Two decades after it was first produced, I was finally won over to Jason Robert Brown’s two-character musical inspired by the unraveling of his first marriage. This was in 2021 during the pandemic, when Out of the Box Theatrics presented a production online. Four years later, “The Last Five Years” is opening tonight for the first time on Broadway, featuring the fan magnet Nick Jonas and Tony winner Adrienne Warren as the mismatched couple. I’m back to wondering why it’s such a cult favorite.

 Jamie Wellerstein and Cathy Hiatt are mismatched from the get-go;  it’s built into the way the show is structured. The musical begins with Cathy at the end of their five-year relationship (singing a woeful “Still Hurting”), and then Jamie at the beginning of it (singing an exuberant “Shiksa Goddess.”) In a series of alternating solos, Catherine’s songs travel back in time from resentful to hopeful, while Jamie’s travel forward, from fixated to fed up.  They meet each other in the middle, singing only one duet, the eighth song of the fifteen in the show (“The Next Ten Minutes”) when they get married. 

Brown’s structure is novel  (reminiscent of Sondheim’s musical “Merrily We Roll Along” and Pinter’s play “Betrayal”) , and his lyrics can be clever. They are also sometimes telling.  In an early song, “Moving Too Fast,” Jamie exults simultaneously about his romantic life and his career (“I found a woman I love/And I found an agent who loves me.”), a tip-off that his career is at least as important as their relationship, and we will witness it becoming ever-more important as a factor in their breakup. That’s one of the ways that they’re mismatched. His ambitions to become a successful writer are realized during the course of the five years, while her less confident efforts to become an actress stagnate. When Jamie sings “If I Didn’t Believe In You,”  ostensibly intended to encourage Cathy, he is really all but declaring (perhaps unintentionally) that their marriage is doomed:

“No one can give you courage
No one can thicken your skin.
I will not fail so you can be comfortable, Cathy. 
I will not lose because you can’t win.”

But novelty and cleverness are not enough to turn “The Last Five Years” into a fully realized musical, and neither is Brown’s score, although many of the songs, ranging from catchy to lilting, have become beloved singalong and  audition material. What has made “The Last Five Years” hold together as more than a pleasant-enough collection of show songs was a credible sense of connection between the two characters.  Of the several productions of the show that I’ve seen, the one in 2021 achieved this best — through the staging, which circumvented the script by placing  the two together in the scenes, and through the palpable chemistry of the two performers, Nicholas Edwards and  Nasia Thomas (who, intriguingly, is the standby for Cathy in the current production.)

On Broadway, director Whitney White keeps the staging largely to a series of solos, detached from much specificity or a sense of lived-in experience. It felt symbolic to me (and annoying) that David Zinn, a multiple Tony winning and normally excellent set designer, relies repeatedly on a backdrop of clouds in a blue sky.

 More crucially,  Adrienne Warren and Nick Jonas, who are appealing and talented singers, just don’t seem like a match for these roles, or for each other.

It’s not completely clear why. The formulas for credibility, and for chemistry, tend to be intangible; what triggers an audience to sense them, or prevents us from doing so, can be subconscious. For example, Jonas, as the son of an ordained minister at an Assemblies of God church, whose wedding to Priyanka Chopra featured both Hindu and Christian ceremonies, is — need I point this out? — not Jewish.  But Jamie very much is.  He drops in Yiddishisms, and two entire songs hinge on his Jewishness, including the very first one he sings, “Shiksa Goddess,” in which he is ecstatic that he’s finally dating someone who’s not Jewish – even though (or maybe exactly because) “I’m breaking my mother’s heart.”  The lyrics are over the top:

“If you had a tattoo, that wouldn’t matter.
If you had a shaved head, that would be cool.
If you came from Spain or Japan
Or the back of a van –
Just as long as you’re not from Hebrew school…. I’m your Hebrew slave, at your service!”

It’s awkward that Jamie calls Cathy a “shiksa goddess,” a once pejorative phrase that means a non-Jewish woman, and (in the cultural milieu with which I’m acquainted) the connotation is of a blonde bombshell — very unlikely to be the phrase that a Yiddish user would employ to describe a Black woman.   That Adrienne Warren is Black makes some of the other lyrics feel off as well. (Would Jamie offer to be her slave?) 

I doubt this mismatch of ethnic identities between characters and performers contributed heavily to the feeling that they were miscast. After all, New York theatergoers in the 21st century are used to making such adjustments. Norbert Leo Butz, who originated the role of Jamie back in 2001, wasn’t Jewish either. The disparity just helps drive home the perception that Jonas isn’t so much portraying a character as just singing the songs.

Far more likely to have a direct effect on the credibility of their casting and the plausibility of their characters’ relationship is, ironically enough, Adrienne Warren’s talent. Warren won her Tony for her powerhouse performance in the title role of “Tina.”  Tina Turner, the character she played, was a natural talent, and it is easy to see Warren that way as well. She puts her all into several of the songs that Cathy sings. But Cathy is supposed to be an insecure performer who is apparently so much the opposite of a natural talent that Jamie has to keep on encouraging her. Indeed, several of her songs are meant to be auditions that she’s failing. As I said, this disparity is meant to be part of the tension between the two. But, if anything, the disparity is reversed: Warren’s voice was stronger, and her delivery of the lyrics more crisp.

There are several clues in the songs that the disintegration of their marriage was inevitable — that they were manifestly mismatched. But for this relationship to matter to us, we have to discern something – anything — that drew them together in the first place.

“The Last Five Years” is playing at the Hudson Theater, which is one theater down West 44th Street from the Belasco, the home of “Maybe Happy Ending.” That musical is about two robots in the future who are running out of juice – not a story, I can reasonably guarantee you, of an actual couple.  Yet we wind up believing in their connection, and caring about what happens to them.

The Last Five Years
Hudson Theater through June 22, 2025.
Running time: 90 minutes, no intermission
Tickets: $77 – $272
Music and lyrics by Jason Robert Brown
Directed by Whitney White
Choreography by Jeff Kuperman & Rick Kuperman, scenic design by David Zinn, costume design by Dede Ayite, lighting design by Stacey Derosier, sound design by Cody Spencer, wig & hair design by Mia Neal, music direction by Tom Murray, and casting by Taylor Williams.
Cast: Nick Jonas and Adrienne Warren.