Inside the Rehearsal Room: The Last Five Years

Hello everyone, this is Steve Black, assistant director for The Last Five Years, submitting my first blog. Rehearsals have been well underway for the past few days and the production is looking amazing, already. Jim Petosa, our fearless director, is helping the actors get to the heart of the piece by allowing Aimee and Mark to find the inner truth of who Jamie and Cathy are and how they behave in the many circumstances they find themselves in throughout the work. Since Aimee and Mark were so prepared and knew the music so well going into the first rehearsal, they have been able to reach an incredible amount of depth in their character work already.

In case some of you don't know, the story follows five years of a relationship between Jamie, a writer, and Cathy, an actress. The story is told forwards and backwards at the same time, backwards via Cathy, and forwards, via Jamie. The two meet for a brief moment together, living in the same time, in the middle of the work. For the rest of the show, even though the other character may be on stage, the person singing is playing to an imagined figure, or memory. We've discovered how difficult this whole timeline can get when each character presents the other with a gift, or prop. Questions prior to or after that moment,  like: "do you know about this yet?, Are you wearing that yet?," keep popping up. We're being really faithful to timeline and I think that it will be really interesting for audience members to see the production and even come a second time to see if they notice little details that they maybe didn't pick up on during their first visit. 

Jim discussed Jamie's life as a writer and how difficult reaching fame at a young age can be (Jamie is 23 we he begins the show). Fame can be difficult at any age. Jim referenced an essay written by Tennessee Williams about his success with The Glass Menagerie and how it changed the writer's life. Williams suggests that sometimes fame isn't for the better, but it certainly gives us perspective on life. The essay can be found online at http://truegoodbeautiful.com/uncategorized/the-catastrophe-of-success-by-tennessee-williams/ 

Today we will finish staging approximately three quarters of the material and then run the first twelve songs/scenes. I'm excited to see how everything flows together. I can see that things are shaping up and I know that audiences are in for a moving, heartfelt, story. More from the rehearsal room, soon!