He said. She said. Let’s just call the whole thing off
For an actor performing alone on stage, the challenge is not to act or sing well: it’s to emit a stage presence so powerful it casts a magic spell on the entire room.
When it’s two actors on stage, the big challenge is not presence: it’s chemistry. To make the audience feel like it’s just the two of them in the room worth paying attention to.
They need to make the theatergoer forget about the guy to the left who keeps checking the time on his phone.
The lady in front who can’t sit still.
Or, in the case of last night’s production of The Last Five Years, the person a few seats away snoring lightly halfway into the musical.
Staged off-Broadway for a few months in 2002, Jason Robert Brown’s The Last Five Years has been performed in other countries, revived last year in New York, and has a film version that premieres at the Toronto International Film Festival next month.
It is about a young couple breaking up after five years of being together.
Set in New York, she is an aspiring Gentile theater actress who fails to get a career break. He is a Jewish writer who quits college as soon as The Atlantic Monthly publishes him and never looks back.
They fall in love, they marry. His career rises, hers doesn’t. They fall out of love.
The musical has a tricky narrative device, prior knowledge of which could make or break the theatergoer’s patience.
She (Cathy Hiatt played by Nikki Gil) starts her story in the present and narrates it backwards.
He (Jamie Wellerstein played by Joaquin Valdes) tells his story in chronological order.
At some point in the timeline—when he proposes to her during a boat ride under the moonlight—the two acknowledge each other’s presence on stage, touch hands, lock lips and spark a chemistry.
But, alas, only for a fleeting moment.
Before and after that scene, they each occupy their own space, never reaching out. Not to each other, not to the audience.
Instead, we are relegated to the role of guidance counselor, listening to a “he said, she said” version of what went wrong in the couple’s relationship.
At some point, we lose our patience and wonder: Are the two characters talking to each other? No. Are they talking to us? No. Should we just talk to each other? Good idea.
We try, but the usher quickly asks us to shush.
To be fair, the actors did their best.
Armed with the musical’s more peppy songs, Valdes, a magnetic and bright-eyed personality on stage, pleases with his eager voice and sprightly body.
His best performance was in “The Schmuel Song,” a story Jamie wrote about an old tailor in his dying years who is helped by a magical clock to figure out his dreams.
As he tells this story to Cathy, Valdes switches between three roles seamlessly—as Jamie, Schmuel and the clock—without cracking his voice or breaking a sweat.
Saddled with slow, sulky songs and a blah wardrobe that looks like she’s about to do the laundry, Gil, who normally sizzles on television, had very few opportunities to rock the stage with a lightbulb personality, but when she did, she owned it.
In the upbeat “Audition Sequence,” she uses jazz hands and legs to grab the audience’s attention and—for once—win its sympathy.
After that, she goes back to feeling sorry for herself.
Six musicians provide live music from behind the stage, cleverly hidden by Mio Infante’s design, which is marked by a blob-shaped bridge that suggests travelling through time. But the ensemble’s music is so overpowering it drowns out the voices of the actors—not strong and powerful to begin with.
It’s a pity. To get the story, the audience needs to listen to each character’s version of the relationship’s downward spiral, and that’s only possible if we can hear the lyrics loud and clear from where we are seated.
It’s not long before we zone out and start hoping, after each new song’s arrival, that it is to be the play’s last five minutes.
The Last Five Years. Aug 29 8pm, Aug 30 3:30pm & 8pm, and Aug 31 4pm. Carlos P. Romulo Auditorium, 4/F RCBC Plaza, Ayala cor Gil Puyat Aves, Makati City; www.ticketworld, +63 917 5545560. PHP833.60, PHP1250.40, PHP1458.80, PHP1563, PHP1771.40.
