There are two sides to every story. And in the musical The Last Five Years, audiences are given a rare opportunity: a chance to hear them both.
Written by Tony award-winner Jason Robert Brown, The Last Five Years follows Jamie Wellerstein and Cathy Hiatt, a novelist and an actress who marry in their mid-twenties, and the struggles with success, maturity, and desire that eventually tear their marriage apart. Through 14 songs, the couple go through key aspects of their relationship: the first date, first fight, doubt, arguments, their wedding day, rising tension, until the day of their divorce. But Jamie’s version of their relationship is told in chronological order, while Cathy rewinds from the fallout, telling the story backwards.
The Last Five Years defined an era of Broadway before there was ever a production foot on an actual Broadway stage. After its off-Broadway premiere in 2002, The Last Five Years grew in popularity primarily through its cast album. For the current millennial and gen-z stars of musical theater, The Last Five Years was a white whale production. Few people had seen it, but it felt like everyone knew the music. After the slow burn of an Off-Broadway and Off-West End revival — and a 2014 film starring Jeremy Jordan and Anna Kendrick — it made its Broadway debut in 2025. The Last Five Years is an audition staple, a beloved conversation starter, a dream role. And now, it’s a new album.
Released today, The Last Five Years (25th Anniversary Live at the London Palladium) was recorded during the limited, sold-out concert residency of the musical at London’s Palladium theater in March. The concert stars Ben Platt and Rachel Zegler, with Brown pulling double duty as composer and director from behind the piano. Two huge stars revisiting a theater cult-classic already feels like a fever dream pulled from the minds of a Broadway super fan. But Brown, Zegler, and Platt tell Rolling Stone that this concert version of The Last Five Years was their own kind of dream.
“This recording is meant to capture not just the score, but to capture the event of what we did. It’s a fun challenge for me as I’m mixing the album to make sure that it both has the intimacy that the piece wants, and the grandeur of these venues that we played in,” Brown tells Rolling Stone. “But on a personal level, I’m just so happy to have this preserved. Because [Ben and Rachel] sing their asses off.”
An Emmy-, Grammy-, and Tony-winning actor, Platt calls The Last Five Years a crucial piece of musical theater canon and something he himself can remember singing for classes and auditions as a teenager. (Platt also worked with Brown on the Tony-nominated revival of Parade.) “I’ve always felt like I have a lot in common with Jamie. I too left Columbia [University], and I too do not regret it,” Platt says, a nod to Jamie’s ballad about success, “Moving Too Fast.” “In the contemporary landscape musical theater, it’s tricky to find something that is musically and texturally as deep as this narrative is. It’s such a delight.”
“Ben should have been doing it all along,” Brown jokes. “Ben should have done it when he came out of the womb.”
But The Last Five Years’ framework as a caustic duet means that the choice of Cathy can’t be taken lightly. Brown says he and Platt both discussed offering it to Zegler, but were convinced her schedule would prevent her from saying yes. “I am busy, [but] I would never deny myself the opportunity to work with my heroes,” Zegler tells Rolling Stone. “Jason Robert Brown scored all of the heartbreaks that I thought I understood when I was young. I was blown away. I remember calling my agents and being like, ‘I would do anything to just be in the room.’”
Brown, Platt, and Zegler performed the concert at London’s Palladium for a sold-out run from March 24 through 29. After an overwhelming wave of interest, they staged three more shows, one at the Hollywood Bowl and two nights at Radio City Music Hall. The score uses an expanded orchestration first introduced in the 2025 Broadway run, including more strings and percussion. But the magic comes from the simple concert format, which places all of the focus on Platt and Zegler’s voices. And while Jamie and Cathy’s relationship is contentious and fraught, it’s actually hard to get Platt and Zegler to stop talking about each other long enough to get back to the musical.
“It could be a very lonely show. I felt so grateful to have [Ben],” Zegler says. “I would sit there and watch that man sing the alphabet backwards and be thrilled. So the opportunity to even just be changing my clothes quickly backstage while listening to him sing “Schmuel Song” makes me feel like I won the lottery in life. He’s my ex-husband for life.”
Platt also sees that camaraderie as a necessary aspect of the concerts. “It’s a bonding experience. It’s a tough and kind of a lonely piece, because as much as we’re a team, I only really get to see her a handful of times on stage and really only sing together with her once,” he adds. “So this unspoken security and protection was a really powerful catalyst to us feeling closer to each other. She’s just the real deal, capital R, capital D.”
Part of the intrigue of The Last Five Years also comes from the story’s very personal beginnings. Brown patterned Jamie and Cathy’s relationship after his own divorce. Now 25 years later, the composer tells Rolling Stone he’s surprised at how the musical affects him.
“As you get older, you leave parts of yourself behind. You don’t know that when you write it. And that’s sort of the most beautiful thing about it, is that this perfect encapsulation of this person you were at a certain age grows, but it grows differently than you do,” Brown says. “About 15 years ago, I became aware that it no longer felt like a painful story to watch. And I became much more sympathetic to the characters.
“It’s a nice place to direct the show from,” Brown continues. “A place of just really understanding that it wasn’t meant to be. It’s really painful in the moment, but God bless you for thinking you belong together. The world depends on people wanting to take big risks with each other like that, and so I’m glad they did. But boy, it hurts at the end.”
