The Last Five Years

The Last Five Years
East Hall Theater; ends Sun., Oct. 2

For the second time in as many months, a modest, two-person fringe show has put to shame the embarrassing elephantine excess going on over at the 5th Avenue. ReAct Theatre's staging of Jason Robert Brown's bittersweet off-Broadway musical romance is more of a rough gem than Andrew Lippa's John & Jen was back in July; it has an uncertain hand at the helm that leaves it resembling a likable workshop production. But it has abundant heart and honest emotion—two things missing from the canned commerce of something like Princesses.

It also has Brown's sung-through book score, a rich, witty, perceptive look at love that outdoes Lippa's engagingly simplistic piece (which Brown's own orchestration helped immeasurably). The Last Five Years gives us perspective on the courtship and eventually fraught marriage of a twentysomething couple, doggedly ambitious Jewish novelist Jamie Wellerstein and his beloved "shiksa goddess" Catherine Hiatt, a struggling, neurotic actress. Catherine's solos take us from the end of the relationship back to the end of the first date; Jamie sings his way forward. At the denouement of Brown's moving 90-minute conceit of trading songs and time frames, we're left with Jamie's last embittered goodbye and Catherine's radiant first.

Though ReAct has triple-cast the show throughout the run, its first weekend's successes and failures are probably a safe indication of what to expect. Catherine (Emjoy Gavino on opening night) is a more easily grasped character, and director David Hsieh and his capable music director/pianist Mark Rabe (who performed the same duties on John & Jen) have no problems bringing out all of who she is. The harried Catherine lacks confidence but not a self-sustaining sense of humor, and Gavino, who was a bit past her depth vocally as Cinderella in ReAct's Into the Woods, is here as bright and funny as she is believably doomed to disappointment. Whether trying to convince herself that Jamie's instant critical acclaim is also hers ("I'm a Part of That") or gritting her teeth through a comically miserable acting gig ("A Summer in Ohio"), Gavino's Catherine captures all the grays with which Brown has carefully shaded her.

Jamie is a tougher character for an actor to color—not without charm, but self-centered and too cocksure that his convictions can carry the day. Hsieh and Rabe are sidetracked by the combined mass of Jamie's ego, the go-getting songs Brown gives him, and the misplaced theatrical bravado of opening-night actor Timothy Glynn (Into the Woods' smug Prince). Gifted with a hearty, open presence and an often magnificent vocal instrument—when he hits a high note, you can bet it's the note to hit—Glynn always seems about to tell us that the corn is as high as an elephant's eye, or that something's coming, something good, if he can wait. The tense task of communicating the more ruminative nature of an intimate, if bouncy, chamber musical gives him an almost permanent crease between the eyebrows. Though Jamie's songs, befitting his fortunes, go up and up and up, Brown has nonetheless tucked tiny moments of worry down within them; even in his first flush of success, Jamie tells us he's "got a singular impression things are moving too fast." We don't get enough of that impression from Glynn's would-be showstoppers—Hsieh and Rabe can't him get to wedge himself into the contemplative chinks of Jamie's armor. (Well, he delves in there once, and wonderfully. "If I Didn't Believe in You" finds his furiously conflicted Jamie attempting to assure Catherine of her potential while explaining his need to explore his own at whatever cost: "I will not lose because you can't win.")

Hsieh's staging sorely needs an extra layer or two of polish. The awkward blocking and penny-pinching physical production prove to be impediments—the actors rarely move beyond their given marks, as if they're auditioning this material rather than enlarging it. Yet the score is so winning and well sung, and Hsieh's devotion (however flawed) to putting it across so apparent, that the show is worth a look and a listen. Much like the relationship it depicts, it's a troubled experience filled with moments of absorbing passion. STEVE WIECKING

Green Night
Chamber Theater; ends Sat., Sept. 24

Based loosely on the Arthurian legend of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Macha Monkey's production has all the outward trappings of political correctness run amok. Playwright John Kaufmann transforms the original story—in which Gawain faces off against the Green Knight in a torturous test of courage and self-sacrifice—into a sort of proto-feminist creation myth, featuring do-gooder ecologists, evil weapons manufacturers, prelapsarian primitives, and a prime piece of real estate that more or less holds the fate of the world in the balance.

It has a pretty hoary setup, wrung dry. When Gwen (Desiree Prewitt), an idealistic and somewhat fusty climatologist, strikes a Faustian bargain with cunning corporate henchmistress Val Green (Alycia Delmore), thereby transferring Cly-Mate's weather balloon guidance system into the hands of the dreaded military-industrial complex for "Project Ax Drop" . . . well, it's about here that anyone fed up with the liberal platitudes will find herself extremely hard-pressed to stifle a yelp of resignation. Nothing in particular is out of order—the acting is good, the writing terse and witty, and the narrative connected sure as a well-tended switchboard. It just seems too easy, unsullied by the sort of ambivalence and complexities that elevate art above the mere practice of pamphleteering. (And, besides that, this sort of science vs. primitive wisdom fable has already been done by Kurt Vonnegut in Cat's Cradle.)