Chagrin Valley Little Theatre

The Last Five Years by Jason Robert Brown

Performance Dates & Tickets

About the Play

…a sweet, wonderful, satisfying meditation on a marriage gone wrong…

Directed by Jacqi Loewy
Starring Rebecca Marks & Andrew Rothman
Accompanied by Dan Kamionkowski

Real-world relationships are rarely as black and white as the classic Broadway musicals tend to paint them. Tough circumstances, poor communication, and low self-esteem can often tear even the most promising couples apart. Jason Robert Brown, the Tony Award-winner behind the musicals Parade, Songs for a New World, Urban Cowboy and 13, brings this sort of complex and visceral view of the modern couple to the stage in The Last Five Years. Debuting in early 2001, this intimate two-actor musical has been produced around the world, and will have just completed an extremely popular extended run in London when Chagrin Valley Little Theatre's staging of it opens on October 29th.

In The Last Five Years, Andrew Rothman (CVLT, Kennedy's at Playhouse Square, Weathervane Playhouse, Rabbit Run) plays Jamie Wellerstein, an up-and-coming novelist who left Columbia University to pursue his literary career in New York. Rebecca Marks (Opera Cleveland, Cleveland Playhouse, Hanna Theater, Great Lakes Theater Festival, Beck Center, Weathervane Playhouse) plays Cathy Hiatt, a struggling stage actress from New Jersey. As Jamie's writing takes him to new horizons, Cathy strives to break out of summer stock and into Broadway. The plot is, at face value, straightforward; Jewish boy meets Catholic girl, they fall in love, marry, and eventually fall to pieces.

However, Jason Robert Brown lays out the story through an unusual twisting of the time line, in which Cathy tells her side of the relationship starting with the post-mortem, while Jamie begins his telling of the story with the first date. The two characters move in opposite directions through time, alternating dovetailed solo musical performances, punctuated by scant dialogue, and only meet to sing as a duo at their engagement and wedding in the middle of the tale. This unique bidirectional storytelling style allows Mr. Brown to balance the soaring highs of fresh love with the crushing lows of the breakup via fifteen original songs in varying styles, accompanied by Dan Kamionkowski at the piano.

At the helm is director Jacqi Loewy, who has staged The Last Five Years twice before; most recently at TrueNorth Cultural Arts in January 2010, and in 2006 at Akron's Weathervane Playhouse (a production which also featured Mr. Rothman in the role of 'Jamie'). A full-time professor of theatre/communication at Notre Dame College, and current Board President of the Cleveland Theater Collective, Jacqi has over a decade of Cleveland theatre credits. She has directed at The Cleveland Play House, Ensemble, Dobama, CASE, Charenton, Playhouse Square and Cleveland Public Theatre, and appeared on stage everywhere from Broadway to most Cleveland venues, including leading roles at Playhouse Square, Dobama, Charenton and Mercury Summer Stock. Jacqi had the privilege of supervising all three years of Tony 'n' Tina's Wedding, the longest-running show in Cleveland's history.

The Last Five Years, which is performed without intermission, is staged at CVLT's River Street Playhouse. This venue seats roughly one quarter the audience of its larger sibling, making it well-suited to the immediacy of this small-scale production.