The Last 5 Years - St James Theatre

Oh, thank you, grabbed a couple!
(Seemed rude not to...)

Neither could I when I looked

Pretty good production shots methinks

Didn't think I'd get round to seeing this, but had hoped in the back of my mind that the St James Under 26 £5 tickets scheme would kick in. Well, the email came today, valid for tomorrow afternoon only, but they're £10 instead for some reason. But they are Band A tickets, so saving myself £40!

So, I'm going tomorrow afternoon and I can see why the tickets were only available for then as I looks only half sold, if that. Shame - I hope the atmosphere won't suffer but still looking forward to getting to see the show for dirt cheap!

Can anyone who has been confirm that this finishes at 9pm? I'm there in a couple of weeks and need to book my coach home, but since St James is so close to the coach station I can go for the 10pm one.

That's what I intend to do, but I wanted to check they haven't somehow stretched this to 2 and a half hours and plonked an interval in the middle (despite what the St James website says). You never know with these theatre types.

For me, this is wonderful.

Some spoilers follow. . .

Some things about this show I've liked for a decade: the luscious musicality, the Sondheimesque freeform lyrics, and, especially, the way it wraps up history like a present, with the outer wrapping of "The last 5 Years" enclosing the pivotal central moment of "The Next 10 Minutes," a shrunken perfect moment of time that represents the purest love at the heart of the piece.

Originally, I took against what I perceived as shallow characterisations of shallow characters. This was the story of a peacock and a doormat, the former priapically obsessed with his own potency, the second defining herself only in relation to a man. He was unlikeable, she was uninteresting.

In the film, Anna Kendrick brought so much sensitivity and heart to her part, as the doormat, that I changed my mind about her character, Cathy. I began to see her as someone who could speak for the doormat in all of us.

But I still hated her wretched partner, the smug shallow peacock, who gleefully dismissed partners for their ethnicity, and who seemed singularly focused on himself.

Then I saw Jonathan Bailey in this, and I was won over. Sure, he's shallow and egotistical, but he's funny too, and wistful, and well-intentioned. Bailey's "Shmuel Song" has many facets to it, but above all, he is playful in the part, magnetically funny: I loved him.

Just as Cathy represents the doormat in us, Jamie represents the dork in us, and together they represent the dreamer in us.

Samantha Barks was equally fabulous, as sensitive as Anna Kendrick was in the movie, eeking out Cathy's every tentative hope, bleeding emotion from every springy elasticated lyric.

I welled up. This is a touching production of an exceptional show. The weaknesses in the characters, that I had previously perceived as weaknesses in the show, are in fact the production's greatest strength. We can all be flawed: egotists and doormats, shallow and whatnot, but we still deserve those ten perfect minutes of love regardless. This show embraces the imperfections of people.

In my experience of the last ten years of this show, the last ninety minutes were what made it worthwhile.

5 stars

I'm guessing those huge swathes of £50 tickets would explain why . . .

Anyone who is signed up to the St James Under 26 scheme, Band A tickets are £5 for this tomorrow afternoon when you log in!

I gave a look at the website and it says that the scheme is no longer running

Tell me about it. The only way I could convince someone that I was under 26 nowadays is if Stevie Wonder was running the box office.

There are two cast recordings. The original off-Broadway cast recording (the Black one) and the revival (the Blue one)/