Most musicals about romance trace a growing love story sequentially. Some depict a romance as it's dying. "The Last Five Years" does both, simultaneously - and therein lies its allure.

When he wrote the story, music and lyrics for the 2002 show, Jason Robert Brown based the tale of Jamie, an aspiring novelist, and Cathy, a struggling actress, on himself and his ex-wife. As "The Last Five Years" begins, Cathy sings about the end of the couple's marriage. The next song is Jamie's. He has just met, and become entranced by, Cathy.

Each of Jamie's songs depicts the relationship through courtship, marriage, settled married life, strife, separation and divorce. His songs alternate with Cathy's, whose songs work backward through the same five-year period.

At the Chance Theater, the emotional tug created by this unusual dynamic is powerful, as director Oanh Nguyen and musical director Rob Blaney forge this compact, intermission-free one-act into something forceful and, ultimately, poignant. This is no "he said, she said"; the story told by each character is of two people in love but ultimately mismatched, a microcosm of so many couples.

Much of Brown's music is inspired by the standard sounds of rock, jazz, and rhythm and blues, leaving most of this score as indistinct as other contemporary musicals. No, it's the lyrics - and what they say about the hopes, dreams and problems of these two little people - that give "Five Years" its oomph.

Those lyrics include "covered with scars I did nothing to earn" (a bitter Cathy after the divorce), "I've found a woman I love and an agent who loves me" (Jamie, with self-referential irony), "off on a trip to Jamie-land" (Cathy's semi-sarcastic take on her husband) and "will you spend the next ten lifetimes with me" (a tender Jamie, proposing to Cathy).

In the play's opening scenes, Bob Simpson's Jamie is bouncy, cocky and self-satisfied - never more so than when singing the funky, jazzy "Moving Too Fast," while Jocelyn A. Brown uses a pure, delicate pop-vocal style to give voice to the still-raw wounds Cathy feels - a style that serves her even when expressing Cathy's anger at her husband's self-centeredness or her dawning realization that the person you love may not measure up to the love you feel.

The magic the play works is in the way both characters seemingly take each other's place from the play's opening to its conclusion. It's hard to imagine the emotionally battered Cathy reflecting Jamie's early optimism, yet here's Brown, mid-play, looking hopefully to Jamie as the one thing she can count on even as her work as an actress misfires and, even later in the play (five years ago), brimming with hope, optimism, self-confidence and even exuberance.

As moving, if not more so, is watching the almost juvenile Jamie burrow ever more deeply into his career ambitions, in effect cutting himself off from his wife. From his clownish first few scenes, Simpson morphs into soft-spoken and humble (while proposing to Cathy), then sarcastic and angry (when she refuses to attend a party for his first novel's publication). At the end of the road, he's sober and guarded, subdued and inward-looking.

With a singing style that recalls the work of Sarah McLachlan, Brown effects a broad emotional range, from dreamy lyricism to the lightly comedic "A Summer in Ohio," in which she's at once sexy, funny and charming, all in an unshowy fashion that girds songwriter Brown's thesis that Cathy, no matter how talented or attractive, desperately seeks validation from others.

Also without having to try too hard, Simpson just seems naturally funny, never more so than when the Jewish Jamie tops a tiny Christmas tree with a Star of David, then sings (in Yiddish dialect), the funny and poignant "Schmuel Song." The gentleness Simpson's Jamie shows Cathy takes us by surprise, as does Jamie's eventual angst, captured by the haunting waltz tune that opens and closes the show and is used in the song where the couple become engaged.

Though the two characters share only a few of the 16 songs, Nguyen keeps his two performers proximate in relation to one another for nearly the entire show - a wise move that keeps us from siding too closely with either character. With song as the chosen communication mode of "The Last Five Years," the music itself is a crucial element.

Performing from onstage, Blaney, on piano, Kyle Cahill on guitar and Jerry Motto on bass guitar provide subtle, unobtrusive support for the pair of actor-singers, giving the words they sing that much more impact.

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