Portland Stage Presents THE LAST FIVE YEARS By Jason Robert Brown

Portland Stage presents The Last Five Years by Jason Robert Brown April 30 through May 19. This hit musical by Tony Award-winning lyricist Jason Robert Brown deconstructs a love affair and marriage between an aspiring novelist and a struggling actress over five years. Told almost entirely through song, this piece moves backward and forward through time weaving the beginning and end of a love affair.

Starring Yarmouth Maine native, Laura Darrell as Cathy, and Johnny Shea as Jamie. Laura is known to many Mainers as the young girl with the beautiful voice who sang on A Very Special Christmas, which raised upwards of $50K for the Maine Children's Cancer Center. She also sang as a child at the Magic of Christmas at the Portland Symphony, and performed twice, as both a child and a teen, in Portland Stage's A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens.

The Last Five Years is an intimate, two person telling of a love affair. Cathy tells it from their divorce to the day they met, while Jamie careens forward from their first date to the end of their marriage. The two alternate as they weave through time and meet together at the center on their wedding day creating an intimate portrait of love and loss equal parts uplifting and heartbreaking. Where the musical really sings is in the unique perspectives Jamie and Cathy have on the same events. For the first half of the show we're treated to the clear ideas they have of each other, but as we get past the midpoint we start to see layers of complexity that lie beneath how they perceive each other and themselves.

Jason Robert Brown wrote the music and lyrics for The Last Five Years, Parade (book by Alfred Uhry, dir. Hal Prince) and Songs for a New World (dir. Daisy Prince), and contributed songs to Urban Cowboy the Musical. Winner: Tony Award for Best Score, three Drama Desk Awards, Kleban Award, and Gilman & Gonzalez-Falla Foundation Award. As a conductor and arranger, Mr. Brown's credits include Dina Was, A New Brain, john and jen, and Yoko Ono's New York Rock. His songs, including the cabaret standard "Stars and the Moon," have been performed and recorded by Audra McDonald, Betty Buckley, Karen Akers, Renée Fleming, Jon Hendricks, and many others. Lauren Kennedy's album Songs of Jason Robert Brownis available on PS Classics. Mr. Brown lives with his wife and daughter in NYC. He is a proud member of the Dramatists Guild and the American Federation of Musicians Local 802 and 47.

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