Eastlight Theatre’s season was set. Then Steve Cordle opened the mail.

The company couldn’t stage “Phantom of the Opera.”

“We received a letter stating that mistakes had been made and that the license for ‘Phantom’ had been pulled,” said Cordle, Eastlight’s Executive Director since 2010.

“Not much explanation was given as to why, but Concord Theatricals worked hard to try and grant us permission,” he added. “Ultimately denied.”

Sometimes, though, when life gives you lemonade, you make lemonade (or add vodka) and keep going.

“Concord did grant us special permission to perform ‘Chicago’ [Sept. 8-16] as a replacement, a restricted title as it is still on Broadway and touring,” Cordle said. “It is an amazing dance show with incredible music and a great storyline.”

Maybe more interesting is Eastlight moving the award-winning musical “The Last Five Years” from October to this month.

“Auditions were about to start for ‘Phantom’ when everybody got the news, that it’s not happening,” says Alison Richter-Meuth. “A musical-theater emergency!

“A First World problem,” she adds, smiling.

“The Last Five Years” will be July 28-August 5 at Eastlight’s venue: Byron Moore Auditorium at East Peoria High School, with Richter-Meuth directing.

Days before auditions for “The Last Five Years,” Richter-Meuth seems eager, but relaxed. An actor, voice teacher and professional singer, the Canton native attended Knox College, WIU and ISU, and lived in New York City before returning to Peoria.

“I love acting, and I love directing,” she says. And “I’m a professional opera singer.”

That background adds to her enthusiasm and ability to direct “The Last Five Years,” which, like opera, has no spoken dialogue or monologue, much less a soliloquy. Instead, the story unfolds through more than a dozen songs.

“Music directing is different than stage directing,” Richter-Meuth says. “This won’t be a series of covers of songs. The songs are conversations.”

A powerful yet intimate musical about a New York couple, Cathy and Jamie, falling in love and falling apart, “The Last Five Years” has a unique structure, toying with time so audiences see the progression of a relationship, and its deconstruction. It intercuts and alternates songs/scenes. Cathy starts at the end of their relationship and her material moves backward; Jamie begins at their meeting five years earlier and moves forward. Their only song together is in the play’s middle, at their wedding.

The range of emotions runs from excitement to disappointment, and the lyrics depict promise and pitfalls, romance and temptations, development, friction, and erosion.

Written by Jason Robert Brown, the musical premiered in 2001 in Skokie before moving off-Broadway a year later and eventually touring worldwide and producing a cast album and even a 2014 film adaptation.

Here, there may not be a large budget for an ambitious production design, but there’s no need for one.

“I’m thinking there’ll be a set piece. Space,” Richter-Meuth says. “So, the audience will focus on the characters.”

Casting for the two roles will look closely at chemistry between the performers, Richter-Meuth says.

“They’ll have to relate, be willing to expose themselves emotionally, and connect,” she says.

The “third character,” Richter-Meuth adds, is the music — “instrumental storytelling” — steered by music/theater veteran Denise Adams-Wenger. As music director, Adams-Wenger’s leading an ensemble including a piano, bass, strings and keyboards whose live music will intermingle styles described as rock and Latin, klezmer and folk and more.

All this is being achieved in a challenging time — beyond a licensing agency pulling the plug on “Phantom.”

Cordle notes how community theater was as affected by COVID as other public events, forcing organizers to navigate new ways to do business as well as art. Eastlight’s had to rely more heavily on grants and donations to survive and launched a new revenue stream by helping dance companies, businesses and churches with lighting, sound and scene designs. And there’s local theaters all competing for talent and audiences.

Sometimes, Cordle concedes there’s a sense of being an afterthought.

“We do feel like Eastlight has been overlooked when it comes to other local theaters,” he told The Community Word. “We have been around for over 30 years, and I still frequently find people who have never heard of us. It’s baffling.”

Having contributed to other area companies, from handling music direction for 2020’s “Annie” at Corn Stock to starring as Madame Rose in Peoria Players’ recent production of “Gypsy,” Richter-Meuth seems more content, or at least accepting.

“People come from Peoria [to perform], obviously, but also Bloomington, Galesburg — performers and audiences as well — we get fine people from all over,” she says. “Whether it’s musical theater or drama, this area has a lot of talent: singers, actors, musicians.

“There is great community theater here,” she continues. “This play will be part of that.”