Review: THE LAST FIVE YEARS at Goodwood Theatre

Reviewed by Ewart Shaw, Friday 21st October 2022.

Boy meets girl and, in the next five years, we witness them as they meet, grow together, and grow apart. In The Last Five Years, given an exciting and passionate performance in the Goodwood Theatre, Jason Robert Brown takes the familiar story one step further. Jamie Wasserstein, an ambitious young Jewish writer, tells his story chronologically. Cathy Hiatt, her eyes on the musical theatre stage, starts with the desperation of loss and ends up brightly smiling as she kisses her old world goodbye. It's a skillful device that keeps the audience shifting their perspective as the stories develop and cross.

After more than a decade with Co-Opera and the Festival Statesmen, Jamie Moffatt has found his place. The voice is superb, passionate, and articulate, yet he also brings wistful warmth to the old Jewish story of Shmuel, the Tailor of Klimovicz. Katie Elle Jackson is almost new to me. I admired her Baker's Wife in the recent open-air performance of Into the Woods. Here she has to begin bitter and confused and become sweeter and more certain as the show progresses. This is a seriously impressive achievement.

Ciara Ferguson, Musical Director, at the helm of her highly skilled ensemble in the pit, was an excellent collaborator. Katherine Edmond's direction is straightforward on the stage of the Goodwood Theatre.

If Elephant in The Room Productions were to replace the orchestra in the pit with a decent piano, this show could and should tour very successfully to our regional theatres, but the ambitious decision to mount six performances across four days came up against one of the most crowded weekends in recent entertainment history. A pitifully small audience the night I saw it, loved it, but maybe felt their scattered applause might be worse than nothing.