The Next Ten Minutes

In my rush to bitch about Sherie Rene Scott last night, I didn't really do justice to the quality of The Last Five Years. The show is a real wonder, even if some of the changes they made to pacify Jason Robert Brown's ex-wife apparently hurt the show in little ways.

The unconventional chronological structure--the man tells the story of his marriage and divorce from beginning to end, intercut with the woman's recollection told from end to beginning--is the selling point, but the remarkable thing about it is that it's justified. I've never been fully able to understand why Merrily We Roll Along has to move backwards, particularly with the full-circle graduation scenes eliminated. It only has drama and pathos when you move from the unhappy later scenes to the hopeful earlier ones, but that's simply because it's not an innately dramatic story.

There's a moment in The Last Five Years, as close as possible to the middle of the show, where Jamie and Cathy both come into light and start playing the same scene at the same time. Even if you know, as I knew, what was coming, you can't help but gasp at how absolutely perfect the structure of the show is at that point. The centerpiece, their wedding, is the only moment where their stories intersect. We've now seen one account of the beginning of their relationship and one account of its end. And the arcs go in opposite directions because the characters are moving apart. This is the only time in the show when both of them are blissfully happy, and we know then that we are about to see her slide into ignorance and him into disillusionment. And that's not gratuitous either--it echoes the primary reason for the collapse of their marriage, that his career moved ahead while hers disintegrated.

The form and the function are perfectly suited for one another. This is how good musicals are made. Hell, this is how everything good is made.