The Last Five Years
Opening Night: April 6, 2025
Theater: Hudson Theatre
Website: thelastfiveyearsbroadway.com
Experience the messy, euphoric, sexy, savage, fleeting rush of falling in and out of love in New York City at The Last Five Years, starring Grammy Award® and Golden Globe nominee Nick Jonas and Tony Award® winner Adrienne Warren. She begins at the breakup. He begins at the first kiss. Both sides of this five-year relationship play out in 90 minutes at this heart-racing theatrical event. One of the most popular musicals of the last 25 years comes to Broadway for the first time ever, featuring the acclaimed powerhouse score by Tony Award® winner Jason Robert Brown, and a bold new vision by Tony Award-nominated director Whitney White. Don’t wait until goodbye—strictly limited engagement ends June 22.
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April 6, 2025
But in 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.
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April 7, 2025
Each song must bear the emotional fullness of a scene, because it’s an entire memory. Warren can do this. Jonas, simply, cannot. Or does not.
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April 6, 2025
But for the most part, this is still The Last Five Years as devoted fans know it: a tuneful sketch of an ill-considered marriage between two young people who still hadn’t fully discovered who they were and what they wanted. The silver lining is it only took them five years to realize it.
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April 6, 2025
They sing magnificently and there’s real chemistry between the two of them, but Whitney White’s direction is literal and unimaginative to the extreme. There’s no emotional payoff in these two stories traveling in opposite directions.
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April 6, 2025
White has crafted an intriguing and intellectually ambitious revival, one that embraces the brutal emotional honesty of Brown’s source material.
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April 7, 2025
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.
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April 6, 2025
In the ugly revival of a work that doesn’t belong on Broadway in the first place, the pair’s already monotonous journey becomes a textureless concert that’s frustratingly hard to track for a show that’s been constantly produced all over the world for more than two decades.
READ THE REVIEWApril 6, 2025
The score, as ever, is jammed with gems. But like a troubled couple, the production has issues. Under the direction of Whitney White, Warren and Jonas overdo their performances, pushing too hard too often.
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April 6, 2025
In a season of overhyped shows, the evident sincerity, the effort, the fervent belief in character – and Warren’s occasional transcendence – feels refreshing.
READ THE REVIEWApril 6, 2025
Both of these performers are, of course, whopping musical talents and their mutual vocal prowess is very much on display to the obvious delight, especially, of the many Jonas fans in the house.
READ THE REVIEWApril 6, 2025
The musical gives its performers center stage with nothing to hide behind and plenty of spotlight to fill. Both stars rise to the occasion.
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April 6, 2025
The handsome pop star sings a solid and thankless role with a tuneful determination, with Jonas’ easy-going good-guy image crashing hard against songs he has to sing that make Jamie out to be a complete and utter a-hole.
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April 6, 2025
Unfortunately, this long-awaited debut is a frustrating misfire — overproduced, emotionally hollow, and fundamentally at odds with the delicate intimacy that makes the musical so beloved.
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April 6, 2025
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.
READ THE REVIEWApril 6, 2025
More crucially, Adrienne Warren and Nick Jonas, who are appealing and talented singers, just don’t seem like a match for these roles, or for each other.
READ THE REVIEWApril 6, 2025
Due to a combination of casting, direction, stage presence and downright talent, Adrienne Warren alone spends the evening airborne, on the upper end of the seesaw and sometimes soaring high above. Nick Jonas remains cemented to the stage floor, mostly, depleting The Last Five Years of its buoyancy.
READ THE REVIEWApril 6, 2025
Director Whitney White and a skillful design team honor the piece’s two-planks-and-a-passion minimalist roots, while offering plenty to delight the eye and ear.
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