Jason Robert Brown’s “The Last Five Years” is a tricky thing to bring to the stage.

A contemporary musical, it plays tricks with time a la “Merrily We Roll Along” (or, if you will, “Memento”), charting the course of a relationship from two directions.

For Jamie, it’s from hopeful beginning to disheartening end and for Cathy, it’s end to beginning.

Actors Theatre will stage a professional version of the show in March 2005, but first, Phillip Fazio’s amateur Ovation Theatre Troupe is taking its own stab with a short summer run in Phoenix.

For theater geeks, it’s a chance to get a primer course in what might be an otherwise unfamiliar show before it heads to the Herberger next year. While Fazio has put together a pleasing and accomplished production — it still feels more like an advance workshop than the finished product.

From this staging, it’s easy to see the difficulties inherent in the song-cycle show. Primarily, its only characters, Jamie (played by Colin Israel, a college chum of Fazio’s) and Cathy (Lindsay Levine, whom Fazio met in a high school summer theater program), exist in their own time and space; they interact only in the middle, with a marriage proposal and wedding. So finding some emotional connection for the audience is difficult.

In this production — with its collegiate-age duo, blocked keenly by Fazio, in the spotlight — successful novelist Jamie comes off as cold and self-centered to the point of caricature, a sharp contrast to Cathy’s spirit as loyal sidekick (summed up eloquently, if not disturbingly, in the song “I’m a Part of That”) all the while frustrated by her failings as an actress.

As Jamie, Israel is more interested in relishing the melodious moments in which he can belt out a sustaining long note than fully realizing his character.

Meanwhile, Levine’s singing voice is hindered by her reliance on microphone amplification in the small, 190-seat Playhouse on the Park; at times (when she’s only singing from her chest and not her gut) she sounds shrilly, and eerily, like Aileen Quinn in the “Annie” movie. Still, it’s hard not to be charmed by Levine’s rendition of “A Summer in Ohio,” a witty ditty about being stuck acting alongside a gay, midget Tevya in a regional “Fiddler on the Roof.”

“The Last Five Years” is backed by a score that, at its best, channels the piano pop brilliance of David Benoit and, at its worst, relaxes in easy musical cliché. But it’s given splendid treatment in this production by a four-member band hidden backstage.

As difficult as it is to stage, “The Last Five Years” is a rewarding piece of urbane theater and it’s the kind of show that warrants repeated viewings. For $12 an adult ticket, it’s easy to overlook the more unripened aspects of this workshop-y production, if only to fantasize about what a professional company can do with the same tricky material.