On my knees for you Anna 🌹🔥

Reason I HAte Jamie No. 46849

'If I hadn't believed in you I wouldn't have loved you at all' from If I Didn't Believe In You

so much of this show is Cathy thinking about her insecurities. Jamie is so successful and she isn't, and throughout the show we get her talent confused with her insecurity: in Climbing Uphill we see her unsuccessful audition and how terribly it goes, and we as an audience are supposed to think she's a bad actress/singer, but she spends the summer touring, and we know that this is something that she does regularly:

'Is it just that you're disappointed To be touring again for the summer?'

Touring isn't a bad job for an actor. It's not Broadway, it's not her dream, but it's a good job and it takes work and talent. Jason Robert Brown got sued by his ex, and consequently had to change parts of the show because it was too close to the reality of their marriage. In other words, the writer is Jamie, the entire show is told by Jamie, and even the songs from Cathy's perspective are written and told by Jamie. Given everything else in the show, I'm not particularly inclined to trust Jamie's account if he's the one telling us that she's bad at her job.

In If I Didn't Believe In You Cathy doesn't want to go to one of Jamie's work parties. She's feeling frustrated about her own career and doesn't feel like spending the evening faking it to appease Jamie's colleagues. So Jamie digs into that. The entire song is very manipulative, but with these lines it fits into a continued theme throughout the show of saying that because Cathy hasn't managed to reach the pinnacle of an incredibly competitive field that she is automatically bad at her job and completely unskilled. Which we know isn't true, because otherwise she wouldn't be touring.

When Jamie says:

'If I hadn't believed in you I wouldn't have loved you at all'

what he's really saying is if I didn't think you would be successful, I wouldn't love you. But because her success is constantly conflated with her talent, when Jamie is talking about her success, he's also talking about her talent, so he's also saying that his love for her is dependent on her being talented, which he is measuring by her success.

Also, for the rest of the song Jamie says 'If I didn't believe in you' not 'hadn't'. I'm probably simplifying this a lot, but in this context, 'Didn't' works in the past and the conditional present tense. 'Hadn't' works in the past and conditional past tense. When Jamie switches to 'hadn't' at the end, he's saying that his belief in her is in the past tense. When Jamie says 'I wouldn't have loved you' that's in past tense too. His belief in her, and his love for her, which are intrinsically tied, are both in the past tense, because she has failed, because she is untalented. The song ends with him confirming all of her worst insecurities and saying he no longer loves her, and the next and final line is:

'Now why don't you put on your dress and we'll go, okay? Cathy? Can we do that, please? Please?'

In other words, the last few lines of this song is Jamie saying telling his wife yes, you're right, you don't have a good job, and you'll never get a better one, you'll never be successful, because you're not talented, and I don't love you anymore, because I only loved you because I thought that you could be successful one day, so why don't you just shut up, stop whining and do as I say, and come to my party to celebrate me and my work and my success.

I hate this man more that I can say.

Rewatching The Last Five Years for the 2847373727th time and OUGH. Cathy Hiatt my beloved!!!!!! Babygirl’s happiness truly doomed by the narrative :/ it hurts so good!! I am so upset and yet I can’t stop watching

What she says: I'm fine

What she means:

You know what makes me crazy?

I'm sorry, can I say this?

You know what makes me nuts?

The fact that we could be together here together

Sharing our night, spending our time

And you are gonna choose someone else to be with no, you are

Yes, Jamie, that's exactly what you're doing

You could be here with me or be there with them

As usual, guess which you pick!

No, Jamie, you do not have to go to another party

With the same twenty jerks you already know

You could stay with your wife on her fucking birthday

And you could, God forbid, even see my show

And I know in your soul it must drive you crazy

That you won't get to play with your little girlfriends

No one can give you courage. No one can thicken your skin. I will not fail so you can be comfortable, Cathy. I will not lose because you can't win.

- Jamie Wellerstein, The Last Five Years

i need lily kerhoas to play cathy hiatt in the last five years NOW

Hadestown - Cynthia Erivo (she/her) as Persephone, requested by anon

Birthday: January 8, 1987 (age 35)

Birth Place: Stockwell, London, England

Theatre credits include: Celie Harris Johnson (The Color Purple), Deloris Van Cartier (Sister Act), Rosemary Pilkington (How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying), Cathy Hiatt (The Last Five Years), Dessa Rose (Dessa Rose), Puck (A Midsummer Night’s Dream), Chenice (I Can’t Sing! The X Factor Musical). Erivo also played the role of the Blue Fairy in the 2022 live action adaptation of Pinocchio. She will also play the role of Elphaba in the two-part film adaptation of Wicked.

(Pictured on the right is Lana Gordon, who is currently playing the role in the US tour production)

Credits: Terrell Mullin, Lana Gordon

Rip Charlotte you would've loved See I'm Smiling from The Last 5 Years

Here comes the bride 🌹❤️

Sunday serotonin 🌹♥

@kindfair

she arrives with an empty cardboard box in hands. what once felt comfortable now feels cold and foreign. "i left some of my things and wanted to come get them." she mumbles quietly, offering him a shy smile. and for a second she wonders if she should have just pretended he wasn't there, if she should have acted like he didn't exist. she almost wishes that he didn't, that they had never met, never fallen in love, never married and never broken up. still, the least she could do was at least be cordial as she picks up her things, pretend that everything was on good terms. pretend she hadn't cried over him, hadn't cursed his name more than a few times. she was an actress and this was to be her most challenging role to play.

@viennawait​ & cathy hiatt. 

INT. PIANO BAR, low - lit and decidedly dingy. there is a strong scent of smoke permeating the space, which feels particularly claustrophobic for THE WAITRESS, today. she’s handled the afternoon crowd alone, and you can tell from the set of her features that the stress of it has gotten to her. lucky for her, her shift is nearly over.

CRASHING. a tray full of glasses is knocked from her hands as one of the PATRONS elbows past her, not a regular, she notices, as he continues walking and leaves her to clean up the mess. for a moment she stares after him, and then she kneels, denim soon wet with a mixture of whiskey and melted ice as she begins plucking pieces of glass from the scuffed floor and placing them onto the tray, until a pair of shoes creep into her line of vision. she looks up, to find the PIANO MAN gazing down at her, his expression difficult to read. 

 “shit. sorry, bill.”  she scoots to the side, freeing up the walkway for him to get by, sure that she was in his way.  her head shakes, and she pulls a rag from the pocket of her apron, mopping up the liquid as it dribbles slowly toward him. 

// hi friends! just a little intro post! my name is rae, i’m 23, and my pronouns are she/her. my personal blog where all my follows come from is @anotherrae-anotherdestiny! anyone is welcome to introduce themselves or interact with any of my blogs. currently, i mod

izaak @its-izaak (nsfw 18+ blog - @izaakafterdark )

riley @reallyradriley (nsfw 18+ blog - @reallysexyriley)

eponine @the-jondrettegirl

klaire @klaire-is-kool

steve harrington @king-of-hawkinss (nsfw 18+ blog - @secret-stevie)

chad @chad-damnforth (nsfw 18+ blog - @dirtydanforth)

cathy hiatt @big-time-star.

marianne @the-virgin-marianne

casey @coolcatcasey

jace @jace-your-dreams

sara @sara-solves-crime

i’m more active on some blogs than others but they are all pretty much active

the history of man by maisie peters is soooooo cathy hiatt coded

The Last Five Years

Time for some rambling about a musical! God, it has been a while.

The Last Five Years... is a show that I had never heard of prior to learning it was referenced in Hamilton, and had more or less forgotten existed until it was brought up briefly in a video essay I watched several months ago, and then at some point there as I was looking for new music to listen to at work I looked up the soundtrack on Spotify. I've been listening to it on and off since.

This musical is told in a format that would only really work as a musical, which I enjoy. It chronicles a relationship between two young artists: Jamie Wellerstein, a Jewish writer seeing quick success with his first novel, and Cathy Hiatt, an aspiring actress seeing rather less success. The gimmick is that instead of telling this story conventionally, with the two characters interacting with each other on the stage, it is almost completely sung-through and almost all the songs are solos, alternating between the two characters - with his songs playing out in chronological order while hers are in reverse chronological order. The first song is Cathy reading the letter Jamie wrote her to break up with her; the second is Jamie lovestruck and bursting at the seams with excitement at the beginning of their relationship. There is one song in the middle where their timelines cross and they're both actually present in the same moment to sing a duet together, and the very last song is a counterpoint duet between Cathy saying goodbye to Jamie after their first date and Jamie saying goodbye to Cathy for good as he leaves; the rest is all alternating chunks of each character's raw POV while the other actor is offstage or sits silently out of the spotlight as the other monologues.

This entire setup could only work properly as two actors on a stage singing. There was a movie adaptation of this musical, but that was just a terrible idea from the start; it's a whole different effect when they're actually acting at each other and not just spewing alternating raw one-sided monologues directly at the audience. It really requires the heightened, non-literal nature of the musical theater format to deliver what it's doing, and that definitely tickles me.

The video essay said something along the lines of how the opposite chronology and alternating monologues symbolize the way the couple fail to understand and communicate with each other, which was part of what piqued my interest - romance isn't usually my thing but I do enjoy me some drama involving people with issues talking past each other.

What I found when I listened to it was not quite that, I think. The impression that gave me was that it was a pretty ambiguous situation, where they're both bad for each other, and in the comments of the YouTube videos I eventually checked out of the original stage performance and the movie, there's a lot of discussion about who was at fault to what extent for their relationship problems, even some "Team Jamie" vs "Team Cathy". To me, though, the answer to that question felt extremely straightforward: it's Jamie, all the way through. I like his songs significantly more than Cathy's, as songs - "Shiksa Goddess", "Moving Too Fast", "The Schmuel Song" and "A Miracle Would Happen" are all just bangers, "Nobody Needs to Know" is really raw and twisted and heartwrenching in the way I like (way more so than I'd expected, knowing only from Hamilton that this was a line about cheating), and only "Climbing Uphill" really stands out for me on Cathy's end - but man, he's just a dick.

In Jamie's songs, sure, he seems pretty convinced this relationship is going south because of Cathy. That she lashes out because she's jealous that he's successful and she isn't, that she expects him to rescue her from her nonexistent self-esteem but he can't, that she doesn't support him, that she expects him to fail so she can be comfortable, that she thinks he doesn't believe in her, that she won't give him privacy. But when we hear Cathy's raw inner monologue, none of these things actually seem to be true. Never at any point does Cathy actually express jealousy or frustration with Jamie's success. She's frustrated with her own difficulties with it, yes - but she's consistently thrilled and excited about his. She multiple times expresses how she refuses to need a man to get by or be dependent on him - nowhere does it sound like she wants him to "rescue" her. She apparently keeps going with him to publishing parties she despises with the same twenty people until she finally finds it in her to refuse (at which Jamie throws a fit about how jealous she is and how he can't rescue her and then demands she come with him to the party anyway). She keeps obligingly leaving him alone when he says he needs space to write, and spends entire summers in Ohio doing community theater, during which one would think Jamie has plenty of privacy. The one charge Jamie levels at her that might be true is that she doesn't talk to him or communicate about her feelings - God knows Jamie seems wildly off-base about her feelings all the time - but after the degree of bizarre gaslighting in the rest of the accusations he levels at her, it's kind of hard not to be skeptical of the idea she hasn't tried - I wonder if Jamie would even have counted it if she’d told him about her actual feelings and not the feelings he’s decided she’s secretly harboring. But regardless of that, in "See I'm Smiling", Cathy admits to having done things wrong and wants to own up to them and make things better. She seems to have at least the intent of being self-aware.

Meanwhile, Cathy's issues with Jamie appear starkly factual within the text, given we can assume their individual monologues don't like, straight-up make up specific events that didn't actually happen - and Jamie never admits to doing anything wrong. He claims he supports her, but when she's regularly doing shows in Ohio during the summer, not only does he not find time to visit her there until the last possible moment, he chooses to pop in for like a day and then leave to go to another one of his tedious publisher parties rather than, you know, see his wife in her show that she’s been doing, on her goddamn birthday? Really? And she believes he's cheating on her, which he is, because eventually we learn that from his end in "Nobody Needs to Know". In general, he seems super not emotionally present for her or supportive of her at all after “The Schmuel Song”, constantly busy doing whatever promoting his book, or saying he needs space to write, or staying in New York while she goes to Ohio. And given all that, it's pretty hard to dispute the notion that he can't spend a single day that's not about himself, isn't it. Her perceptions of his faults all seem accurate and indisputable; his perceptions of hers just seem like baseless inaccurate mansplaining of her own feelings where I can only scratch my head as to where on earth he's getting any of that from.

And... even aside from what Cathy herself voices, other parts of Jamie's own POV are decidedly toxic and insidious. His very first song, "Shiksa Goddess", is all about how the reason he's head over heels for her is: she isn't Jewish. That's it. He's been with a dozen different Jewish women and he's sick of it and wants something different, any Gentile woman will do. He says he could be in love with someone like you, rather than that he loves anything particular about her. After the one duet, where they get married, here's the very next song:

Everyone tells you that the minute you get married, every other woman in the world suddenly finds you attractive - well, that's not true It only affects the kind of women you always wanted to sleep with, but they wouldn't give you the time of day before And now they're banging down your door and falling to their knees At least that's what it feels like, because you can not touch them [...] And all of a sudden, this pair of breasts walks by and smiles at you, and you're like, "That's not fair!" [...] And I have to say that what exacerbates the problem is I'm at these parties I'm the center of attention, I'm the grand fromage And here she comes: "Let's get a cup of coffee! Will you look at my manuscript?" [...] And there's that really awkward moment where I try to show I wasn't encouraging this (Though of course I sort of was) And I don't want to look whipped in front of this woman, which is dumb, I shouldn't care what she thinks, since I can't fuck her anyway!

And, I mean, can't fault a guy for being horny, sexual attraction to other people does not magically disappear when you get married, I enjoy what delightfully raw unfiltered inner monologue this is, but his whole framing of this is just so revealingly misogynistic. Sure, this is all about how he'd love it if he just stopped being attracted to other women, he wants to be faithful to his wife, but apparently while he is attracted to them he just thinks of women in the most dehumanizing possible terms.

And then, of course, he does go on to cheat on her in the end, annnnd he tells the new one, "Maybe I could be in love with someone like you." Just like Cathy. He also tells her that I promise I won't lie to you but that seems laughable given he seems to be about to start the same cycle with this other woman.

I find it kind of hard to tell whether this is all entirely intentional. The creator, Jason Robert Brown, was sued by his ex-wife for basing this musical too closely on their relationship (and this definitely isn't a genderswapped version of it, since the lawsuit resulted in the removal of a song making Cathy explicitly Irish, like the ex-wife, in favor of "Shiksa Goddess"). Either Jason Robert Brown did a whole lot of self-reflection and deliberately wrote himself as a total dickweed and his ex-wife who sued him as entirely innocent, or he meant for all this to be a lot more two-sided and ambiguous than it seems to be to me. Parts of it feel super deliberate - the callback about being in love with someone like you in "Nobody Needs to Know" in particular - but others maybe not, and it sure seems like a lot of people on the internet perceive it more ambiguously.

Aside from this Team Cathy manifesto, though, I don't have too many feelings on this musical. I had hoped for it to be very issuey and very humans being humans tragically at cross-purposes, but from my perspective it's mostly just a girl who's generally insecure and really hates doing community theater in Ohio, likable enough but not super interesting, and a sort of interesting but terrible narcissistic ass who, yeah, does think he loves her, at the start, and probably genuinely intended to be supportive of her, but then just gets wrapped up in himself and his own success and ego and then utterly fails to comprehend why his wife is actually pissed at him.

There are some excellent bits of lyrics here and there, and some songs I enjoy listening to, but the characters ultimately don't really grab me enough for me to consider it a favorite. Still, I do appreciate the interesting use of the format a lot, and I do enjoy the soundtrack (but mostly Jamie's songs, I'm sorry Cathy, you did nothing wrong but apart from "Climbing Uphill" your songs are just not as catchy or fun). If it sounds interesting to you, check it out.