Sunday and The Last Five Years
On looking, loving, and what lasts
Let me sketch for you a love story.
He is an artist — consumed, driven, brilliant in a way that is at once intoxicating and impossible. She is observed, on show, studied like the light. She submits herself, in her own way, to others’ eyes, others’ judgment, others’ scrutiny. But she, too, is watching. She watches the man she loves as he works. She watches him succeed and fall short, draw closer and drift away.
He makes something remarkable. Something that will outlast their relationship. She’s a part of that — present in it, preserved, even — and yet the making of it is precisely what she cannot survive. The work is where he lives. She, increasingly, is where he visits.
This, of course, is not a single story. It’s an old song, as Hadestown’s Hermes might say. It’s a song sung by Sondheim and Lapine in Sunday in the Park with George, by Jason Robert Brown in The Last Five Years, by each of us touched in some deep and hard-to-name way by one or both of these towering works.
This week, at the London Palladium, Ben Platt and Rachel Zegler have been the custodians of that song. Their Brown-directed production of The Last Five Years, now States-bound, is a 90-minute miracle. To say that Platt and Zegler are at the peak of their powers is tempting, but suggests that for them there even is such a peak. I prefer Cathy’s words: en route to the sky. And what a thrill it is to be dizzy from that height.
Today, let’s place Jamie and Cathy alongside George and Dot. Let’s listen for the song they share, the worlds they build, the love they can and cannot hold.
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As Sunday begins, Dot is standing in the sun, furious, in love, and already working something out. What she is working out is the particular experience of being with a man who looks at her constantly, intently, but who never quite seems to see her. Dot is modelling. She is, professionally and personally, an object of study.
In “Color and Light,” George and Dot’s inner worlds run simultaneously, in parallel, never quite touching — which is, of course, the point. Dot’s spoken observations about George here have the quality of someone trying to solve a puzzle that keeps changing shape. “He could look forever,” she says — and then, with the precision of someone who has been watching carefully for a long time: “as if he sees you and he doesn’t all at once.” George catalogues her completely, with a painter’s total attention: the pink lips, the red cheeks, the wide eyes, the round face, the tiny pout… He sees everything about Dot. He cannot, quite, see her.
This is the trap of loving someone like George: the same quality that makes him impossible — that total, consuming attention — is what makes him irresistible. “And you’re studied like the light,” Dot sings, “so you want him even more.” Being studied like the light is reductive and insufficient and, in its way, intoxicating. She knows all three things to be true.
Cathy, in The Last Five Years, has no painter studying her. Or does she? In Jamie’s very first song, he sings: “You, taking the light. / You, you are the story I should write — / I have to write!” What Cathy has, too, are auditions — and Brown shows us that auditioning and being insufficiently loved are structurally the same experience. In both cases, you submit yourself. In both cases, the people doing the assessing will often have other things, or people, on their minds (“Look at me. / Stop looking at that, look at me,” sings Cathy). In both cases, the verdict tells you almost nothing about who you truly are.
“Climbing Uphill” takes us inside Cathy’s head mid-audition, so we hear both the song she is presenting and the torrent running beneath it: the self-consciousness, the professional dread, the shoes she hates, the resume she half-invented. And then, in the middle of all this, she pivots to Jamie: his need for space, his work, his absence from this moment that she is living entirely alone. She is standing in front of strangers asking to be seen, and her mind goes directly to the man who is supposed to see her most clearly, and the gap where his attention should be.
The Follies fantasy that briefly opens up in “Color and Light” deserves a moment’s attention. Dot imagines a different kind of being-looked-at entirely: gentlemen in tall silk hats, young aristocrats with fancy flats, men who would wait for her, drink to her, want her with an uncomplicated directness that George’s painterly gaze never quite offers. Performance, in this fantasy, means desire rather than study; to be on a stage is to be wanted, not measured. She dismisses it, sensibly, as a world of married men and stupid boys and too much smoke and noise. But she dismisses it from the inside, which means she has stood inside it long enough to know its appeal.
Both women, then, know what it is to perform the self under observation, and both know how to calibrate that performance for a particular audience. Which brings us to “See I’m Smiling.” Jamie has come to Ohio to see Cathy, and she is working, visibly, to project happiness onto a visit that is not quite going as she’d hoped. “See, I’m smiling,” she tells him — “that means I’m happy that you’re here.” The annotation of the feeling, the stage direction spoken aloud, is the action of someone who has learned that her emotional reality requires translation to reach him.
This is Dot saying “don’t move the mouth” to herself, before George can say it to her. In Sunday, that instruction arrives in the opening scene and it is literal: George, mid-sketch, silences Dot mid-flow because he needs the line of her mouth to stay still. In “See I’m Smiling,” it’s as if Cathy has internalized the instruction so thoroughly that she delivers it to herself. She has learned to be both instructor and instructed — to manage her own presentation, to hold the pose.
In “Color and Light,” George and Dot’s parallel inner worlds briefly converge. Their voices meet, for the first and only time in the number, on a single shared line: “I could look at him / her forever.” Both of them mean what they say absolutely. And they do not mean the same thing at all.
George’s forever is the painter’s forever — the arrested instant, the pigment that will not fade, the afternoon held permanent on canvas. Dot’s is the lover’s forever — duration, presence, the hope of being known across time rather than captured in a single light. The word is identical, but the two forevers do not touch.
At Sunday’s formal midpoint, George’s forever is made flesh. His painting assembles itself, one Sunday afternoon on the Grande Jatte held still for good. Dot is in the painting, permanent and unreachable. Their relationship already over, George bestows upon her that “more public and more permanent expression of affection” she sang of at the top of the show. She becomes, in a way, immortal. The whole of Act One, it seems, has built towards its finale’s full-throated, full-ensemble “Forever…”
The Last Five Years also reaches for forever at its structural center. “The Next Ten Minutes” is, gut-wrenchingly, the only time in the show where Jamie and Cathy briefly occupy the same present tense. Their wedding is the single point of convergence in a formal design that holds them apart. Here, forever is a destination that the lovers try to reach by increment. Jamie proposes, famously, ten minutes at a time:
Will you share your life with me
For the next ten minutes?
For the next ten minutes:
We can handle that.
The song builds, though, and the language builds with it. When Jamie and Cathy sing together for the first time in the show, he asks her for “ten lifetimes” and “a million summers” while she sings—yes, that word again—“Forever. / Forever, Jamie…”
They continue:
‘Til the world explodes,
’Til there’s no one left
Who has ever known us apart!
The irony could scarcely be more devastating. We, watching on, have only known them apart. And we will only know them apart. Except, of course, for this one incalculably precious moment.
Cathy, notably, imagines a different kind of forever altogether. “I could protect and preserve, / I could say no and goodbye,” she sings — but for Cathy, preservation is absence. It’s the life never fully lived, the self kept intact by keeping what some might call a tender distance... George preserves Dot and makes her immortal. Cathy’s version of preservation would simply make her invisible. She refuses it. “But why, Jamie, why?” She steps instead into the version of love that can be lost — which is the only version, both shows understand, that is ever real.
The logic, remarkably, is one Jamie already understands. In “The Schmuel Song,” a story he writes for Cathy and reads aloud to her by Christmas tree light, an act of total creative devotion ends in a girl promising “forevermore” to the man who made the dress. The artist makes something; the making conjures the forever. Jamie knows this story. He tells it beautifully. The rest of his story is, perhaps, the distance between knowing it and living it.
George’s forever is a genuine artistic act, permanent and true and ruinously costly, and it carries Dot into a different kind of eternity — she is in the painting, she will always be in the painting, something of her will outlast all else. Jamie and Cathy’s forever is a vow, and we know from the very first line of the show—“Jamie is over and Jamie is gone”—that their vow will fail. Perhaps, here, The Last Five Years itself is the painting, and Jason Robert Brown our Seurat. He does what his characters can’t: he paints onto canvas a permanent record of their love. He holds that love still long enough to be seen whole.
Sunday gives Dot a second kind of forever: in Act Two, a century later, she returns to give the younger George what her George could never quite receive. The love changes form. It becomes available again, in a different way, in a different time. In this week’s paid-subscriber essay, we’ll explore that breathtaking sequence, as well as “Finishing the Hat” and “Moving Too Fast,” in more depth.
For now, let’s end where The Last Five Years ends — which, of course, if you’re Cathy, is where it begins. She stands on her front steps at the end of her first date with Jamie. He has just kissed her. She watches him turn the corner and go, and the world, for this one suspended moment, is nothing but potential: the next phone call, the next meeting, the rest of her life still unlost ahead of her.
Her world is, in that moment, a blank page or canvas. So many possibilities…
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In Sunday in the Park with George, we meet a fictionalized version of Georges Seurat—intense, obsessive, married to his art at the expense of all else. “I am not hiding behind my canvas. I am living in it,” he says. But how might we best get a sense of the living, breathing Seurat? And how might knowledge of the real man inform our understanding of the character we’ve come to know so well?
Two of the greatest shows ever created! Love your insights on the less obvious connections that manifest in “Climbing Uphill” and “See, I’m smiling”. Dot and Cathy’s shared experience of the unseen muse reminds me a little of the Margaret Atwood quote, “You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur.” Just reminiscent of that internal voice that often tells women being seen at all is greater than the alternative. Anyway! Love this so much! Hopeful for more essays in the future on these shows’ connections
Wow! These analyses you write are so illuminating. Thank you!