THE LAST FIVE YEARS Reviews

Haven't even seen the show but if the comments on here are any indication these will be "grab your popcorn"-style reviews Especially if some critics try to use it as an excuse to decry cash-grab (mis)casting.

Updated On: 4/6/25 at 10:10 PM

Broadway Reddit is saying JRB made some unusual comments about the director during curtain call. Anyone have more info or a link to any video of the speech?

NYT: Green is mixed

THEATER

Review: How ‘The Last Five Years’ Became a Blur on Broadway

Nick Jonas and Adrienne Warren star in a muddy revival of Jason Robert Brown’s still-scathing musical.

"n the show’s first Broadway incarnation, starring the resplendent Adrienne Warren and an underpowered Nick Jonas, the structure (along with the balance) has been compromised. The production, which opened on Sunday at the Hudson Theater, muddies the show’s temporal ironies and flattens its emotional topography. Its meaning and thus its impact are short-circuited.

With material so precision-made, it takes just one mistake to do big damage. Instead of keeping the characters out of each other’s scenes as Brown’s libretto indicates, the director, Whitney White, often throws them together: one singing, one reacting to the song in mime. They make faces, make contact and even make out. As a result — follow me with a protractor if you must — each inhabits the other’s arc, thus disturbing their own. The individual timelines no longer track."

Daily Beast

Review: Nick Jonas Brings Strong Voice to a Gaslighting Jerk in ‘The Last Five Years’

I CAN DO BETTER THAN THAT

Nick Jonas and Adrienne Warren sing better than their characters connect in the new Broadway musical “The Last Five Years.”

https://www.thedailybeast.com/last-five-years-review-nick-jonas-brings-strong-voice-to-a-gaslighting-jerk/

Deadline says the problem isn't with the production, but with the material

https://deadline.com/feature/broadway-show-reviews-2024-2025-season-1236284911/

"No, the problem with The Last Five Years, even with White’s sensitive direction, splendid orchestrations that lean heavy on piano, percussion, guitar and some gorgeous cello, and an impressionistic New York streetscape set, is the play itself, too confusing to offer clarity when clarity is needed – is Cathy a good actress or just a pipe-dreamer? Is Jamie a narcissist or just a writer who wants to write?"

1 star from the NYP/Oleksinski

‘The Last Five Years’ review: Nick Jonas musical is the worst of the Broadway season

https://nypost.com/2025/04/06/entertainment/the-last-five-years-review-nick-jonas-musical-is-the-worst-of-the-broadway-season/

Holdren in Vulture

A Messy Breakup: Nick Jonas and Adrienne Warren in The Last Five Years

https://www.vulture.com/article/theater-review-nick-jonas-adrienne-warren-last-five-years-jason-robert-brown.html

"Whitney White’s revival is sleek and unpretentious—Stacey Derosier’s lights, elegantly juxtaposing oranges, golds, and blues, are particularly lovely in helping to score the story’s temporal and spiritual separations—but it hasn’t quite solved the asshole problem. Emotionally, this Last Five Years goes the route it’s easiest for the show to go: It belongs unquestionably to its Cathy, the luminous Adrienne Warren. It would be tough to accept a performer so radiant, with such a killer voice, as an actor who can’t get the gig — except that Warren brings such sincere frustration and longing to Cathy’s struggles that she becomes an unhappy reminder of just how many extraordinary talents there are out there, battling it out against a system that refuses to give."

B- from Entertainment Weekly

Nick Jonas and Adrienne Warren are incompatible but still charming in The Last Five Years

Jason Robert Brown's eulogy to a doomed marriage makes its long overdue Broadway debut.

https://ew.com/the-last-five-years-review-nick-jonas-adrienne-warren-broadway-incompatible-charming-11709679

TimeOut

The Last Five Years

Not since Beanie.

https://www.timeout.com/newyork/theater/the-last-five-years-broadway-review-nick-jonas-adrienne-warren-jason-robert-brown

"Not since Beanie Feldstein in the 2022 revival of Funny Girl has the advance skepticism that greeted a Broadway casting announcement proved so apt. Like Feldstein, Jonas is talented and likable, and he’s not some carpetbagger; he was a child actor in Beauty and the Beast and Les Misérables before he and his brothers became Disney Channel stars and international pop pinup boys. And, not for nothing, he has 35 million followers on Instagram. But concerns about his Jamie turn out to have been well-founded.

The problem is not that Jonas can’t sing the part, though he doesn’t sing it especially well. (He’s fine in his middle range but wobbly at the bottom and strained at the top.) It’s that the persona he has crafted over time and the performance habits that go with it—the ingratiating moves, mild pop riffs and bouncy strut of a cute, athletic, slightly cocky but basically nice All-American boy next door—are at a polar distance from what he is asked to play in The Last Five Years. Even with a pair of glasses slapped on his face, nothing about him reads for a moment as a Jewish intellectual novelist. He’s the shiksa goddess here."

...

"If everything else about this revival were perfect, it might somehow overcome the wrongness of its Jamie. But aside from Warren and the band—expanded from six to nine pieces in Brown’s new orchestrations, and music-directed once again by Tom Murray, who has been with this show from the start—White’s staging looks a mess. Model buildings crop up like Monopoly hotels on David Zinn’s unprepossessing set, and Stacey Derosier’s lighting nearly drowns the characters in pools of blue and red; even the costumes, by the normally faultless Dede Ayite, often miss their marks. Brown’s show deserves better than the serial missteps of this 85-minute faux pas de deux."

Play Esq. said: "Listen, I loved this production but I thought Green’s review was fair and better than I had expected. Lots of pull quotes for the show and Warren. I’m still hoping she has the momentum for a second Tony."

She definitely won't get her second Tony for this show. She probably won't even be nominated.

Theatrely

An Ambitious LAST FIVE YEARS On Broadway — Review

"Far from betraying the material (itself semi-autobiographical, drawn from the composer’s first marriage and divorce), this shift draws out a surprising emotional potency in Brown’s story. The central couple never feel more distant than when they are side-by-side, one a silent participant in the other’s idealized imagining of what their love could be, maybe should be, but so evidently is not.

...

If a gulf between the two performers ultimately drags the production down, that same gulf also has surprising dramaturgical upsides. As Cathy, Adrienne Warren is beyond superb; red-hot and scorching. It’s a radiantly sexy performance, if also a tragic one. Warren finds no contradiction between Cathy’s incredible talent and her debilitating self-doubt.

Put up against this kind of power, pop star Nick Jonas is almost comically outgunned. "

BorisTomashevsky said: "Broadway Reddit is saying JRB made some unusual comments about the director during curtain call. Anyone have more info or a link to any video of the speech?"

We demand gossip!