Kitty Litter

In place of a record review today (I'm more likely than not to wait until November 4 to resume them), I'd like to look back on the musical that debuted on Broadway thirty years ago today, largely because my mother made me see it with her, and it was the worst experience of my life. But that's only because I've never been to a Madonna show.

I am, of course, talking about Cats.  Cats is easily the worst show ever conceived, a mess of a musical in which a bunch of actors and dancers grotesquely made up to look like Kiss drummer Peter Criss circa 1975 cavort, caterwaul, and romp around in a spectacle "inspired" by T.S. Eliot's Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats.  It shouldn't surprise you that Andrew Lloyd Webber was the mastermind behind this show; his vulgarity was all over the place, the costumes and the interstellar junkyard set being the least of Cats's failings.  The Eliot connection was supposed to make it literary and magical, I suppose, but I didn't leave the theater - the Winter Garden Theatre, in the heart of New York's Theater District, site of that well-known seventies musical crime Beatlemania! - wanting to read whimsical poetry and discover the wonders of a magical feline world.  I wanted to throw up.  And if that was my reaction, that shows you how little Eliot's work has to do with this musical.  But, as I later figured out, Lloyd Webber is known to go too far from the gist of his sources.  There's a big difference between Jesus Christ and Jesus Christ Superstar.    

The key difference between Cats and Jesus Christ Superstar, of course, is that Lloyd Webber didn't have Tim Rice, whose lyrics provided the only sense of humanity and wit in Lloyd Webber's work, write any lyrics words of Cats.  In fact, they were mostly taken verbatim from Eliot's poetry in Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats.  The result was that Eliot's subtlety was completely buried by Lloyd Webber's ponderous music, bringing to light all the obvious pitfalls when you try to set a poem to a tune - namely, you come up with something pretentious and overwrought that seems majestic at first but becomes more and more shallow the more you experience it . . . like the American national anthem.  Fess up, super-patriots, don't Francis Scott Key's words read better than they're sung?

The big similarity between Cats and Jesus Christ Superstar, though, is an unhealthy obsession Andrew Lloyd Webber has with death and reincarnation.  In  Jesus Christ Superstar, Jesus is crucified, as in the Gospels, but though we know He will be resurrected, Lloyd Webber and Rice ended the story on Calvary.  (Maybe the period between the Resurrection and the Ascension was being saved for a possible sequel?)  Here's what Cats is purportedly about;  the characters compete at something called the Jellicle Ball for the right to go to another world and be reborn.  Grizabella, the faded Glamour Cat, wins the competition and goes with Old Deuteronomy to the next world.  If you must see this musical, it's important to know the story before you go into theater and see the Jellicle Ball, because you're not going to discern the story from the actual show. (Another reason I'm giving away the ending is to spoil Cats for you, so you don't ever see it.)  It's just a bunch of fake cats singing T.S. Eliot verses, just as the previous show at the Winter Garden had fake Beatles singing Beatles lyrics, but at least the musical numbers in Beatlemania! were meant to be performed as such.

The one song form Cats that was not lifted verbatim from Eliot but instead was based on a variation of verse from two separate Eliot poems was "Memory," the show's big hit.  In addition to being one of the soppiest pieces of B.S. melodrama of all time, "Memory" is a completely unoriginal work; not only did lyricist and Cats director Trevor Nunn cop verses from Eliot's  "Preludes" and "Rhapsody on a Windy Night," the music is a ripoff of Ravel's "Bolero" (hardly the best example of classical music, though it rivals "Love's Theme" as a fine tune to make out to) and background music from an obscure 1967 Latvian movie.  This is the second greatest crime ever perpetrated against the Baltic peoples, after the 1940 Soviet invasion.  Every time I hear "Memory," I want to silence my radio with a sledgehammer.  Fortunately for me - and my radio - I manage to avoid any stations that would likely play it.  (To give you an idea of how generic and interchangeable any song associated with Andrew Lloyd Webber is, "Memory" could have easily been inserted in any of his other musicals, and was in fact almost added to Evita or Sunset Boulevard.)  

Oh yeah, my experience with Cats. I saw it in May 1983 with my mother and sister, because my mom wanted to see it.  I remember I had a case of poison ivy at the time, but watching the Cats cast (anagram!) - the original cast, which included noted actresses Betty Buckley and Janet Hubert-Whitten - crawl and wail like they did made my skin crawl even more.  No one cast member, not even Betty Buckley, gave a distinctive performance, which proved to be an example of Lloyd Webber's and Nunn's evil genius.  By having the actors costumed and disguised so thoroughly that you couldn't tell who they were, and by giving them such generic stage direction that they couldn't assert any real star power, Nunn could change cast members regularly without anyone noticing or caring who played which role.  Maybe that's why it ran on Broadway for nearly eighteen years.  (It closed on September 10, 2000.)  What really freaked me out was, during intermission, some of the performers came out on all fours and rubbed against some of the audience members who got up to stretch their legs.  The Winter Garden Theatre had to undergo a really good scrubbing before Mamma Mia! could open there in October 2001, which made sense to me; after audiences were subjected to kinky-costumed actors rubbing on their pants, imagine what audiences did in their pants! 

I'm still mad at Frank Rich for the glowing review he gave Cats in the New York Times back in 1982, and I'm convinced this may be a reason he switched from theater criticism to political commentary - because he's so much better at the latter.  Of Cats, Rich wrote that it "transports the audience into a complete fantasy world that could only exist in the theater and yet, these days, rarely does."  Theater critics carry a lot of weight because it's too expensive to go to a Broadway show; if a critic hates a show, you're not going to pay a lot of money to see it, even if the review is wrong and deserves second-guessing. Rich had the opportunity to kill this musical, just as President Obama recently had a chance to kill the Romney campaign.  Instead, as Obama did with Romney, Rich gave Cats a lease on life - nine lives, in fact - and it really did turn out to be "now and forever."

My mother actually liked it, because she sympathized with Grizabella being old and unwanted.  Wait a minute - didn't Grizabella win the contest to be reborn into a better world than that junkyard she inhabited with her awful co-stars?  I, on the other hand, sympathize with Joe Queenan, who saw Cats twice - once to see how bad it could be, and again to confirm that it was the worst thing on the planet.  Of the second time he saw it, he wrote, "I hated this show.  I mean hated it.  I don't mean that I hated it so much that I liked it.  I meant that I just plain hated it.  I hated the songs.  I hated the costumes.  I hated the sets.  I hated the performers.  I hated the audience.  I hated the building.  I hated the primordial forces in the universe that tolerated, even encouraged, this kind of situation.  Most of all, I hated the fact that I was there."

However bad Broadway may be today, with its collection of special-effects spectacles and jukebox musicals, I don't think anything will ever be as bad as Cats.  I'm just glad it wasn't forever, as it's not on Broadway now.  But those of us who saw it and remember it as two hours and change of wasted time we can never get back have to be on our guard and make sure no one, from the moon on down, loses their memory of how horrible it was.  A Cats revival is rumored to be in the works.

We mustn't give in.