Sara Bill Photography
Next Week, All In Productions stages its production of The Last Five Years. It’s a dramatic romantic musical journey with an interesting plot structure. The play opens with a couple breaking up. It proceeds to show the couple meeting for the first time. Scenes alternate from the beginning moving forward and the end moving backward until they meet in the end. Sort of.
The couple in question are an author and an actress who are played in this production by Michael David Stoddard and Amanda Carson. The two will musically move through breaking up and falling in love in a musical with a structure that mirrors the mixed-up complexity of human emotion.
I’m not terribly familiar with Michael David Stoddard’s work, but he’s been pretty active in various places for the past dozen years or so. Amanda Carson is one of those actors I’d always wanted to see a little bit closer to the center of the stage in nearly every production. She’s got wit and charisma. Audiences get a chance to see her and Stoddard in an intimate musical starting next week as the shiny, new All In Productions launches its staging of The Last Five Years Dec. 18 - 27 at the Next Act Theatre.