Nick Jonas musical is the worst of the Broadway season

“The Last Five Years,” composer Jason Robert Brown’s downer story of a failed marriage, has always been an unsatisfying musical.

Yes, legions cherish Brown’s 24-year-old pop-rock tunes like “I Can Do Better Than That” and “Moving Too Fast” — not me! — and the emotional sledgehammer numbers are mainstays of cabarets all over the world. 

But when they’re fused together to tell the womp-womp story of Jamie and Cathy, spouses who barely interact onstage as they loudly belt out their grievances, they make for a whiny bore of a show that manages to be both slim and lumbering.

Believe me, despite a short 90-minute runtime, “The Last Five Years” is never “moving too fast.” You’re five years older by curtain call. 

Now, add in woefully miscast leads in Nick Jonas and Adrienne Warren and barely-there direction by Whitney White and what you get is the dirge that opened Sunday night at the Hudson Theatre — one of the worst musical productions of the season. It’s appallingly bad.

In the ugly revival of a work that doesn’t belong on Broadway in the first place, the pair’s already monotonous journey becomes a textureless concert that’s frustratingly hard to track for a show that’s been constantly produced all over the world for more than two decades. 

Audiences always deserve clarity, but “The Last Five Years” must be especially well-defined in its staging and performances, since the weird structure is jarring to the uninitiated. 

You see, Jamie tells the couple’s tale in sequential order, from meeting gentile Cathy, his “Shiksa Goddess” who’s a struggling actress, to their breakup. 

Cathy’s songs, meanwhile, occur in reverse. She begins “hurting” from the split and ventures backwards to the elation of their first date — a la “Merrily We Roll Along.”

Well, best of luck figuring any of that out. The first Broadway bow of Brown’s semi-autobiographical musical is almost impossible to follow, and the viewer gives up on it quickly.  

Much of the blame falls on Jonas’ dire enunciation as Jamie, a Jewish author who finds success in publishing while Cathy settles for a summer stock theater job in Ohio.

During some songs — especially the quick ones — I couldn’t make out a single word coming out of his mouth. All that escapes are adequately reached notes, like the teacher from “Charlie Brown” crooning a solo at a piano bar.

And the pop star, who’s on Broadway for the second time as an adult, is not a particularly expressive actor either, so his eyes and body don’t do the heavy lifting for his lips. 

With the words cast aside, his unintelligible Jamie has no personality to speak of, and we get no impression whatsoever of who he is. Brown’s lyrics have never been truer: Jamie is over and Jamie is gone.

Jonas is not the sole bum decision, though. White’s staging, or lack thereof, is un-engaging and blurry slop. 

Although the musical is scenically spare, that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be specific, crafty or stimulating. And yet the revival is gauche and unsightly. Narratively watery, White puts the audience onto a paddle-less boat. It is never immediately clear where or when Jamie and Cathy are, other than downstage center at the Hudson. 

Aside from an occasional excursion to an awkward raised platform, this is Park and Bark 101. 

Warren, who won a Tony Award playing the title role in “Tina — The Tina Turner Musical,” is the only element somewhat worth appreciating here. Her voice is predictably stunning and she has A+ diction. (I’ve never been so grateful to simply understand basic words.)

But, perhaps because of who Warren is onstage with and what she’s been told to do there, her Cathy is not as deep or intriguing as the character could be. She’s poised and unshakeable, and never neurotic or fragile — qualities you’d sooner expect of a down-on-her-luck actress in frenetic New York who constantly faces rejection. Warren borders on bland.

Nevertheless, she builds more of a character than Jonas. Which is to say, she builds a character.

If the crowd doesn’t get to know this Jamie at all, they at least go on a speed date with Cathy.

If only “The Last Five Years” were that speedy. As the lights went down on this ponderous misfire, I felt the entire room thinking the same thing: They could do better than that.