- Sep 23, 2022
- 7 min read
I tried to understand cats for years. The animals, I mean. I’m such an animal lover now that most people would be horrified to know I was indifferent to them for most of my early life. There were two dogs in my childhood household on Burgundy Drive. Duchess, a beagle mix, was an outside dog and she died when I was six or seven. Chip (technically Chip #2, the second pekapoo) was chronically ill and mean by the time I was cognizant. So, there was none of the jocular fun from either that most associate with dogs. As for cats, they seemed snobbish, standoffish, above everybody. So, there was no emotional connection to animals for me and, after Chip and Duchess died, my parents vowed no more animals so the question was kaput for many years.
Then came Catherine. Up at college, my girlfriend and I pet-sat an older cat for two snowbirds who headed to Arizona in the winter. Beth told me not to get up in the cat's face as she had seen me do when I clumsily tried to connect with animals. She told me to enter the apartment normally and ignore the cat. She would come to me. She did. Catherine was a marvelous creature. I have loved cats ever since and am the proud owner of two—Macey (15) and Amos Moses (8). We also have an adorable chiweenie, Grace, who makes typing this on the computer very hard right this moment.
I tried to understand Cats for years. The show, I mean. Growing up in the late eighties and loving theatre, Cats was everywhere. I knew few people who didn’t have the cast album or a program. If they had neither of those, they had seen it either on Broadway or on tour. Cats is not quite as ubiquitous as it used to be. There has been a Broadway revival, but The Phantom of the Opera replaced it years ago as the most successful production maybe ever(?). But when Cats first appeared, it was a curiosity and a head-scratcher.
The story is famously told that after American director Harold Prince saw the material that would comprise Cats, he turned to Lloyd Webber and asked, “Is there something I’m missing in the show—is it about Thatcher or the British class system…?” and Lloyd Webber turned to him and said, “Hal…it’s about cats.”
Well, I hated that story as much as I hated everything else about Cats. For thirty-some-odd years, it was the bane of my existence. I hated many things about it. I hated that something so simple ran as long as it did—no, it wasn’t the simplicity, but the vapidity of doing something so brainless in the theatre. But it was also the music—it is the Lloyd Webberiest music he’s ever Lloyd Webbered. But really, it was the fact that it was a dance musical. Being physically awkward, dancers make me nothing but angry in how they can contort. It’s the least favorite of my modes of storytelling. But ALSO, there’s no story.
The basic through-line of Cats is that one of the Jellicle Cats (your guess is as good as mine) will be chosen to be reborn, ascending to the Heaviside layer (some sort of cat haven/heaven). The cat who is chosen, Grizabella, is heavily intimated to be some kind of promiscuous(?) cat. Other than that, that’s it. The other Jellicles are introduced, but they don’t make it to the Heaviside layer. Grizabella does. And there’s the story.
The lyrics are culled from Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, a collection of playful verse from T. S. Eliot who was otherwise a serious man with mostly dour subjects. I picked up a hardcover of it many years ago in one of my attempts to understand why everybody loved Cats. There is not much to it—Grizabella was cut from the final product and, while the illustrations are lovely, it is clearly meant for intelligent children and Eliot completists. The surprising thing is the last thing I think of when I read the poetry is how it would sound musicalized. It did not strike me as musical in the slightest.
But musicalize it Lloyd Webber did—in styles ranging from British music-hall to disco and back. Grizabella and the lyrics for her song, “Memory,” were mocked-up from Eliot’s drafts (provided by his widow) and given additional lyrics by Richard Stilgoe (of Starlight Express fame) and Trevor Nunn, the director. But what made Lloyd Webber musicalize Old Possum? What was the impetus?
For years, I thought it was just about making money. Cats was a cash-cow. But that was not a given when it first appeared in London. A dance musical had never been tried there and the producer, Cameron Mackintosh, was yet to be a household name. With everything against it, it found a following quickly, ran in London forever, and its Broadway production was the center of the theatrical world (for better or worse) at one time.
Okay, well, if it wasn’t money, maybe it was because Lloyd Webber wouldn’t have to work with a living lyricist. While wonderful lyricists have written his later works (Don Black, Charles Hart, and Christopher Hampton especially), it seems Lloyd Webber has never wanted again a lyricist as present, photographable, and technically amazing as Tim Rice. No lyricist has ever shared the same billing line with Lloyd Webber since Rice and I think Lloyd Webber likes it that way. But that wasn’t it either.
Maybe I had to think back to what Lloyd Webber told Prince. It’s not about money or royalties or publishing rights, but…cats. A man’s profound love of cats birthed a musical. But, for many years, I didn’t hear in it music that spoke to me of anything of the litheness, nimbleness, and graceful nature of cats I’ve known. Then I had to remember cats are more than loving, special, and unique. They are also prickly, selective, have to be involved in everything, sneaky, hilarious, the list goes on.
Things really changed for me when Cats was made into a film. Not the made-for-video project from the late 90s that staidly captured the original choreography as if it were filmed for copycat (sorry) productions still to come. No, everyone I knew sent me clips of the 2019 Cats film thinking, expecting, hoping I would find the whole thing a cultural trainwreck like everyone else and curse its name online with victorious exuberance. I expected to hate it. I planned on hating it. And, because of the weekend I watched it, hating it was the farthest thing from my mind.
I was settling into a different world that Saturday. For multiple weeks, my father had been in and out of hospitals. The cancer diagnosis had come, and we were bracing ourselves for all our lives to be turned inside-out. Within nine months, the house was roaring with ventilators, and we (rightfully so) sacrificed all we could to keep Dad going. But on the days when you had a moment to yourself, you didn’t want to hate something, enjoy kicking it when it was down.
I played Cats and found myself having the best time I could have had with a film version of that particular musical. I know I may be alone on the planet in thinking this but given everything they could have been done—an animated version by Spielberg, included—it really couldn’t have been better than it was. Any way you would have tried to animate the cats, it wouldn’t look right. So, I ignored all of the technical inadequacies, the boring new song, and the presence of hamologists Rebel Wilson and James Corden and simply had a good time. I needed that at that moment.
I found myself un-annoyed by the presence of Taylor Swift, the concocted plot involving Macavity, the sets. I realized what I was watching were a bunch of cantankerous, rebel-rousing felines showing off, leaping through the air, singing, dancing. How wonderful. I imagined my cats doing that. If I were to fling one my the cats up in the air (I won’t), I imagine it would look about as weird as anything in the film.
Was my personal turmoil (and the need for relief) the only reason I enjoyed it? No. In fact, what prompted this piece was this strange sensation that came over me in the car Tuesday afternoon. I suddenly wanted to hear the Overture and the opening number of Cats (even in my pretentious days I thought the opening number was brilliant). I found the London Cast Recording on Youtube and played it and found myself delighting in the ways Lloyd Webber used instrumentation and jarring tempo, the very playfulness of the score—he was musicalizing not Eliot’s words, but the remarkable dexterity and physical prowess of the cat, which was made (as the great quote reminds us) so that the human being can experience what it’s like to hold a lion.
Another story from Lloyd Webber lore is that one of his feline pets tried to do the world a service by erasing completely its owner’s original score for the Phantom sequel (eventually called Love Never Dies). I love that story even more than anything in Cats because it says a lot about cats and pets that speaks to us all. A cat can find the perfect way to interrupt everything you’re doing and give you a little chaos. And a little chaos makes the world a lot more fun.
I can say now, at the dawn of 39, my love of cats and my love of Cats are about equally strong. It is freeing to take off the shackles of propriety, intelligence, and taste to enjoy something fun, mischievous, frivolous, magical. It’s also kind of fun to be the only person who finds joy watching the movie. It’s kind of fun being alive, really—with a cat in your lap, on your head, pushing you out of your favorite spot on the couch because she wants it.
Have a little fun today. Watch something stupid, make a wrong turn, mess up someone’s hair. That’s exactly what a cat would do, and cats seems to have so much more fun than we do.
