Programming at Thousand Islands Playhouse in Gananoque, Ont., about two hours south of Ottawa, runs the gamut of regional favourites and more surprising picks.Supplied
Halfway through The Last Five Years, Jason Robert Brown’s seminal 2001 musical about a failed marriage in New York, there’s a song that might hit close to home for any theatre companies whose programming spans the warmer months.
Titled A Summer in Ohio, the song chronicles the many lows of making theatre in small towns. Summer theatre is where creativity goes to die, laments struggling actress Cathy – she’d rather shove an ice pick in her eye, or eat fish from some time last year, than ever return to the pastoral stage.
If I could, I’d recommend to Cathy that she might find better luck at Thousand Islands Playhouse, where summer theatre couldn’t feel less like the cultural void she describes in The Last Five Years.
Located in Gananoque, Ont., about two hours south of Ottawa, the company’s programming runs the gamut of regional favourites and more surprising picks. This fall, after the closings of Grease and The Last Five Years, the playhouse will present Come From Away, as well as the Kingston premiere of It’s a Good Life If You Don’t Weaken, the new musical featuring songs by The Tragically Hip.
The Last Five Years uses the Thousand Islands Playhouse’s intimate Firehall Theatre to explore, up close, why the marriage depicted in the musical is so dysfunctional.James Paddle-Grant/Supplied
It helps, as well, that the company’s Gananoque surroundings embody the best of Canada in the summertime: The theatre overlooks a gorgeous slice of the St. Lawrence River’s waterfront, which audiences can explore without having to venture too far from the air-conditioned lobby.
The surrounding town, meanwhile, thrums with quaint antique stores and charming cafes: The orange cheesecake gelato I sampled at Pistachio Cafe ranks among the best I’ve had in this hemisphere, and the tangy salsa verde served with Stonewater Pub’s carnitas tacos will likely inform all my future salsa-sampling.
The Last Five Years is a tricky show to get right, but of the four or five versions I’ve seen since moving to Canada a decade ago, this one reigns the strongest. Helmed by managing artistic director Brett Christopher, the sleek production uses Thousand Islands Playhouse’s intimate Firehall Theatre to explore, up close, why the marriage depicted in the musical is so dysfunctional.
The twist, as written by Brown, is that the story is told bidirectionally: Successful writer Jamie (James Daly) tells his side of things from the beginning, while Cathy (Tess Benger) starts at their breakup. The timelines intersect only once, at their wedding, and both characters are highly layered, unreliable narrators: Neither is the villain of their inevitable divorce, just as neither is the sole victim of it.
Neither character in The Last Five Years is the villain of their inevitable divorce, just as neither is the sole victim of it.Garrett Elliott/Supplied
Indeed, The Last Five Years is tough. It’s sung through with very little spoken dialogue, and in production, it can be difficult for a director to string what’s effectively a collection of monologues into a cohesive theatrical experience. Musically, too, it’s a beast: Brown’s piano score hinges on jazz chords that regularly get smushed in performance.
Christopher’s production, however, avoids the traditional pitfalls of the show. Music director Patrick Bowman conducts a tight, tuneful band, and Christopher manages to make the two-timeline mechanic of the show obvious without feeling heavy-handed. Scenic designer Joshua Quinlan’s simple set, for instance, splits the audience into two halves, further establishing the Jamie-Cathy binary by creating two perspectives from which spectators can watch the story unfold.
Benger, among this country’s most consistent musical theatre actors, is a natural Cathy, with a beautiful high belt that mostly complements her otherwise conversational style of singing. Benger approaches the role with a sense of curiosity as she fills in the character gaps of Brown’s score: How does Cathy balance her contempt for summer theatre with her growing inferiority complex? How does she navigate being divorced via handwritten note just moments after deriding the ex who “blew her off with a heartfelt letter?” It’s a pleasure to watch Benger attempt to answer those questions, and even more so to hear her sing as she does.
While James Daly offers delightful performances of Jamie’s first few numbers, the back half of Brown’s score mostly gets the better of him.James Paddle-Grant/Supplied
Daly, fresh off a winsome performance as Ilya in the Canadian premiere of Heated Rivalry: The Unauthorized Musical Parody, is less successful as Jamie – by and large, he is miscast. While Daly offers delightful performances of Jamie’s first few numbers, the back half of Brown’s score mostly gets the better of him: The Schmuel Song is surprisingly ungrounded dramatically, while Nobody Needs to Know ventures into the perilous upper heights of Daly’s voice and occasionally squeaks.
Even so, The Last Five Years is a worthwhile showcase of what Thousand Islands Playhouse does well. Its intricate story asks an audience to think critically, and under Christopher’s direction, the production offers a seductive alternative to the more crowd-pleasing musical fare that audiences might find in Stratford or Niagara-on-the-Lake.
And while Cathy might have conflicting feelings about summer shows, in Gananoque, those critiques couldn’t land with less wallop. The town’s a perfect summer getaway, and hey: The theatre’s not half bad, either.
Editor’s note: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that Thousand Islands Playhouse overlooks Lake Ontario. It overlooks the St. Lawrence River. The caption accompanying the lead photo previously referred to the Firehall Theatre, which is not depicted in the image. The caption has been updated.