The Last 5 Years by Tony award winning composer and lyricist Jason Robert Brown is a musical deconstruction of a love affair and a marriage taking place over a five year period. Jamie Wellerstein is a young, talented up and coming Jewish novelist who falls in love with Cathy Hiatt, a Shiksa Goddess struggling actress. Their story is told almost entirely through songs using an intercutting time line device; all of Cathy's songs begin at the end of their marriage and move backwards in time to the beginning of their love affair while Jamie's songs start at the beginning of their affair and move forward to the end of their marriage. They meet in the center when Jamie proposes.

Teenager Ethan Wate is obsessed with his urge to finish high school and go on to college in order to leave the small town of Gatlin, South Carolina behind, until a mysterious girl begins to inhabit his dreams. When he meets Lena Duchannes, a newcomer who has just enrolled in his school, Ethan knows she is the girl in his dreams. Lena is rejected by the rest of her classmates for being the granddaughter of Macon Ravenwood, whom the town's superstitious residents consider to be a devil-worshiper. But Ethan gives her a ride anyway and they fall in love. Lena reveals to her new boyfriend that she is a witch, and that on her sixteenth birthday she will be claimed by either the forces of light or of darkness. She will remain in the light, but only if she does not remain in love with Ethan. To make matters worse, her evil mother, Sarafine, is casting spells to push Lena to the dark side. Ethan joins her in a search to find a magic spell to save their doomed love. Will the lovers succeed?