"Compulsively enjoyable...The show moves smartly along on the specificity of truth... Unpredictably heartfelt insights, energized by a seductive, rhythmic drive... Here is a real modern falling-in-and-out-of-love musical... Their last five years make us feel much better about the future of musical theater."
New York Post

The Last Five Years was commissioned by Lincoln Center Theatre after its bookwriter/composer Jason Robert Brown, won the 1999 Tony Award for Best Musical Score for LCT’s Parade. TL5Y’s debut at Chicago’s Northlight Theatre in 2001 was an immediate critical and box office success. The New York production opened Off Broadway in March 2002 receiving a Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Music and Lyrics. It quickly became a cult classic with young musical theatre performers. In 2004 I was in Sarasota, Florida directing at the Asolo Theatre and saw Sam Osheroff and Kris Danford perform three of the numbers in a cabaret. They landed the songs with such heartfelt emotion and humor, that the material seemed written for them. I made a mental note to invite them to Peterborough to do the entire show.
Brown calls the show "personal, not autobiographical.” It is loosely based on his own first marriage. The husband and wife, in alternating songs, replay their five-year relationship in two different time frames -- she starts in the present, at the wounded end of their relationship and travels backwards in time; he begins five years ago at their breathless "she likes me!" meeting and moves forward to now. Their emotional arcs pass one another, and the juxtaposition between his grinning optimism and her unhappiness (and vice versa in the latter half of the show) create an emotional rollercoaster, wrapped up in one of the brightest, freshest musical scores of the new century.