The Last Five Years

One of the most innovative musicals of the last decade, Jason Robert Brown’s The Last Five Years tells the compelling, uplifting, and eventually tragic love story of Jamie, a writer, and Cathy, an aspiring actress. Through their five-year courtship, marriage, and divorce, Jamie receives much acclaim and success as a writer while Cathy struggles to make it as a performer, and this strain is too much for their relationship forcing them to leave one another.

Brown ingeniously tells the story from each character’s point of view, but with Jamie’s story told chronologically, and Cathy’s told simultaneously in reverse. The effect yields an incredibly dramatic and lush show, winning Brown the 2002 Drama Desk Awards for Best Music and Best Lyrics.