‘The Last Five Years’ @ Circle Theatre

Promo/show photos by TayStan Photography

—Jan Farrington

I couldn’t truly say I walked out “happy” from Circle Theatre’s intense production of Jason Robert Brown’s musical The Last Five Years.

But was I moved? Yes.

And was I satisfied? Also yes.

Real life and real love don’t often seem (to us, undergoing it) to arrange events in the beautiful shape of an X—the configuration of a well-used path, a crossroads—or a Metro system, in the case of the always ancient, always new city of Rome, whose simple X-shaped subway makes it easy to find our way back to the center—to meet, to start over, to choose another leg of the X to explore. To us in the thick of things, love’s journey may appear as a confusing tangle of yarn, or a mess of spaghetti getting stickier to handle each minute.

Metaphors aside, it is moving and it is satisfying to experience a love story (not ours, thank God) whose graceful, painful symmetry was created for artistic impact. Composer and lyricist Brown gives us a X-shaped love story told in songs, sung through by the two characters onstage, Cathy (Laila Jalil) and Jamie (Jens Jacobson). The Last Five Years is the chronicle of their meeting, their love, their loss—but in opposite directions. One lover goes from bitter hurt toward the moment of ecstatic, hopeful meeting. The other starts at ecstatic, but then slowly pulls away toward a final leave-taking. From Yes to No, from No to Yes. It has a heart-hurting beauty.

Director Ashley H. White uses a light hand on her two talented performers, giving them room for a range of believable emotions that pull and push at the audience. Jalil’s Cathy, an aspiring (but not breakout-famous) actress, comes in hot, “Still Hurting” and with Jamie’s transgressions plain on her face. In contrast, of course, Jamie—a novelist whose career is about to explode—enters having just met the “Shiksa Goddess” he’s dreamed of, in the first flush of passion and joy. We’re drawn to his happiness, of course, but in walking with them along their opposite-time paths, we’ll re-evalute them many times, see their flaws and gifts, their self-sabotage, and treasure the “Ten Minutes” when they’re both at the center of the X—on the same page and in love…forever.

If you’ve seen the 2014 movie (with Anna Kendrick & Jeremy Jordan) made from Brown’s musical, you know the film’s on-camera singing style is intimate. Inevitably, some of that is lost in a stage performance, where vocals need to be more muscular to be heard in the last rows. Both Jalil and Jacobson have strong, true voices—and if there’s a bit too much “belting” for my taste, we do hear every word. And both give compelling physical/emotional performances, never losing the reality of their characters even in the throes of a song.

Terrific music director Cody Dry plays a grand piano (in all senses of the word) and with a trio of string musicians onstage throughout, the flowing, sensitively calibrated music fills out the landscape. Except for a moment at the middle, Jamie and Cathy don’t directly see or interact with one another—but the music passes between them in waves of feeling.

And Leah Mazur’s set design is a wonder: a back wall thickly covered with hanging pages of music and words that curve toward us, high over the musicians’ heads. We imagine first drafts of Jamie’s novel, Cathy’s audition pages, love letters, and so much more. It’s another history of the past five years, thoughtfully lit by lighting guru Aaron Johanssen.

The show plays through September 6. Go. Director White, who seems to move from strength to strength in her shows as Circle’s artistic director, has given us (as she says concisely in her director’s notes) a show that’s “utterly human…about identity, ambition, memory, hope, failure, and the ache of trying to give your whole, messy, humanness to someone else.”

We’ve all been there.

WHEN: August 14-September 6, 2025
WHERE: Circle Theatre, 230 West Fourth Street, Fort Worth
WEB: circletheatre.com