Character guide
Cathy Hiatt
from The Last Five Years
Cathy Hiatt is a struggling actress whose five-year relationship is told in reverse in The Last Five Years, Jason Robert Brown's musical that reached Broadway in 2025.
- Show
- The Last Five Years
- Broadway premiere
- 2025
- Role
- Lead
- Music by
- Jason Robert Brown
Cathy Hiatt on stage vs screen
Broadway compared with the 2014 film
On screen, Cathy is no longer alone in her songs. On stage, both characters perform almost exclusively solo numbers, with Cathy telling the story backward from the breakup. Richard LaGravenese's 2014 film puts Jamie in the room for each of her songs and adds a few pieces of dialogue, while keeping the songs and their order nearly identical.
Lauren Kennedy created Cathy at Northlight Theatre in 2001, and Sherie Rene Scott played her Off-Broadway in 2002. Anna Kendrick played Cathy in the film, a performance many critics called the best of her career, and Adrienne Warren played her in the show's first Broadway production in 2025.
Who is Cathy Hiatt?
Cathy Hiatt is an actress working her way through summer stock and regional auditions while her husband Jamie Wellerstein's writing career takes off quickly around her. Her story is told in reverse chronological order, opening at the end of their marriage and moving backward to the excitement of their first meeting, so the audience watches her hope curdle into heartbreak in the opposite direction from how it happened.
Cathy's frustration with her stalled career, and the growing distance she feels from Jamie's success, make her a sympathetic portrait of ambition colliding with disappointment, and her reverse telling gives the audience an unusually intimate view of a relationship's slow unraveling.
Cathy's role in The Last Five Years
Cathy is a lead role, one of only two characters in the entire show, requiring a performer with the vocal stamina and emotional range to carry extended solo numbers that span heartbreak, hope, comedy, and despair, often within a single song. Adrienne Warren starred as Cathy in the show's first Broadway production in 2025.
Audiences and performers are drawn to Cathy for the raw honesty of her songs, particularly her devastating opening number, and for the technical challenge of playing a relationship's ending and beginning almost simultaneously across the length of the show.
Cathy Hiatt: frequently asked questions
What show is Cathy Hiatt from?
Cathy Hiatt is a lead character in The Last Five Years, which had its first Broadway production in 2025.
Is Cathy Hiatt a lead or supporting role?
Cathy Hiatt is a lead role, one of only two characters in the show.
Who wrote the music for The Last Five Years?
Jason Robert Brown wrote both the music and lyrics for The Last Five Years.
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