Theater Review

Addison's WaterTower Theatre stuffs intimate musical with relationship baggage

The Last Five Years at WaterTower Theatre

Seth Womack and Monique Abry star in The Last Five Years.

Photo by Jason Anderson

Each relationship comes with baggage, but rarely do you get to see a couple's detritus all at once. Director Kelsey Leigh Ervi's concept for The Last Five Years, Jason Robert Brown's hauntingly beautiful musical about the flowering and souring of one New York romance, is all about more, but especially more stuff.

Bradley Gray's multi-tiered set is crammed with photos, furniture, clothing, and even ice skates and a full-size Christmas tree, some of which is utilized by the two-person cast during the 90-minute show. It's a bit claustrophobic, and can sometimes make the criss-crossing timeline even harder to follow.

Brown's conceit is that Jamie, a budding novelist, begins the show having just met his future love, Cathy. The aspiring actress Cathy, however, starts at their divorce and works backwards. They trade songs, each moving away from or toward the love they built and discarded. Traditionally the only time the two characters truly connect is at their mid-show wedding, but not in Ervi's version.

At WaterTower Theatre, Jamie and Cathy are constanting interacting, playing silent scene partner to each other with backup from the onstage band, members of which are perched throughout the set. Sometimes that works. When the band, led by music director Adam C. Wright and with a particular stand-out performance by violinist Katrina Kratzer, is brought into the action, it gives the actors an often humorous sounding board. But often the constant togetherness of Jamie and Cathy weakens the impact of the actor who's singing — it feels like more for the sake of more.

Clawing their way out from the avalanche are two extremely talented performers, Seth Womack and Monique Abry. Womack immediately gives us a hint of Jamie's later insufferable ego, but heaps on so much charm that it's easy to see why Cathy falls for the young writer. Abry nails Cathy's deep-seated insecurity but still emits a "cool girl" vibe, instantly explaining why Jamie eagerly moves from moving in to putting a ring on it.

But as the musical marches on, the balance is thrown and Jamie emerges as the more likable of the two. It's a curious development, one that perhaps Ervi didn't intend to create but that lingers nonetheless.

It doesn't linger as strongly as the emotional gut-punch that is Brown's ending, though, and Ervi continues the wave of longing with a mini "museum of broken relationships" in the lobby. Pause on your way in or out of the theater to read why seemingly ordinary objects encapsulate a relationship for the locals who lent them.

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WaterTower Theatre's production of The Last Five Years runs through July 1.

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Mural News

Netflix House will debut in Dallas with murals from acclaimed artist

Netflix House

Jeremy Biggers at Netflix House

A long-awaited immersive venue is opening in Dallas, and it will debut with local art on its walls: Netflix House, a year-round exhibit revolving around Netflix shows and movies, will open at Galleria Dallas on December 11, with two murals from award-winning Dallas multi-medium artist Jeremy Biggers.

Netflix House is an immersive dive complete with merchandise store, film house, arcade, and restaurant-bar. When it opens, Dallas will be the second location in the U.S., following Philadelphia, where it debuted in November 2025, also with murals from a local artist.

A graduate of Booker T. Washington High School for Performing and Visual Arts, Biggers is a renowned artist whose murals can be found spashed on walls across Dallas. Many, such as the Selena portrait on the wall outside Top Ten Records at 306 S. Bishop Ave., have become local landmarks.

He's a logical choice, having worked with a number of corporations including Nike, Adidas, the Dallas Mavericks, and IBM, for whom he created the "THINK" mural in their Dallas corporate office. His works have also been exhibited nationally, including a 2024 solo exhibition "be safe out there bro" at Band of Vices, a gallery in Los Angeles.

"Being chosen to be the artist to paint this mural, it would have been a disservice to myself, as well as the art scene in the city, not to try to infuse myself into it," he says.

$\u200bJeremy Biggers at Netflix House$ Jeremy Biggers at Netflix HouseNetflix House

Biggers did two murals featuring his interpretation of Netflix figures including the Squid Game Young-hee doll, characters from KPop Demon Hunters and megahit series Stranger Things, plus Pandy and DJ Catnip, the best friends in the interactive series Gabby’s Dollhouse.

Both murals are intensely colored works that incorporate Biggers' signature motif: a grid of polka dots spread across the image.

One is on the exterior of Netflix House, at the parking entrance, a colorful collage of characters, measuring 38 feet x 50 feet — the tallest mural Biggers has tackled. He painted it with aerosol; it took him two months to complete.
The other is on the interior, on the mall side entrance of Netflix House, measuring 57 feet x 12 feet — a study in moody blacks and blues, with accents of neon-red that give it a 3D effect.

“I'm trying to tell the story of Netflix, and the story of where Netflix has been historically, where Netflix is headed in the future, and then also infusing my own narrative and my own language visually into that story,” he says.

“They could have opened this anywhere, so for Dallas to be one of the very first locations — that’s a testament to us as a market, as consumers of arts and consumers in general," he says.

Jeremy Biggers at Netflix HouseNetflix House

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