by AMY BARRATT

Knowing that Pumpkin Theatre’s production of The Last Five Years is the second in less than six months in the Montreal area—Hudson Village Theatre did it over the summer—I went to Pumpkin’s version at Théâtre Ste-Catherine, curious to see what’s so special about Jason Robert Brown’s small-scale musical. Despite a professional treatment by Joel Fishbane’s indie theatre company, I came away perplexed.

Although his lyrics are clever and grown up, owing a debt to the great Stephen Sondheim, the storyline of The Last Five Years is banal, and much of the music would be at home in any Disney offering of the last 15 years. The main appeal of this show to artistic directors may be that it has a cast of two and can be done with virtually no set. Fishbane must be commended for hiring live musicians whom he cleverly locates in the balcony of this intimate theatre.

Intimacy should be the watchword of a piece like The Last Five Years, which charts the romantic relationship of Jamie, a novelist, and Cathy, a musical theatre actress. Any claim this production has to intimacy is squandered, however, as soon as the performers appear with those horrible headsets taped to their faces. It’s one thing to employ these monstrosities in a 1,500-seat Broadway house, and quite another to impose them on the 100-seat TSC.

In theory, you mic the singers and musicians in order to filter them all through a sound system and deliver them to the audience perfectly balanced. So why, in the performance I saw, did the singers still seem to be fighting the orchestra? Musical director Nick Burgess’s time would have been better spent working to achieve that balance the old-fashioned way, through dynamics rather than amplification.

It’s not as if a performer like Lisa Rubin, who plays Cathy, couldn’t blow the roof off a much bigger theatre with her Broadway goddess belt. Whether you go for musicals or not, you’ve got to admire Rubin’s chops. She’s like a racehorse up there: singularly focused on the job at hand. Having toiled for three summers at the Charlottetown Festival playing second-fiddle Diana and understudying Anne of Green Gables, not to mention numerous roles with the Dora Wasserman Yiddish Theatre, Rubin is more than ready—she’s chomping at the bit—to carry 50 per cent of a show that is 100 per cent sung.

Both Rubin and Charles Bender, as Jamie, can act the heck out of a song, but only Rubin gives the impression that she could go on singing all night. Bender has a pleasant voice but he’s clearly struggling, especially with the high notes.

Fishbane’s direction is tight, but doesn’t do enough to point up the unusual structure of the piece. A lighting designer might have had some helpful ideas on that score.

Gigi and Pipi present

Can’t get enough of Gigi L’Amour and her technologically gifted sidekick Pipi Douleur? Transmedia artists and darlings of the local cabaret scene Stephen Lawson and Aaron Pollard (aka 2boys.tv) present zona pellucida, a multimedia theatre piece, tonight only.

“Some of the images spun out by the 2boys.tv will stay with me until the day I die,” wrote Eugene Stickland of the Calgary Herald. “This show was one of the highlights of my theatre-going life.”

Shows are at 7 and 9 p.m. tonight, Nov. 23, in the Studio Hydro Québec of the Monument National (1182 St-Laurent).

The Last Five Years to Saturday, Nov. 25 at 8 p.m., Théâtre Ste-Catherine (264 Ste- Catherine E.), (514) 931-5449

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