(Jane Coyle’s article appeared in the Irish Times, 7/1.)
There’s more than one way to say goodbye. In his classy little musical, American composer Jason Robert Brown brings effective dramatic effect to the word, using it both to begin and end the doomed love story of Jamie Wellerstein, an ambitious young Jewish writer from New York, and Cathy Hiatt, an aspiring actress from Ohio.
On paper, the storyline reads like an overloaded sugar rush, but the stage reality is quite different, not least because of the wit and musical quality of the songs, the delicate live score and a cleverly constructed narrative in which the dual perspectives are unpeeled, back to back, in reverse order.