MUSICAL REVIEW: The Last Five Years ★★★★★

Reading Rep’s production of The Last Five Years is nothing short of revelatory—a staging that strips Jason Robert Brown’s intimate song cycle to its emotional core, while simultaneously elevating it into one of the most affecting pieces of musical theatre you are ever likely to encounter.

The show’s ingenious conceit—charting Cathy and Jamie’s relationship from opposite ends of its trajectory—has often felt like a cerebral device. Here, under Hal Chamber’s exquisite direction, it becomes heartbreakingly human. Each crossing point between the characters pulses with dramatic inevitability, yet the staging resists sentimentality, allowing the audience to feel the weight of what is left unsaid as much as what is sung.

Martha Kirby as Cathy balances vulnerability with a fierce sense of humour, her rendition of “A Summer in Ohio” fizzing with comic timing while “Still Hurting” devastates with raw honesty. Opposite her, Guy Woolf’s Jamie exudes restless charm and ambition, his “Moving Too Fast” a masterclass in controlled exuberance, later unravelled by the devastating self-justification of “Nobody Needs to Know.” Together, they create a relationship so lived-in that it feels both utterly specific and universally recognisable.

What sets this Last Five Years apart is its clarity. The production never drowns in concept or excess; instead, it trusts the material and performers completely. The result is theatre that feels immediate, resonant, and profoundly moving. Musically, the evening is a triumph. The onstage band makes Brown’s jazz-inflected score sound both lush and startlingly fresh, every shift in rhythm reflecting the mercurial tides of love and loss.

Reading Rep has delivered not just the best Last Five Years you may ever see, but one of the finest evenings of musical theatre currently on offer regionally, if not across the UK.