Description
From the Ovation award-winning company that brought you One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest: The Immersive Experience comes an intimate, multisensory staging of the classic love story, like never seen before.
SYNOPSIS
An emotionally powerful musical about two New Yorkers in their twenties who fall in and out of love over the course of five years, the show follows Cathy, an aspiring actress, and Jamie, a budding novelist, as their story is told both backwards and forwards.
Director Kari Hayter gets solid performances from her actors and utilizes the small space well. Parrish brings humor and nuance to Cathy, and Porter has an affable rakishness à la Chris Pratt, but with her story told in reverse chronological order as his moves forward, it’s difficult to follow.
While the interactive elements feel much more forced here than they did with Cuckoo’s Nest, the innovation is still something to be admired. The extra bells and whistles may not be necessary, but what’s important is that there is a really strong performance of a great musical at the core of this “experience,” one that is very much worth seeing.
Rare is the musical that lends itself to as many interpretations as Jason Robert Brown’s The Last Five Years. After Hours Theatre Company’s Multisensory Experience may not be the definitive production, but it is quite spectacularly one of a kind.
The Last Five Years: A Multisensory Experience is a show that has gone out of its way to have a toe in immersive waters, while keeping itself rooted in a straight forward (and excellent) re-working of the off-Broadway musical done in a familiar theatre-in-the-round style. And this production has taken it a step further, creating a sort of interactive sensory tasting menu that has been well thought out and made to be an explicit part of the performance and not just an adjunct...
While not an immersive show, outright, The Last Five Years: A Multisensory Experience is an immersive appetizer for the uninitiated and a sorbet for the connoisseur. Like a good tasting meal, you’re left wanting more, the literal smell of a fine time hanging about you.
This musical production is at one a powerful serenade of life and love’s precarious challenges and new beginnings, performed by a cohesive duo. The After Hours Theatre Company is a great example of small musical theatre offerings here in our city of angels.
Overall, After Hours Theatre Company has proven once again to be hungry to challenge itself. Even in the production’s weaker points, exacerbated by a problematic script, it is never painful to watch, and it is always beautiful to listen to.
Director Kari Hayter gets solid performances from her actors and utilizes the small space well. Parrish brings humor and nuance to Cathy, and Porter has an affable rakishness à la Chris Pratt, but with her story told in reverse chronological order as his moves forward, it’s difficult to follow.
While the interactive elements feel much more forced here than they did with Cuckoo’s Nest, the innovation is still something to be admired. The extra bells and whistles may not be necessary, but what’s important is that there is a really strong performance of a great musical at the core of this “experience,” one that is very much worth seeing.
Rare is the musical that lends itself to as many interpretations as Jason Robert Brown’s The Last Five Years. After Hours Theatre Company’s Multisensory Experience may not be the definitive production, but it is quite spectacularly one of a kind.
The Last Five Years: A Multisensory Experience is a show that has gone out of its way to have a toe in immersive waters, while keeping itself rooted in a straight forward (and excellent) re-working of the off-Broadway musical done in a familiar theatre-in-the-round style. And this production has taken it a step further, creating a sort of interactive sensory tasting menu that has been well thought out and made to be an explicit part of the performance and not just an adjunct...
While not an immersive show, outright, The Last Five Years: A Multisensory Experience is an immersive appetizer for the uninitiated and a sorbet for the connoisseur. Like a good tasting meal, you’re left wanting more, the literal smell of a fine time hanging about you.
This musical production is at one a powerful serenade of life and love’s precarious challenges and new beginnings, performed by a cohesive duo. The After Hours Theatre Company is a great example of small musical theatre offerings here in our city of angels.
Overall, After Hours Theatre Company has proven once again to be hungry to challenge itself. Even in the production’s weaker points, exacerbated by a problematic script, it is never painful to watch, and it is always beautiful to listen to.
