Jason Robert Brown

Posted on April 9, 2025 at 3:05 am

Once I finish a show, it stays finished! Done! Close the book, put it away, here the Maestro laid down his pen.

Except sometimes.

I mean, there’s always one line that I never got right. Or a character whose actions don’t quite make sense. Or just something … missing.

I did a blog post many years ago about all the changes Alfred Uhry and I made to Parade when we revised it for the Donmar Warehouse in 2007. There isn’t enough space on the Internet to denote all the changes Robert Horn and I have made to the various versions of 13 that have been released into the world over the last two decades. But most of the time, when I make changes, they’re small adjustments made for a particular actor or to improve some especially inelegant phrase, and so I haven’t generally acknowledged those changes publicly.

But when director Whitney White began her pre-production work for the Broadway premiere of The Last Five Years, she asked me if I would consider making a couple of adjustments.  My default answer to this question is “no,” and there are a lot of good reasons for an author to say “no,” but I really like and trust Whitney, and I thought it might be exciting to see what happened with “yes.” “Yes,” we’re going to take a show that was written to be performed in my living room and we’re going to put it on a Broadway stage, and we’re going to have a magnetic powerhouse pop star and a Broadway phenomenon starring in the piece, so “yes,” maybe I should be open to looking at it a little differently.  

So this is a list, probably incomplete, of the changes I made for this production and this production only, although you’ll see that there are some changes that I do authorize for future productions.  And if you’re planning to attend the show on Broadway (and I hope you are!), I suppose I should call these “spoilers.”

1. The orchestrations. This is a pretty big change, and there really isn’t any song in the show that isn’t affected by it.  The original conception for the show was that it should be a chamber piece, something that could be performed in a very intimate setting, maybe even without amplification. (I have in fact done it in my living room, but it is admittedly a challenge to do this kind of singing without a microphone.) But this production has a very different concept, simply by virtue of playing in a theater with 970 seats. Also, our stars are both used to performing in very large venues with a lot of instrumental support, so I thought it was worth exploring what it would be like to expand the sound of the show. I really only added three players, so it’s certainly not a massive change, but it’s definitely a bigger sound than the original, and I think it’s pretty successful in general, although I have no intention of licensing these orchestrations for general use.  The original instrumentation is:
Piano
Acoustic steel-string guitar
Fretless bass
Violin (doubling a cymbal)
Cello 1 (doubling on chimes and celesta)
Cello 2 (doubling on crotales)
The new orchestra expands the palette in several ways. First of all, I’ve added two more string players, mostly so that I could have high string lines that could sing out over the vocals – that was very challenging in the original version when I only had one violin. (The 2002 cello parts are sometimes laughably high.) Then, I added drums, which I had done for the film version as well, but I was able to do with a lot more nuance here. And there are some digital instruments in the orchestra now – the sample of a ticking clock drives the beat for “A Miracle Would Happen” and shows up throughout the score; the pianist also plays a Hammond B-3 organ as well as a Wurlitzer electric piano and a clavichord in addition to some bespoke patches created by our synth programmers, Hiro Iida and Harrison Roth; and the celesta is played by the drummer (who also has to play a hammer dulcimer sample for four measures). So the complete instrumentation is:
Piano (doubling on keyboards)
Guitar (electric, acoustic and mandolin)
Bass (electric, fretless and upright)
Drums (doubling congas, shaker, chimes and keyboard)
Violin 1
Violin 2
Violin 3 (doubling Viola)
Cello 1
Cello 2
One other change is that Violin 1 and Cello 2 both have very exposed improvised solos, as opposed to the original where everything for the strings is precisely notated. 

(And here’s a photo of me on the red carpet with our amazing Broadway orchestra: L-R, Paul Mutzabaugh, piano-conductor; Zachary Brown, cello 2; Adda Kridler, violin/viola; Ken Kubota, cello 1; Fung Chern Hwei, violin (concertmaster); JRB; Julia Adamy, bass; Tomoko Akaboshi, music coordinator; Jamie Eblen, drums; Maria Im, violin 2; and Hidayat Honari, guitar. Photo credit: Andy Henderson)

2. There are two categories of lyric changes. Category #1 is Dept. of Cultural Sensitivity. Look, I don’t think of myself as a mean person, and I would hate to be thought of as disrespectful or cruel. I’m not perfect at it, but I try very hard to model empathy and respect in the world. But I’m aware that some of the lyrics I wrote in the early parts of my career occasionally slip into mockery or cheap stereotypes. Unfortunately, I can’t change all of it – sometimes the writer part of me tells the human part of me that changing a certain line, a certain word, a certain section would so violate the rest of the song or the intent of the character that it would essentially ruin the dramatic moment more than just leaving it as is.  But when I do come up against certain things that are truly insensitive or ignorant, I do my best to address it.  A couple of years ago, I was gently educated that the phrase, “If you once were in jail / Or you once were a man” in “Shiksa Goddess” was disrespectful to trans folks, and I realized that it was long past time to change it.  So now the second chorus of “Shiksa Goddess” has been changed to:
If you had a tattoo, that wouldn’t matter.
If you once were in jail, I’m not upset.
If your mother and your brother had “relations” with each other
And your father sold Viagra on the Internet,
I’d say, “Well… nobody’s perfect.”
If you are doing a production of The Last Five Years, you are welcome to use those lyrics in place of the originals.

3. You’ll never notice this one unless you played Jamie in a production somewhere, but we did make a cut in his first telephone call (this happens during “See I’m Smiling,” but it’s not on any of the recordings). Whitney and I both felt like it went on a little too long, and also it’s far from my best writing. (There’s also a little change here where Jamie says he’ll email a copy of his manuscript, which he almost certainly wouldn’t have been able to do in 1997.)

4. Category #2 of lyric changes is Dept. of Updated Cultural References. The most important adjustment Whitney asked me to make was to update some of the lyrics so that the story could take place in 2025, instead of in the late 90s as I had originally written it.  Lots of people have asked for this over the years, and I did reluctantly make some changes to this effect for the movie, but let it be said for the record that I don’t think the show should be updated to the present day – part of Jamie and Cathy’s story is about the world they live in, and those characters would make different choices in 2025 than they made in a world without cell phones and social media.  But I wanted to see how Whitney’s vision for the show would work, and I’m glad I did – the principal benefit is that it allows the audience to step into the story the same way that the audiences stepped into it twenty-three years ago, and it gives Nick and Adrienne the opportunity to bring themselves to the characters without having to play “period” or dress in 90s fashions (which were not, you may recall, super flattering).
The first place this really came up was in “Moving Too Fast,” which describes the arc of Jamie’s meteoric rise in the New York publishing world.  Unfortunately, the way that someone became a Hot Shot Young Author in the late 90s simply doesn’t exist anymore. The Atlantic Monthly is now just called The Atlantic, and it really doesn’t publish short fiction at all. In fact, the whole business of “first serial rights” in fiction, where a magazine would excerpt a chapter or section from an upcoming book, has largely disappeared, except for in The New Yorker and Harper’s (among magazines with any serious clout or circulation). And Sonny Mehta died six years ago and there isn’t another publisher with his clout or name recognition. Still, the song is the song, and it was built on Jamie’s career progressing in a certain order, so I had to at least keep the basic shape of that journey intact, unlikely though it would be in 2025. So there is now a new lyric for part of “Moving Too Fast” that goes like this:
We start to take the next step together,
Found an apartment on Seventy-Third.
The New Yorker’s printing my first chapter –
Four thousand bucks without rewriting one word!
I left Columbia and I don’t regret it!
I wrote a book and Salman Rushdie read it!

Unlike the changes in Category 1, I am not amenable to these updates showing up in any other production. The story of The Last Five Years as I wrote it takes place in the late 90s.  That’s the show you’re licensing.

5. It would be impossible – or at least really boring – to catalogue all the little changes I made in the accompaniment of the songs, but some are fun to point out. One of my favorite musical games these days is to displace the downbeat in a groove, so that right when you’re expecting a big hit on beat 1, I leave a space and then have everyone just come in half a beat later like nothing has happened.  I did it in “Moving Too Fast” right near the end, when things are already pretty chaotic:

6. Another similar “drop” happens in “A Part of That” as Cathy soars through her final chorus:

7. Category 1 change: While I never intended “midget” literally – in my mind, it was an insult Cathy directed at the star of her company – it’s not a great word in any case, and it’s easy enough to replace.  I actually came up with this fix when we did the movie in 2013, but for whatever reason, Anna ended up singing the original lyric and not:
With a gay dentist named Karl
Playing Tevye and Porgy.

8. Category 2 change: As in the movie, Cathy now finds Jamie’s book at a Target in Kentucky, not a Borders as I originally wrote. (The original version isn’t ideal anyway, since apparently there never was a Borders Book Store in the state of Kentucky!  But that’s still the only version I’m authorizing.)

9. In the Battle of Cathy’s Keys, it should be noted that Lauren Kennedy, Cynthia Erivo, Betsy Wolfe and Samantha Barks all did “A Summer in Ohio” in B, but Sherie Rene Scott and Anna Kendrick did it in Bb. Adrienne Warren is the first Cathy I know of to sing the song in the key of A.

10. Speaking of Cathy’s Keys, this doesn’t count as a change but I present the information here in the interest of completeness: Adrienne sings the bridge of “The Next Ten Minutes” in the lower key (as it is on Sherie’s and Anna’s recordings).

11. During one rehearsal, I was just playing around and I added an extra note to a chord in “The Next Ten Minutes,” and I felt a shiver of excitement and instantly decided I had to keep that note! Enjoy the forbidden thrill of adding an E# to change the tonality of this moment:  

12. There was one lyric change I made without anyone asking. Having sung the role of Jamie a couple of times in concert, I identified a place that always felt a little confusing and kind of dishonest, so I took this opportunity to rewrite the beginning of “A Miracle Would Happen”:
Somebody told me that the minute you get married,
Every other woman in the world suddenly finds you attractive.
Well, that’s not true.
But there are some women –
Not all women, but some women –
Who wouldn’t give you the time of day before,
And now they’re bangin’ down your door
And falling to their knees.
I am happy to authorize this rewrite for any future productions, and here’s the score page so you can see how the new lyrics fit.

13. This is sort of a Category 1 AND Category 2 change: This was so depressing, but literally no one in the rehearsal room knew what “Mr. Ed” was. (A talking horse, of course, of course.) I spent several days trying to come up with a funny replacement, but they all sounded much more misogynistic than the Mr. Ed reference, so I just punted on the whole thing:
And in a perfect world,
A miracle would happen,
And ev’ry girl would crumble into dust…
You can feel free to use that one if Mr. Ed doesn’t work for your production.

14. A Category 2 change I didn’t make is that Jamie at one point mentions that his book is being published by Random House, which is no longer a thing – it’s now called Penguin Random House, and an author is much more likely to call it “Penguin” – but there was just nothing good to change it to. So I kept it as it was.

[Update: Rachel Fershleiser assures me that authors still call it “Random House” and that I was right not to change it! Thank you for the correction and affirmation!]

15. A Category 2 change: Cathy is auditioning for a show that is produced by “the people who cast Linda Blair in a musical,” which is really funny if you know who Linda Blair was and you know that she actually did get cast in a Broadway musical. (Google, my children.) When we did the movie, Anna Kendrick came up with “Russell Crowe,” which was sensational but alas is already out of date. (This is one of my reasons for not updating the references in the show – you’re always playing Whack-a-Mole.) Whitney helpfully suggested “NeNe Leakes,” which is ideal for so many reasons, not least of which is that it’s true.  But again, not for other productions.

16. Category 2: Jamie mentions at one point that his book has gotten a great review by John Updike, which is impossible in this production since Updike died sixteen years ago. There aren’t many authors of Updike’s stature who also write criticism, and I couldn’t think of anyone of that generation whose approbation would really matter to Jamie, so I assigned the review to George Saunders, who is probably exactly the kind of writer that a contemporary Jamie Wellerstein would look up to with awe.

17. And finally: It’s always been very important to me that The Last Five Years ends on a solitary Bb and that there be no music under the curtain call. That’s how I’ve always done it, that’s how it’s meant to be.  But, well, it’s a big Broadway theater and Broadway audiences expect big loud curtain calls.  So, for the first and presumably final time, there is Bow Music, a churchy blues waltz based on the main “I Could Never Rescue You” theme, featuring blazing solos from our pianist, Paul Mutzabaugh; our concertmaster Fung Chern Hwei; and our guitarist, Hidayat Honari.  And you can only hear it at the Hudson Theater this spring!