'The Last Five Years' Meets In The Middle

August 10th, 2007 at 12:01am Michael Conniff 2

I wish I could report to you that there was a fact a moment during "The Last Five Years" on opening night in Rio Grande Park--say, when the man and the woman meet in marriage--when I knew that Theatre Aspen had finally arrived.

But there was no such moment because the play by Jason Robert Brown was far too brilliant to allow for a cessation of emotions in the face of reasoned analysis. The moment never came because you were in the moment of the play, and there was the brilliance of Hadley Fraser and Paige Price to consider, two big-time singers and actors with Broadway experience who took a script lousy with genius and brought it to life under the skilled yet economical direction of David Ledingham.

The heart (and the audience) knows of such things--knows the moment when life and art come into alignment like a truck sliding into four-wheel drive. In "The Last Five Years," such an alignment paradoxically takes the structure of a failed love story told every which way from Sunday: Jamie Wellerstein (Fraser) begins at the beginning and meets a painful end; Catherine Hiatt (Price) starts at the tragic ending and works her way toward the happiness they found together at the start. They meet in the middle on the aforemention moment of their wedding, in the climactic moment of a script that has all the time in the world for time.

Jason Robert Brown cannot take all the credit for what happened opening night under the tent despite a score and lyrics that are never less than transcendent as they find the trajectory of the truth. Ledingham, also  starring in the comedy "Moonlight and Magnolias" under the tent, is becoming a take-no-prisoners mainstay for Theatre Aspen on the stage and behind the curtain. The musicians--Nancy Thomas, Bill Capps, Marcia Fisher, David Blair Harding, and Bob Finnie--were never less than stellar and damn near flawless playing a score so complex time seemed to stand still in the face of such complicated time signatures.

But at the end of the day--at the end of the play--this love story found flight on the wings of star power. Hadley Fraser's sexy vitality knew no bounds, and he pulled off the remarkable trick of starting as a kid and descending into hell, with his energy running like an electric jolt through the tent. Paige Price had to do just the opposite, beginning in anguish and finding her way backward to true love that looks like a sucker punch in retrospect.

The beautiful score came with magnificent, operatic, crafty and crafted singing by both in a doomed duet all the more beautiful for the outcome that has come and is yet to come. You had that indescribable feeling that these were not star turns for Hadley Fraser and Paige Price so much as stars being born right before your eyes.

My favorite moment came right before the final fadeout, as Jamie walked up the stairs and away from the marriage and Cathie looked into his eyes across time and across the stage. There was nothing left to be said or sung. Love in all its permutations was in the air under the tent, and you could still hear the cries of the heart echoing in the silence.

Entry Filed under: Music, Theater, Aspen, Colorado, United Post