The musical, that impossible hybrid of vaudeville, opera and popular song, continues to attract audiences like no other theatrical form, both locally and across the country. Musicals suffer from clichéd images of showgirls kicking their legs, of antiquated songs that don’t relate to today’s listeners, as well as cornball optimism. Yet the truth of the matter is that a musical today may contain any kind of song, lack showgirls of any description, and be downright depressing. If you don’t believe me, check out the original cast recording of “Urinetown.”

This millennium is off to a pretty good start for the musical. In my opinion, more great shows are coming out of New York, both Broadway and off‑Broadway, this decade than in any other since the 1970s. We’ve had musicals featuring puppets (“Avenue Q”), re‑examining young love (“The Light in the Piazza”), proclaiming hopelessness (the aforementioned “Urinetown”) and, most prominently, re‑treading favorite old movies (“The Producers,” “Hairspray,” etc.). Most of them have been big shows, big enough to fill the Gammage Auditorium stage in their cross‑country tours.

But among aficionados and among the people who perform musicals, one tiny show seems to be trumping them all. “The Last Five Years” opened and closed off‑Broadway within six weeks in 2002. But the original cast album caught fire and gained fans around the globe. Before long, there were only two kinds of musical theater performers: Those who had done “The Last Five Years,” and those who wanted to do it.

In the Valley alone, the two‑person show about a marriage gone sour has been produced three times. A fourth production follows this weekend at Arizona MusicFest. If you can’t make Friday night’s performance featuring the festival’s very own singing conductor, Robert Moody, Mesa Encore Theatre has just announced it’s dumping a previously scheduled show to do songwriter Jason Robert Brown’s little masterpiece.

Brown had already composed the Tony Award‑winning musical “Parade,” a large‑scale Broadway show about a lynching in the South, when he focused his attention to something much more intimate: a musical about the five‑year courtship, marriage and breakup of a young couple. It was based on his own experience, though the man in the story was changed from a songwriter to a fiction writer. There is no book–no dialogue–but only two people singing 14 songs that tell the story from the competing perspectives of the man and the woman.

And here’s the trick: The woman remembers the relationship from the present, going backward; but the man recalls it from the beginning going forward. So their timelines are like two arrows going in opposite directions. The woman's first song is “Still Hurting,” a lament to the death of the marriage. The man’s first song is “Shiksa Goddess,” an exuberant ode to the fact that he, a Jewish man, has found the “shiksa” (non‑Jewish woman) of his dreams. The timelines cross only in the middle, at the point of the wedding, in an ineffably beautiful duet called “The Next Ten Minutes.”

Here it is Valentine’s Day week and I’m touting a show about love that goes wrong! But the truth is, we’ve all been there or probably will be someday. Relationships that once seemed ideal can decay into battles of competing egos, bruised emotions and mutual accusation before you can say “engagement ring.” What is amazing about Brown’s songs is that he is so brutally honest about himself (or his stand‑in character in the show) and his role in the breakup. Don’t worry, guys: The woman doesn’t get off easy, either. When his career ignites and hers doesn’t, she becomes, in her uncontrollable envy, his biggest detractor–a sure deathblow to any relationship.

And yet, that love duet is the real thing. It expresses genuine love in a fresh, contemporary sound that is nonetheless in the tradition of other great musical theater duets dating back to “People Will Say We’re in Love.” Where else but in musical theater, can you hear people sing to each other, unselfconsciously and without pop culture irony, words such as these: “Will you share your life with me for the next 10 lifetimes/For a million summers, ‘til the world explodes/’Til there’s no one left who has ever known us apart?”

I take it back: This is the perfect show for the season of love. It expresses the most heartfelt feelings of intimacy, and contains the greatest warnings for future bumps in the road, of any show I can think of. By being honest about his own life, Brown touches something in all our lives. That’s what musical theater can do when you strip it of showgirls, glitter, and audience expectations of “big.”

For information on the show Friday, Feb. 16, at MusicFest, go to www.azmusicfest.org. The show starts early, at 5:30 p.m., because a gourmet dinner is also served. Tickets, including dinner, are $80.

If you miss it, catch “The Last Five Years” in April at the Mesa Arts Center. For more information, go to www.mesaartscenter.com.