2010 Season – Crisis of Faith

The Last Five Years
Music and Lyrics by

Jason Robert Brown

Directed by Mickey Lund

With John Halmi and Sheri Kuznicki Owen

Music by Ryan Shookman

A contemporary song-cycle musical that ingeniously chronicles the five-year life of a marriage, from meeting to break-up…or from break-up to meeting, depending on how you look at it.  The Last Five Years is an intensely personal look at the relationship between a writer and an actress told from both points of view.

Director’s Notes
Perhaps it could be considered ironic that it has taken Dignity Players the last five years to get to a point where the production of this edgy, contemporary song-cycle musical was possible. The fact of the matter is that it was five years ago this month that we put a planned concert version of this very show on hold indefinitely for a variety of reasons, not the least of which being that Dignity Players had not yet produced a musical nor proved its ability to produce musicals with a social message in a minimalist style. Since then, we have successfully produced two musicals, Triumph of Love and Vanishing Point, both relatively big shows that we scaled back considerably to meet the requirements of our performance space. We produced them not because of their message, but because of my desire as artistic director to entertain our audiences.

There’s certainly nothing wrong with producing an entertaining show, and it is my hope that our 2011 season will take on a much lighter tone and require far less of our audience’s faithful concentration to digest each show’s message. But The Last Five Years also embodies the theme of the Dignity Players current season: plays and musicals focused around individuals’ crises of faith. In the character of Kathy, we witness an aspiring performer in a crisis of confidence, beaten down by endless failed auditions as well as the failure of the one thing she “got right”: her marriage. In Jamie, we see a successful writer and novelist also experience a crisis of confidence: his burning need to be in love and to be loved by all around him.

There is no doubt that the passage of time, either forward or backward, changes our perception of both events and people. So Jamie and Kathy move through time, one forward and one backward, allowing us to witness the events that lead to the failure of their marriage—and perhaps gain an insight into our own crises that will allow us to learn, grow, and change for the better.

I would like to thank Dave Thompson for his encouragement, support, and deep knowledge of this music and this show; Ryan Shookman for his commitment to doing good theatre and his incredible ability to interpret this stunning music; and John Halmi and Sheri Kuznicki Owen, who gave tirelessly of themselves to fulfill my vision of these characters and sing music that, on one hand is hauntingly beautiful, and on the other is deceptively difficult. I can think of no others with whom I’d rather have shared this journey.