Nick Jonas in “The last five years”

I was an asshole, but I know I was an asshole, but I will always capitalize on the fact that I was an asshole “Art of art is a specific atmosphere, and 2001 was a peak year for that. This moment gave us to Jason Robert Brown The past five yearsA sort of stripped touch Shuntfully, we drive For the Cuspid Gen X – Millen and always a beloved standard for NetC hopes and the university theater departments by Skokie (where the show was created). In 1999, at 29, Brown had already won a Tony to Parade; Meanwhile, his marriage to actor Theresa O’Neill had collapsed. Two years later, he came melancholy and restless of the assault on the rupture of a marriage between a young Jewish writer whose star gets up quickly and her partner, an actress who cannot escape the summer stock. Art has not exactly eased the wounds of life: O’Neill continued Brown and Brown continued his back. Lincoln Center moved away from the production of the premiere of the musical in New York in 2002, perhaps because of the prosecution, and Brown – poorly insisting that the spectacle was not autobiographical – fits its second issue to make the female protagonist less like O’Neill.

Well, that’s all The bridges of the county of Madison At this stage. But for anyone depicting The past five yearsThe questions still hang on how to balance and complicate the sympathies of the musical. For Cathy, the actress, the story backs up, from sorrow to the first magic meeting. For Jamie, the author, the events go ahead – he begins like a budding novelist, about to withdraw, who is delighted to supposed an ode to his “Shiksa goddess” (“I had Shabbas dinners on Friday evening / with each shapiro in Washington”, he is on theumer. ” From a Broadway scene – famous and lucky, and also a cheater that slides his alliance, leaving a note and walked away.

The renewal of Whitney White is elegant and unpretentious – the lights of Stucey Derosier, elegantly juxtaposing oranges, gold and blues, are particularly charming to help mark the temporal and spiritual separations of history – but it has not entirely solved the problem of the asshole. Emotionally, this Last five years Go on the road, it is easier for the show: it undoubtedly belongs to its Cathy, the bright Adrienne Warren. It would be difficult to accept such a radiant interpreter, with such a killer voice, as an actor who cannot obtain the concert – except that Warren brings such sincere frustration and desire to the difficulties of Cathy that it becomes an unfortunate reminder of the way in which extraordinary talents exist, which were fighting against a system that refuses. While we follow it through a series of auditions that are unleashed from the soul in “Climbing Uphill”, satirical precision becomes almost too scary. “Why does the director look at his crotch?” She sings frantically, her internal monologue emerging as she performs a series of discount dance movements:

Why does this man look at my curriculum vitae?

Don’t look at my curriculum vitae.

I invented half of my curriculum vitae.

Look at me …

No, not my shoes.

Don’t watch my shoes –

I hate these fucking shoes.

Why did I choose these shoes?

Why did I choose this song?

Why did I choose this career? …

Why do I work so hard?

These are the people who throw Nene Leakes in a musical.

Nene Leakes, in previous productions, was Linda Blair: the show received some adjustments for the new era of celebrity cascadery casting. That his creative team feels a feeling of irony as to his own participation in this trend – his name is Nick Jonas and he plays Jamie – we cannot see on stage. There, Jonas does his best, but his Jamie just doesn’t have enough things to remove half of our hearts from Cathy de Warren and invest them in him. As a singer, he is stronger in poppier segments and more swoop more; Despite being micro, it becomes breathless and difficult to hear in its lower range. But it is not his voice that drops him; It is the lack of contours in its character. This jamie is too easily rejected as a white right guy selfish 101. He (Jamie, not, in particular, Jonas) can be categorically Jewish – the Rick brothers and the choreography of Jeff Kuperman include his share of Violous– the dance movements, and at one point, Jamie prefers to offer a Christmas present to Cathy with a great song and dance of a fable on a tailor named Schmuel – but the main engines of his personality and the growing conflicts of his marriage, present themselves as basic hetero stereotypes. He is ambitious; She is in need. He cheats; She suffers. He cannot stop looking at each “pair of breasts” that passes after their marriage; She sings “forever” and wanted to have her child. “I don’t want you to injure yourself,” he sings his four years in his story. “But … nobody can give you courage / nobody can thicken your skin / I will not fail so that you can be comfortable, Cathy. / I will not lose because you cannot win.”

These are devastating words, with the potential, to the credit of Brown, to land not only with a frank force, but with the sting of truth. Being the one in a relationship to feel like your horse is a good manner in advance on that of your partner can bring his own type of anxiety and empathetic pain. But White and Jonas did not build an anxious or particularly compassionate Jamie. Even in the first song of the character of the success of the snowball, Jonas plays everything excited and triumphant, giving no nuance to the gift of the optimistic number: “I have a singular impression / things move too quickly.” Later, “The Schmuel Song” is less like an offering in Cathy and more as a look of the look that she must sit. When Jamie finally confronts her with the possibility of her own shyness and self-sabotage, he seems only personally injured, not accumulated by the complexities of their power dynamics, and not of combat For She despite, or even through, the harshness of what he has to say.

“There is no message on the show,” said Brown Rifle In 2022. “I have no declaration to make. It’s just a story of two people who desperately want to be together and cannot be … It’s just a little bird that flies beautifully.” It’s good, but for this flight to make real beauty, a production must find a way to correct the imbalance that is cooked in the script. Here, Warren’s performance is the only thing to really hover. “I can do better than that,” she sings to Jamie, telling her past in her own hope and Chutzpah song early. If only it was not so easy to wish it to sing it in its wake.

The past five years is at the Hudson Theater.