HELLO, theatre. It’s been a while.
A year, in fact. Almost, exactly a year. And here we are again for the second Liverpool Theatre Festival, a lovingly curated showcase of work old and new, bringing familiar faces and crowd pleasing productions outdoors, and offering a wealth of choice and entertainment for all audiences and tastes.
Once again the festival is already proving a triumph for producer Bill Elms, keeping live entertainment going in these still uncertain times and offering another terrific programme full of well-known local talent in the surrounds of St Luke’s (Bombed Out) Church.
And it was the lure of one of my favourite musicals, The Last Five Years, that dragged me out of the funk of my theatreless existence and back into the stalls, with the revival of a production first staged in 2017.
Starring real-life married couple Helen Noble and Graham Tudor, with musical accompaniment from Jordan Alexander, this was a stripped back version of a musical that is essentially pretty minimalist to begin with; however, to lose yourself in watching the premise unfold - telling the story of a couple’s relationship from the giddy excitement of its beginning to its bitter end, him starting with their first meeting, and her their last - needs little more than the talents of the performers to fly.
The scaling back of the production was a necessity given the circumstances and limitations of the venue. But the beauty in Jason Robert Brown’s 75 minute, one act work is in not over-complicating its concept or beautiful score. (The movie version, for example, left me surprisingly cold.)
This production works. Helen Noble (Hollyoaks alumnus) shines as Kathy, embodying the character’s effervescence and heart-on-sleeve vulnerability with great comic timing and emotional range; while as superstar author in-the-ascendent Jamie, Graham Noble captures a Tom Cruise-esque aggressive charm. MD Jordan Alexander holds everything together with just a keyboard.
First staged in 2001, there’s some throwaway lines here and there that show The Last Five Years’s age now - before our eyes it has become a period piece; and there’s a youth and naïveté to Kathy and Jamie’s doomed relationship - along with the realisation they’re not even out of their twenties at its conclusion - that’s changed my perspective since I last sat down and watched the whole thing too. Sigh.
But oh, those songs. The storytelling, spanning a whole chunk of two people’s lives, rich in detail, humour and emotion, in a little over an hour. It’s still a work of wonder. And in the right hands - as it was here - it’s always a joy.
The Liverpool Theatre Festival runs until September 12. For more on what’s still to come, check out the website.
