-year period. And if that sounds a bit dull, don't worry, because Brown had the inspired (if not entirely original) idea of making Cathy's story run in reverse chronological order, while Jamie's is going forward.
The two characters occupy separate halves of the stage, never acknowledging each other's presence apart from one moment right in the middle of the show where their timelines cross, like Dr Who and River Song, at their wedding. It's a genuinely beautiful moment, where they embrace, dance and sing in perfect harmony, before swapping sides and continuing their solipsistic solos.
As if that weren't structurally complex enough, at alternate performances the actors playing Jamie switch between Aaron Gelkoff and Phoenix Barnett, and Cathy swaps between Rebekah Devlin and Imogen Bowden. I can't comment on Barnett and Bowden, but if Gelkoff and Devlin are anything to go by, they will be outstanding.
With so much focus on technical brilliance in the music department, it's fair to say that staging and drama are left lagging a little behind. There is an occasional, lovely effect of silhouettes reflecting the action with nostalgic irony. But apart from that, this is really a succession of standalone torch-songs. What’s missing is a sense of how the story really develops, and how the two convergent narratives interact with and play off each other.
On the rare occasions when this happens, the show takes flight like an eagle uplifting from its nest. At the end, for example, Cathy looks at Jamie and sings ‘Goodbye until Tomorrow’ (having only just met him), while he responds simply with ‘Goodbye’ (as he’s leaving her forever). It’s a poignant, emotional gut-punch, encapsulating the whole relationship in four words, and I felt that there were more such moments of dramatic potential waiting to be teased out of the script, that never quite made it to the audience’s level of perception. Instead, some of the numbers, such as Cathy’s ‘Climbing Uphill’ (about the difficulty she’s having in her acting career), feel like isolated memories rather than integrated parts of a whole. As a result, the overall dramatic effect is a bit like seeing a group of singers perform songs from West Side Story with an orchestra at the Royal Albert Hall, rather than as a piece of independent theatre.
But the focus here is on the music, and that is immaculate. If you like musicals, and your tastes extend to pop, jazz, classical, Klezmer, Latin, Blues, Rock and Folk, you will find plenty to enjoy in The Last Five Years. Music students are usually confined to their own specialist department in a stage production. At the Pilch this week they’ve taken over the whole show. And boy do they deliver.
* No exaggeration: Brown's ex-wife sued him for breaking non-disclosure agreements about their divorce after the show premiered in 2001.