Frontmezzjunkies reports: From Moulin Rouge!’s Final Bow to The Last Five Years Finding New Breath
By Ross
Broadway, like that pesky love-thing, is built on entrances and exits. Just as one stage door prepares to close, another opens with promise, possibility, and no small amount of baggage. With the announcement that Ben Platt and Rachel Zegler will star in concert productions of The Last Five Years at the Hollywood Bowl, London Palladium, and Radio City Music Hall, directed and conducted live by Jason Robert Brown himself, the celebration of the musical’s 25th anniversary feels like exactly that kind of hinge moment. A story about beginnings told backwards and endings told forwards, and the musical, which recently attempted a Broadway arrival, now finds itself reborn in spaces large enough to hold both nostalgia and reinvention. Tickets went on sale February 6, and with that comes the familiar thrill of anticipation: not just for the piece, but for what these two performers may bring to it now.
Zegler’s casting, in particular, feels like a moment of recalibration. She has garnered great reviews for her Evita in the West End (although I’m not entirely convinced). We shall see when it hops over to Broadway next season so as not to go head to revival head with ALW’s Cats. In past reviews, I’ve admittedly been less than generous, noting that in both “West Side Story” and Broadway’s Romeo + Juliet, she felt like “the weaker partner,” writing that her and her acting partner’s “sexual chemistry doesn’t ignite in the same way everyone else’s passion… does,” leaving us wanting “just something a bit more to emotionally hold onto.” And yet The Last Five Years is a very different kind of beast. Cathy Hiatt’s journey, a reverse-engineered saga through heartbreak, ambition, and quiet erasure, may offer Zegler the exact terrain she’s been missing: emotional interiority layered into great songs over iconic ingénue glow. Sometimes the right role isn’t about proving yourself louder, but about being heard more clearly.
Ben Platt, on the other hand, arrives with a kind of emotional shorthand already baked in. In his Tony-winning performance in Dear Evan Hansen, I called him “devastatingly memorable,” noting how we could “see it on Platt’s face, see it in his body, and hear it in his voice; the desperation, the fear, the desire for love, and the discomfort in just being him.” Jamie Wellerstein, for all his charm and success, is a character driven by ego, entitlement, and emotional blindness, qualities Platt has repeatedly shown he knows how to shade without flattening. If The Last Five Years lives or dies on our ability to sit inside discomfort, Platt has already proven he knows how to make us do just that.
At the same time, Broadway prepares to say goodbye to one of its most extravagant love letters. Moulin Rouge! The Musical will close on July 26, 2026, after 2,265 performances, standing as the 36th longest-running show in Broadway history. When I first reviewed it, I called it “joyful ‘toxic‘ pleasure,” breathlessly swept up in a world where “Truth. Beauty. Freedom. And above all things, Love” collided in decadent, dangerous harmony. It was, and remains, a show that understood spectacle as seduction. It’s a production that didn’t shy away from excess but embraced it as emotional currency. Its survival through the pandemic and its triumphant return made it feel, for a time, like a symbol of Broadway’s own resilience. And I couldn’t get enough of it.
And maybe that’s the connective tissue here. Moulin Rouge! bows out as The Last Five Years steps back into the spotlight. One show revels in communal intoxication; the other dissects intimacy with surgical precision. One closes having proven that spectacle can endure; the other reopens asking whether love ever really does. Endings and beginnings don’t exactly cancel each other out; they speak to one another. So, thankfully, as one curtain falls at the Al Hirschfeld, another rises with two performers standing at very different crossroads, ready to tell a story about love already ending, even as it begins. Exciting stuff, if done right.
