In The Last Five Years, a nearly sung-through musical by Jason Robert Brown (he wrote music, lyrics and book), we follow Jamie, a student at Columbia embarking on a writing career, and Cathy, an actress/singer pursuing the circuit of auditions and regional theater gigs. Jamie and Cathy have a cute Manhattan courtship (sitting in Central Park, he points out to her the residences of John Lennon and others), experience career ups and downs (he's fast-tracked into the world of New Yorker literati, while she's trapped in summer stock), marry and break up.

I'll admit at the outset that watching a pair of 20-somethings nattering endlessly (in song, yet) about their commitment issues is my idea of hell.

Happily, there is some redemption in Brown's songs. The score of The Last Five Years runs a considerable gamut -- from plaintively sweet, Lilith Fair-ish ballads to quirky comedy numbers -- and to all of these Brown brings a lively, individual musical style. His particular specialty seems to be a kind of stream-of-consciousness narrative that breaks conventional rhythm midway through a song: hard to describe, but it's charming. These songs particularly benefit from Brown's urbane and funny lyrics:

It's very premature to say at this point -- as some fans are doing -- that Brown is a logical successor to Sondheim, but he is an engaging talent. The Last Five Years makes a swell concept album.

And that's also the problem. Beyond what we hear in the songs themselves, there's nothing inherently dramatic about the show. Neither of the characters shows any sign of personal growth or development, a serious flaw made more evident by the show's big gimmick: that the story runs in two directions, with Jamie starting at the beginning of the relationship and moving forward, and Cathy starting at the end and looking back. They meet in the middle of course, which is supposed to dazzle us with cleverness -- but it really doesn't matter, since they're the same people at any given point.

Worse, The Last Five Years is more than a bit misogynistic -- or perhaps, since the piece appears to be autobiographical, a more apt term is self-serving. Brown emphasizes Jamie's talent, sex appeal and saintly patience, while he turns Cathy into a whiny second-rater. That structural metaphor (he moves forward, she goes backward) is transparently nasty.

Anyway, as seen at Philadelphia Theatre Company, both characters strike me as narcissistic bores who deserve each other. It's possible a pair of greatly charismatic performers could personally compensate for the lack of depth, but here both Wayne Wilcox (Jamie) and Nicole Van Giesen (Cathy) are at best competent (and she in particular has noticeable problems with pitch). Director Joe Calarco seems to recognize the lack of back-story and attempts to solve it with a multimedia collage involving photos from Jamie and Cathy's past. It provides snazzy visual appeal, but ultimately upstages the actors.

Like I said, The Last Five Years is an enjoyable concept album that gains nothing from the staging, and is probably best enjoyed through home listening. I suspect Brown may secretly know it too: The show -- minus a few unnecessary passages of dialogue -- is exactly one CD in length. —David Anthony Fox

Endless Love

This comedy is one of Shakespeare's meditations on falling in love. It should be frothy as champagne one minute and foamy as dark ale at another. In this production, the whole play has gone flat.

The main plot is this: When the twins, Viola and Sebastian, are shipwrecked, each thinks the other has drowned. Finding herself in a strange land, Viola disguises herself as a young man to protect herself and gets a job working for the Duke Orsino. Expectably, but secretly, she falls in love with him, hiding her feelings as she must hide her gender. Meanwhile, the Duke is in love with Olivia -- rich, aristocratic and totally uninterested in his proposals and jewels -- and he keeps sending his "man" Viola to help woo her. Olivia falls for this young man, while Orsino finds himself puzzlingly attracted to his new manservant (a deliciously subtle element which is totally omitted from this production). This is Shakespeare's recurring human fugue; while A loves B, B loves C and C loves A, and so on through time and the alphabet.

The play's subplot involves Sir Toby Belch, Olivia's carousing cousin, and his rich pal, Sir Andrew Aguecheek. A servant, the priggish Malvolio, gets the worst of their drunken mischief, aided by the maid, Maria, and an assortment of other minor characters. There is good fun mingled with vicious mockery, and Sir Toby's "Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?" is used to justify a good deal of cruelty.

Director Whit MacLaughlin seems to have taken Twelfth Night's subtitle too much to heart: "Or What You Will." He has made the subplot the main plot, allowing the comic relief to overrun the play. And, instead of judiciously cutting the text, as is often the case, he has lengthened it (the running time is more than three hours), creating long, repetitious scenes in which there is no dialogue, where people dance, sing, move furniture, whatever, and because these scenes invariably involve the "low" element, we wind up spending much more time with Sir Toby and his crew than with the Duke and Viola. But this may be just as well since those actors are far more accomplished, although it certainly does make the play lopsided. MacLaughlin has overworked the gimmicks (I was quite fed up with the jukebox long before the end) and he has added cheap shots ("[it works] like Aqua Velva on virgins" or an archly timed recording of "The Great Pretender") that are more embarrassing than amusing.

But even forgetting about the odd decision to set the play in 1950s Italy, where Olivia's palatial house is next door to a bar that is sometimes indoors, sometimes outdoors, and everybody's clothes are astonishingly unbecoming, and forgetting that he sacrifices the lovely Elizabethan songs to Jerry Lee Lewis and Frank Sinatra, the most peculiar decisions were in the casting. Nancy Boykin is (there is no nice way to say this) far too old to play Olivia, and winds up looking like Blanche DuBois making a pass at the newspaper boy in A Streetcar Named Desire. Patrick Brinker as the Duke seems to forget that he has a limp from time to time, and is generally too wooden to convey any desire for anyone, much less the complicated shift from romanticized melancholy love ("If music be the food of love ") to the deep undertow of true love as it sweeps him away. Although many of the performances are fun (Scott Drummond as the Elvis impersonator Aguecheek, Mary Martello as the sexy maid Maria) they are not the heart of the play and are merely entertaining. Strong performances by Karen Peakes as Viola and by Gene Terruso as Sir Toby Belch keep the production alive. — Toby Zinman

Through April 13, Philadelphia Theatre Company at Plays and Players, 1714 Delancey St., 215-569-9700

Let's Get Physic-al

Schrödinger's Girlfriend, not to be confused -- or perhaps to be completely confused-- with Schrödinger's famous cat, is about physics. It is also about love and sex and theater. It is both a vaudevillian farce and a serious play about the nature of the perceived reality and man's place in the universe. Despite all this rich potential, it is, I am disappointed to say, boring.

Erwin Schrödinger was one of the legendary posse of physicists who created a branch of physics early in the 20th century called Quantum Mechanics, designed to understand how subatomic particles interact with each other. In the course of this show, Albert Einstein, Max Planck, Neils Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, among others, turn up, all lovers of a mysterious woman called Hansi, a serious theoretician as well as a serious siren. When Schrödinger decides to make Hansi the subject of an experiment rather than his mistress, he creates a world of uncertainty, not to mention indeterminacy, for himself.

I love plays that are about difficult subjects that teach you, as you watch, all you need to know to understand them (Stoppard's Hapgood and Frayn's Copenhagen are wonderful examples). In this show, playwright Matthew Wells has provided vaudeville bits, cabaret songs and lectures on physics. What his point is remained unclear: Why has he enlisted all these theatrical carryings-on? There's too much hokum, too many cheesy puns (OK, OK, I know: Puns, like the wave/particle theory of light, make words work in two ways simultaneously, but cheesy is cheesy) and not enough wit. The science is straight lecture and difficult to follow. The characters never emerge as real people, so they remain merely devices.

There are moments of brilliance: Scott Greer as Heisenberg, Tony Braithwaite as Planck. The flaw lies in the casting of the major roles: Joe Guzman plays Schrödinger as if he's in another play, a realistic, domestic drama, while Megan Bellwoar as his dull wife seems to be just as dull as Lulu, Hansi's sexy sidekick. Kathryn Petersen, an actress who radiates sweetness and wholesomeness, and who cannot sing at all, is miscast as the singer Hansi who needs to be both very seductive and a major belter. And whatever amusement was to be had from double-casting (wave/particle theory revisited) falls quite flat. — Toby Zinman