It’s been over 40 years since Cats took home the Tony Award for Best Musical. And whether you love it or loathe it, when it first debuted, nobody had ever seen anything like this furry frenzy. In a move befitting of a nine-lived feline, Cats returns this spring — unlike anything we’ve seen before.
A real-life harbinger of the years that would follow it, Cats embodied just about everything about the excesses of the 1980s, from its big sound (music by Andrew Lloyd Webber) to its bigger budget ($4 million) to its even bigger hair (wigs by Paul Huntley).
Its plot, adapted from the beloved children’s poems of Nobel Prize-winning poet T.S. Eliot, was thin, simple, and more than a little absurd. A group of cats with names that sound vaguely like diseases (Mungojerrie, Rumpleteazer, Macavity, etc.) converge in a litter-filled alley to sing their stories about what makes them exceptional. Ultimately, one is chosen to move on to kitty heaven, a.k .a. the Heaviside Layer. A subplot about a once glamorous — and now very sick — cat struck a chord with queer audiences who may have subconsciously seen it as an allegory for the AIDS crisis, which played out in real time when the musical opened in 1982. Four of the original cast members (Rene Clemente, Steven Gelfer, Timothy Scott, and Reed Jones) died of complications due to AIDS.
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With songs set to Eliot’s above-mentioned poems, direction by then-head of the Royal Shakespeare Company Trevor Nunn, and a cast of peak-form professional dancers gyrating to synth-pop while costumed in painted unitards and leg warmers, Cats proved the untapped desire for theatrical maximalism.
Since its 1981 London debut, Cats has existed at a unique artistic intersection where highbrow art meets campy pop culture that gays can’t seem to get enough of. It went on to be an unprecedented commercial success and launched numerous careers, including Sarah Brightman (The Phantom of the Opera), Bryan Batt (Mad Men), and Rob Marshall (Oscar-winning director of Chicago).
And while its jaw-droppingly bizarre and universally panned 2019 all-star film version (more on that later) might have been the proverbial final trip to the vet for any other show, this spring, New York audiences anticipate its return in a radically reimagined production, Cats: The Jellicle Ball, set in the drag ball scene of the 80s — proving that, like its namesake, Cats has nine lives.
A bad investment turned boon
The final performance of ‘Cats’ on Broadway. Photo by Richard Corkery/NY Daily News Archive via Getty Images.
With intricate costumes, an A-List production team, and a massive set (including that famous oversized tire that rises to the Heaviside Layer), Cats came with a lion-sized budget that investors weren’t exactly lining up to put their money into. Producer Cameron Mackintosh would have to go after numerous small backers through newspaper ads. Composer Andrew Lloyd Webber took out a second mortgage on his home to pay for a chunk of it. The show would go on to gross $3.5 billion worldwide.
A star is torn
Cats’ breakout song, “Memory,” was supposed to be debuted by multiple award-winning actress Dame Judi Dench, whose casting as Grizabella the Glamour Cat was a condition on which Trevor Nunn, then artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, agreed to direct the show. Twelve days before the show’s London opening, Dench tore her Achilles tendon and was replaced by London’s original Evita, Elaine Paige. For the Broadway production, Betty Buckley took over the role, earning a Tony Award for Best Supporting Actress in a Musical.
A ‘Memory’ with forgettable lyrics
While just about all of the lyrics in Cats are directly lifted from T.S. Eliot’s “Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats,” its 11 o’clock number, “Memory,” originally had words by Lloyd Webber’s former collaborator from Evita, Jesus Christ Superstar, and Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Tim Rice.But with maudlin lyrics like “Daylight / I won’t care if it finds me / With no breath in my body / With no beat in my heart,” Rice’s contributions didn’t exactly scream “showstopper.” Nunn rewrote the lyrics, and the song would become a hit for Barbra Streisand, Barry Manilow, and Broadway’s Betty Buckley.
A costume catfight
Original costume designs by John Napier.
During its troubled rehearsal period in London, choreographer Gillian Lynne reportedly threatened to quit the show over a set of un-danceable costumes for the opening that the show’s designer John Napier reportedly spent ten percent of the show’s budget on. Lynne got her way, and the costumes ended up in the alley.
A 3,000-pound hairball
The wigs used onstage for Cats are custom-made for each dancer, generally take about 40 hours to construct, and cost about $3,000 to make. Each fully ventilated wig is tatted by hand out of thousands of individual strands of Yak hair and can’t be reused when a performer leaves the show. It’s been reported that throughout the original Broadway production’s 18-year run, the show’s wig department used over 3,000 pounds of Yak hair.
Art imitating life
By 1990, the absurdity of Cats had become such a perennial joke in highbrow New York circles that playwright John Guare used it as a plot point in his Pulitzer Prize-nominated satire Six Degrees of Separation. Inspired by real-life events, the plot of Guare’s play involves a group of wealthy Gothamites who get taken in by a young gay con man who claims to be the son of actor-director Sidney Poitier. The conman’s bait to his dupes were roles in his father’s fictional upcoming project — a film version of Cats.
A little too frisky
Fourteen years into Cats’ original run on Broadway, the show made headlines again over a $6 million lawsuit from an audience member who claimed she didn’t like how the actor playing Rum Tum Tugger put his paws on her. ”He crouched down and started moving his hips back and forth, saying, ‘Boom, boom, boom,’ ” the complaint said, according to a report in The New York Times. ”He was moving his groin back and forth. If I hadn’t turned my head, he would have rubbed it in my face.”
How ‘Swift’ly we forget
After being named Time Magazine’s 2023 ”Person of the Year,” the common perception would be that everything Miss Tay Tay touches turns to gold. That might be true only if you omitted the 2019 film version of Cats, co-starring Rebel Wilson and Sir Ian McKellen. The film was savaged across the board by critics and audiences alike and lost $100 million. True to form, Swift shook it off. “I had a really great time working on that weird-*ss movie,” she told Rolling Stone. “I’m not gonna retroactively decide that it wasn’t the best experience. I never would have met Andrew Lloyd Webber or gotten to see how he works, and now he’s my buddy. I got to work with the sickest dancers and performers. No complaints.”
In July 2022, a casting breakdown appeared on BroadwayWorld.com seeking gender-fluid performers for a workshop reimagining of Cats set in the Harlem ballroom scene of the 1980s and ’90s. Competition categories listed for the musical’s characters include “Butch Queen Face” for Gus the Theater Cat and “Pretty Boy Realness” for Rum Tum Tugger, a bi-curious cat. Set to open this spring as part of the inaugural season at The Perelman Arts Center in Lower Manhattan, this production promises an “immersive competition with all new ballroom and club beats, runway ready choreography, and an edgy eleganza makeover that moves the action from junkyard to runway.” Purrfection!
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