Walking out of Pease Auditorium last Thursday after the fine new production of Jason Robert Brown’s The Last Five Years, I heard the wonderful sounds of frustration and bewilderment. CPCC Summer Theatre, local masters of the homegrown musical, have an entrenched audience that makes peering over their heads before the lights go down look like gazing over a cottonfield ready for harvest.
So the further CP producer Tom Vance leads his constituency from their comfort zone, the better I like it. The venerable Vance tossed a particularly wicked curve this season by adding an extra show to CP’s summer slate and offering it outside the usual four-show subscription slate. That allowed two of the company’s favorite performers, Susan Roberts Knowlson and Patrick Ratchford, to range beyond their typical Show Boat-Oklahoma-Music Man chemistry.
I’m happy they did. But I’m unhappy that the show ended its run on Sunday without connecting with its true audience — younger people who might enjoy pondering characters such as Cathy Hyatt and Jamie Wellerstein rather than merely humming their tunes.
Watching The Last Five Years, you would find it best to heed Vance’s pre-show advice and keep in mind that, while Jamie is narrating the couple’s relationship from beginning to end, Cathy is moving backwards — from their breakup back to their very beginning. A firm grip on your program also helped keep you oriented in the crisscrossing timelines. That’s where many of the bluehairs fell overboard, I’d guess.
Sailing was smoother for Ratchford in the early going. Jamie is a hotshot novelist on a fast-track to acceptance by a big-name publisher, literary prestige and nationwide book-signing tours. Above all, he’s been liberated from a litany of humdrum Jewish girlfriends by the “Shiksa Goddess” of his dreams. A showstopping song right out of the gate.
Meanwhile at the other side of their relationship, Cathy is “Still Hurting.” As an aspiring actress, she hasn’t broken into the A-list — or even the Z-list — of Broadway musical performers. So as Jamie moves forward to the gratifications of acceptance by the New Yorker and book signings, Cathy is marooned in hackneyed musicals produced by a summer stock company in — yikes! — Ohio.
While Knowlson mines a certain amount of humor from Cathy’s grim plight, Brown doesn’t provide enough of that humor early on to dispel the weepy, self-pitying impression she tends to make. Jamie moves from his shiksa mambo to an uptempo blues to a lovably klezmer-tinged novelty. Ratchford thrives on his golden chance to stretch out — a one-man Borscht Belt variety show. The best Mrs. Wellerstein can do is a country shuffle basking in her husband’s success.
Ah, but then we cross the crucial watershed of matrimony. The duet at the halfway mark, “The Next Ten Minutes,” has a Sondheim-like wittiness over a baseline pulsing with a Sondheim-like throb. Hereafter, Cathy’s moods get sunnier while Jamie’s darken. Even when she’s struggling at an audition, she’s delightful. “Climbing Uphill” is as much a showstopper for Knowlson as anything Ratchford does all evening. There’s a Molly Bloom affirmation in “We Can Do Better Than That” and pure girlish giddiness in Cathy’s final adieu, “Goodbye Until Tomorrow.”
It isn’t total role reversal because Jamie’s career is increasingly succeeding as his marriage is falling apart. He’s also given the privilege of committing adultery, so he can agonize with guilt instead of merely wallowing in self-pity. Believing in Cathy as an actress while she really doesn’t believe in herself, Jamie acquires a tragic gravitas befitting a literary lion.
Still the dominant impression for me at the end was the one Brown — perhaps too insistently — wished to convey. Look at what Cathy once was, and look at what this relationship did to her. Songs of innocence are fated to be engorged by songs of experience at the end of a sobering journey.
Bravos all around to Knowlson, Ratchford, and the sextet of musicians led by Jeana Neal Borman.
If you’re among the few who have seen Kathy Najimy and Mo Gaffney performing live or on HBO — and among the fewer who revere the comedy duo’s every move and grimace — you’re not likely to have much use for Off-Tryon Theatre Company’s revival of Parallel Lives: The Kathy and Mo Show. Otherwise, head out to the Cullman Avenue quonset and fasten your seatbelts. Amanda Liles and Jenn Quigley are having a good time onstage, and they’re delivering a comedy blast.Kicked off by two acerbic feminist sketches showing “Supreme Beings” creating a sexist world, the two halves of Parallel Lives make one joyous romp that rarely loses its edge 15 years after its first unveiling. Under Ashley Kerns’ crisp direction, Liles is sharper and funnier than we’ve ever seen her, and the lumpish Quigley meshes well with her more animated partner, playing most of the vulgar slow-witted men.
The Kathy-and-Mo concepts are still pretty wacky in the new millennium. A gay Denny’s is still a bizarre destination for Kris and Jeff’s teen date though we’ve moved a decade or more past the notorious expose of the chain’s racist hospitality. Annette and Gina’s clueless Brooklynese analysis of West Side Story could happen credibly tomorrow.
I felt a lull at the funereal “Three Sisters” sketch that carried over through the early part of “Las Hermanas,” where we meet two over-the-hill adult ed students. But the women’s consciousness mumbo jumbo that closes out Act 1 still has a potent frisson of relevance. Quigley and Liles make it devastating.
Act 2 keeps the momentum going briskly through its first three sketches. I’d forgotten the rapier-sharp skewering of Catholicism in “God” and the brief silliness of “Shakespeare.” But for some reason, there’s a laxity in delineating husband and wife in an otherwise tight “Futon Talk.” Then after a nice bit of mime (“Silent Torture”), I’ll have to admit falling prey to Gaffney-Najimy nostalgia, missing the mustache amid the boozy barroom dialogue of “Hank and Karen Sue.”
You know those half-serious, deeply sentimental sketches that used to show up at the tail-end of TV variety shows like Caesar’s or Gleason’s or Burnett’s? That’s “Hank and Karen Sue,” where Quigley as Hank and Liles as Karen Sue finally get a chance to deliver rounded characterizations and bring us to the edge of sadness. In the olden days of live sketch comedy hours, it was an effective way of sending us off with the sense of having ingested a full meal. Still is.
This article appears in Aug 25-31, 2004.
