Cats -- from the children's book to the stage. Episode 17 (Cats 3 of 8)

Cats, 3rd episode

A show is about to open in two days.  It features a power-packed pair of producers who would re-write Broadway history with two of the biggest musicals of all time, POA and Les Mis.  The female lead is in one of the final rehearsals, and it will be her place in history to sing into the world a song so powerful, so vital, so memorable, that it will immediately become a top-10 hit, get re-recorded more than 600 times, including two MORE trips to the top 10 by two others who are mega-stars in their own right.

I can’t fool you.  You are listening to a musical theater podcast.  You know the performer, and you know the song.  Elaine Paige is performing to an empty house, but she’s doing one of the final run-throughs of Memory, performing in Grisabella before the opening of Cats, and the mega-stars are Barbera Streisand and Barry Mantilow.

The other performers watch from the wings – it’s almost the only moment of the show where they aren’t all dancing during the musical numbers.  The orchestra rises in anticipation; this is the song that will make the show.  In fact, it’s the song that almost all the critics will point to as holding the entire show together, and show that will go on to play tends of thousands of times, win every major award, break all records for longest run and largest return.

It's a formula that’s worked before; Andrew Lloyd Webber, the composer, has paired with lyricist Tim Rice, and the magic that is conjured with the fusion of those two genius minds never fails to move audiences.

And then, breathlessly at first, she trills words that will soon be immoral: “Daylight / I won’t care if it finds me / With no breath in my body / With no beat in my heart.”

Wait.  What?  No, those aren’t the words.  I really can’t fool you!

But they were almost the words…that’s right, the lyrics to maybe the most immortal song in Broadway history were changed 2 days before the show opened.  And that was after the female lead had to pull from the show because she snapped her Achilles tendon, before the producers declared what the director had been done was not fit for the stage and threatened to pull the whole thing, before all the costumes were scrapped and re-done one week out.

And these are just some of things that almost derailed the show before it ever started.  But, as we know, these obstacles were overcome.  What had to happen for the show to get off the ground, and, most importantly, why did it work?  In the words of director Trevor Nunn, “the theater creaked, the ghosts walked…” and we’ll find out where they went in this episode of THM.

Transcript

Cats, 3rd episode

A show is about to open in two days.  It features a power-packed pair of producers who would re-write Broadway history with two of the biggest musicals of all time, POA and Les Mis.  The female lead is in one of the final rehearsals, and it will be her place in history to sing into the world a song so powerful, so vital, so memorable, that it will immediately become a top-10 hit, get re-recorded more than 600 times, including two MORE trips to the top 10 by two others who are mega-stars in their own right.

I can’t fool you.  You are listening to a musical theater podcast.  You know the performer, and you know the song.  Elaine Paige is performing to an empty house, but she’s doing one of the final run-throughs of Memory, performing in Grisabella before the opening of Cats, and the mega-stars are Barbera Streisand and Barry Mantilow.

The other performers watch from the wings – it’s almost the only moment of the show where they aren’t all dancing during the musical numbers.  The orchestra rises in anticipation; this is the song that will make the show.  In fact, it’s the song that almost all the critics will point to as holding the entire show together, and show that will go on to play tens of thousands of times, win every major award, break all records for longest run and largest return.

It's a formula that’s worked before; Andrew Lloyd Webber, the composer, has paired with lyricist Tim Rice, and the magic that is conjured with the fusion of those two genius minds never fails to move audiences.

And then, breathlessly at first, she trills words that will soon be immoral: “Daylight / I won’t care if it finds me / With no breath in my body / With no beat in my heart.”

Wait.  What?  No, those aren’t the words.  I really can’t fool you!

But they were almost the words…that’s right, the lyrics to maybe the most immortal song in Broadway history were changed 2 days before the show opened.  And that was after the female lead had to pull from the show because she snapped her Achilles tendon, before the producers declared what the director had been done was not fit for the stage and threatened to pull the whole thing, before all the costumes were scrapped and re-done one week out.

And these are just some of things that almost derailed the show before it ever started.  But, as we know, these obstacles were overcome.  What had to happen for the show to get off the ground, and, most importantly, why did it work?  In the words of director Trevor Nunn, “the theater creaked, the ghosts walked…” and we’ll find out where they went in this episode of THM.

[canned intro]

We are charging past 20,000 downloads, but in the interest of keeping this non-commercial for as long as I can I’m resisting asking for your money.  But I can’t tell you how much I value your attention.  This week I’m adding a new email address … theaterhistorypodcast@gmail.com.  If you hear anything you like, want to argue about, or have poignant thoughts on the New York Met bullpen drop me a line.  You honor me just by letting me know that you’re out there.

But, you either grow or die, so if your email is about something you like, do please drop the link on your social media, tell a friend, find a theater person you have a crush on and ask them if they’d like to go on a romantic date and then take a long walk on a beach while you both stream an episode of THM on your Bluetooth ear buds.  I can’t promise I know what this will do to your life, but no matter what else you’ll never have another date like it.

Today we move from the history of the original author of the poems to the musical productions.  There was a ton to say about that original author and the last episode two episodes we covered the life of TS Eliot.  If you get a chance, it’s worth listening to those before you take up this missive, but even if you heard them, a recap is in order.

It goes something like this: he was raised in St. Louis, he loved cats, he returned to his family roots in Boston, was highly educated at a couple of prep schools and Harvard and then Oxford where he met Ezra Pound.  He spent a year in France where he met a medical student who he would dedicate is first really significant poem to, causing several to speculate he had – at least -- homosexual urges.  But he married a British national named Vivien Haigh-Wood and their marriage was a huge disaster almost from the get-go, and while she was in a sanatorium and he was in something more like a spa he wrote a poem called The Wasteland which was the defining literary work of modernist literature.  It was many things but not uplifting; seriously, scholarly, dark, and heavy.  After that he was the most literary figure of the movement, more significant even than James Joyce or Ezra Pound himself, all this is happening in the late 19-teens and 1920s, largely while working with a publishing house where Virginia Woolf was a central figure.

Things changed in 1933 when he would leave for American to go on a speaking tour and left his lawyers instructions to divorce Vivienne in his absence; he took a turn to the conservative, converted to the Anglican church, became a British citizen, ditched (and alienated) Virgina Woolf’s publishing house for a new one, and traded a series of racist letters with Ezra Pound.  The new publisher made Eliot the godfather to his children and he wrote them – and some adult friends -- some adorable letters with allusion to, and poems about, Cats. 

Meanwhile, Ezra Pound went fully fascist and did all he could to advance Mussolini in Italy and would be captured by the allies as an enemy combatant, caged, charged with treason, and eventually confined to an asylum.

Eliot was doing better than that and in 1939 took those silly cat poems and published a silly little 14-poem kids book that nobody took seriously, mostly because they were not serious, but they were a very rare light diversion amongst his published works.  They would be the last light fare he would ever write.  He won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1948, and for good measure wrote some very successful plays including some that played well on Broadway.

He lived for 11 years with a friend, literary scholar, and muscular dystrophy sufferer named John Hayward, fueling more speculation about his sexuality.  Hayward was the curator of Eliot’s literature but they split in 1951 and for the next 8 years a woman named Valerie Fletcher was the caretaker of his literary estate; the two married in 1957, she being his junior by 40 years.

That’s a lot, so here are a few points worth remembering as we transition from the book of poems to the musical.  First, without saying anything about what Eliot’s sexuality was, it is fair to say that he was enormously guarded.  His poems are largely about men who feel sexual urges toward women but can’t bring themselves to act on them, he was adamant that he didn’t want a biography written, and part of his very overt turn to conservatism was that he liked the stiff upper lip and reserved approach to social relations.  He did write this schoolboy banter that he was strangely attached to, and it was over the top with, let’s call it “locker room talk,” although one scholar has probably more aptly called it “sexual excess.”  But this too is consistent with repressed sexuality of some sort – he is intensely private, there is almost no record of him having a satisfying or even happy sex life until he married Valerie when he was, again searching for euphemisms here, past his sexual prime.  

If you think I’m dwelling on Eliot’s sex life a little more than I should, my only defense is that this will all get connected to Cats the musical.  But point number one is that, even setting aside anything about his personal life – and there are good reasons to do that as well – when Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist Louis Menand took up the subject he started it with this phrase “T. S. Eliot's sex life. Do we really want to go there?” – so setting aside the voluminous speculation about TS Eliot’s sex life – his literature and poetry do have extensive discussions of sex and sexuality and it is ALL angst-ridden.  Nobody has ever said “What really stands out about TS Eliot’s poetry is its free and open discussion and celebration of human sexuality.”  I guess I just said it, but I am sure I’m the first person to utter that sentence aloud.  And you were here to witness this ground-breaking event!

Second, Cats, which was published under the title Old Possum’s Guide to Practical Cats, and was not a big deal.  Eliot won a Nobel Prize in literature but it sure wasn’t for Cats, which was fun and light and intended to make people smile.  In the Eliot cannon, the critics and reading public of the day didn’t give it much attention and even now is barely rates a few pages, or maybe only a few paragraphs, in the serious literary work on TS Eliot.  There is NOTHING sexual in it and Grizabella – the glamour cat who some read as a prostitute -- isn’t even one of the characters.

The third point is that Eliot was politically and socially conservative.  If you’re wondering what the bit about “Old Possum” is a reference to, that title itself is an allusion to some of the unflattering stereotypes of people of color in Uncle Remus and, in case there was uncertainty about whether that was an accident or unambiguously racist remember that “Old Possum” is the nickname that was given to Eliot but open racist, anti-semite, eugenics enthusiast, fascist, and traitor Ezra Pound.

Eliot wasn’t in that deep but there was a dark side to his conservatism where he skirted the line between conservatism as a commitment so social conventionality to give meaning to life, and conservatism to support, say, Ezra Pound.  Let’s just say that had King George the Fifth gone on a tear to eliminate every Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion program in the UK during Eliot’s lifetime, Thomas Stearns Eliot would have been just fine with that.  The poetry and philosophy of TS Eliot was definitely not about celebrating alternative identities.

So our three takeaways about Eliot are (1) he was sexually reserved, maybe repressed, in both his life and poetry, (2) the book Cats was a fun and diversionary entry in the Eliot library but definitely not part the intellectual heft of TS Eliot’s life and work, and (3) he was socially conservative, probably to the point of being antisemitic and antiblack, but even if he was not marching in white hood and cape he definitely was not trying to advance alternative identities.

And what’s weird about that is that Cats, the musical, succeeds because it is the opposite of all that – it is a wild celebration of open sexuality, it has been embraced by those with marginalized identities, especially the LGBTQ+ community, and the first line of defense against its plot-less grandeur is the intellectual heft given to it by Nobel Laureate for Literature TS Eliot, who is credited with, and won an Emmy for, the stage book.

The time has now come to talk about the show itself, and I think I can promise you an almost completely novel take on Cats.  The performer Kolton Kraus, who played the role of TumbleBrutus, said in an interview that “I think you either love it or hate it.  There’s really no in-between.  I’ve never heard anybody go, ‘I kind of liked Cats.’”  And I….kind of like Cats.  I started life as an avowed Cats hater – the production, that is, not the animals, who are awesome – but doing this, um, air-quotes research unquote – I have gained an appreciation for both it and for Andrew Lloyd Webber.

Jia Tolentino, who does research without air quotes, is an award-winning writer for the New Yorker, and she deserves a separate and special award for her 2019 piece on Cats.  Her timeline adds some delicious details to the narrative.  When TS Eliot switched from Virigina Woolfe’s Hogarth Press it was to a publishing house called Faber and Gwyer.  And Faber the elder asked Eliot to be the godfather to his children.  In 1931 he sent 4-year-old Tom Faber an illustrated letter discussing Tom’s cat and Eliot’s cat, which was named Jellyorum.

One awesome thing about Cats is that their names are cool – my own have been named Zaphod Beeblebrox, Stormageddon, and Evil Devil Creature – and maybe giving a cat a name isn’t enough to be, you know, the entire plot for a 2 hour show, but it definitely is a fun part of cat ownership.

Then, in 1936 he sent a letter to an adult friend named Polly Tandy where he explained there were 4 types of cats, separated by personality type and not species, and then sent a separate letter to Tandy’s daughter that he signed “your old Possum” which pretty directly links the letters to the later book, as did the complete poem in the letter about the Gumbie Cat.

This is all review that we discussed in the last episode.  The new detail is that on Christmas Day in 1937 the BBC did a radio broadcast where the Cats poems were read.  They went over well and there were two more installments.  If you’ve made it this far in life, and maybe even seen the production a time or two, and still don’t know what a Jellicle cat is, Tolentino reports that ‘“Pollicle dogs” and “jellicle cats” are Eliot’s glosses on the way posh British people said “poor little dogs” and “dear little cats.”’ If you’ve heard that it’s just a nonsense word that doesn’t mean anything this isn’t far from that, but at least it’s an origin story.

In 1939 the book is published, and it has 14 different poems describing 14 different cats, no mention of anyone named Grisabella or memories, and nothing about the heavyside layer, whatever that is.  But it takes on a Dr. Suess-like momentum and becomes a book that British parents read their kids.  Two of those parents were musicians named Webber and they read the poems to their son, Andrew Lloyd.

Just to jump the conclusion a little bit, in previous episodes I’ve poked fun of Cats and, in the series on Phantom of the Opera, pointed out that there are those who aren’t huge Andrew Lloyd Webber fans and part of that is his muted crediting of Gaston LaRoux, the original author of the book POA.  But for Cats, I think the correct conclusion is that ALW made the whole thing work, did so by taking some enormous chances and with a deep belief in the power of live theater, and wholly credited TS Eliot for the central role that Old Possum’s Guide to Practical Cats played in the production.

ALW’s central start came as a musician and composer, and he studied at the Royal College of Music in London.  Made his big splashes on Broadway and just a few years after the Beatles hit it big.  While they were re-defining pop music he was redefining popular theater.  He did Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat 1968, Jesus Christ Superstar in 1970, and Evita in 1978.

One day during tech for Evita he got bored and started toying with the idea of writing music for lyrics, which was a new thing for him because he’d always started with the music and added the lyrics later, or rather, had Tim Rice add the lyrics later.  According to ALW himself in the coffee-table book produced for the musical, this was around 1977 and at the 1980 summer Symondton Festival – which is on AKWs own country estate, he performed some concept stuff that included the Cats poems that he set to music.

In attendance was none other than Valerie Eliot, TS Eliot’s surviving spouse and literary estate curator, and she loved the idea.  She agrees to back the project but on the condition that it relies entirely on TS Eliot material, and skimming over the details, the theater book for the show will need to rely almost exclusively on the work of TS Eliot, with the limited creative freedom to work that source material from a children’s book into an adult full-length stage performance.

Valeria also gives ALW 8 lines of an unfinished poem called “Grisabella” – Eliot had started the idea and scrapped it, saying that it was too sad for children, and that it was based too much on Villon’s La Belle Heulmeire.  Obvi.  I mean, who doesn’t know that Villon Wrote in the 1400s, published in 1500s, and is considered one of the great French medevial poets?  The specific poem in question is about a woman who laments loss of youth and beauty…and an abusive spouse.  The spouse is pined for, and not lamented, by the way.  The story goes that Eliot is writing his kids poems, starts off on a cat named Grisabella, and gives it up because he realizes his ideas are too much like the medevial poet.  If my emphasis here seems strange, this is going to matter because of how central Grisabella is to the musical, even though she’s not in the book at all, and that will trigger enough commentary about the show that we’ll dedicate an entire episode to what’s up with Grisabella.

ALW will effusively, and graciously, credit and thank Valerie for her contributions.  But this is where I think ALW really takes a mostly harmless book of poetry and changes Broadway forever, and the credit goes to him, the Director Trevor Nunn, and the choreographer Gillian Lynne.

ALW’s production partner is Cameron McIntosh, who had in his resume Anything Goes in 1969, that only ran 2 weeks, and My Fair Lady in 1978.  He’s living a theater life of boom and bust through about 5 shows until he hits Cats in 1981.  He goes on to do Les Miz in 1985, which will cement his role as a theater icon, but he’s not quite there yet when he’s taking on Cats in 1980-81.

So let’s divide the tale of the production into the things that go wrong and then the things that go right.  Because stories of near disaster are always more fun when they don’t turn tragic.

It starts when Twyla Tharpe is approached to do the choreography, and she says no.  If you are unfamiliar with the name Twyla Tharpe, as I was before both my wife and daughter mocked and then lectured me, she is basically the creative mind behind almost all modern dance.  To add insult, one director that ALW is making the pitch to literally falls asleep (this is according to Tolentino, who I really trust, but this one sounds a bit apocraphyl – if you’re a director and the guy who’s done Evita and Jesus Christ Superstar pitches you I’ll be you can stay awake), and ALW evidently is having trouble finding a theater to host what he himself is calling a “suicidally stupid musical.”  Nobody wanted to finance it, and MacKintosh had to take out newspaper ads to solicit random, small-fry investors to get the capital for the show.

I’m going to read directly 3 paragraphs from Tolentino because I’m NOT gonna improve on the prose of this award-winning writer. And because of the thousands of pages of stuff I perused putting this together this is the page that really stuck with me.

“On the first day of rehearsals, Lloyd Webber’s musical director “slumped onto the piano keys and said he couldn’t play anymore,” then quit. Nunn clashed with Lynne. Lloyd Webber worried that his songs couldn’t be sung properly through so much dancing. Twelve days before previews, Dench, who had been cast as both Grizabella and the Old Gumbie Cat, Jennyanydots, collapsed mid-rehearsal and cried out, “Who kicked me?” She had snapped her Achilles tendon. It instantly became gossip that “Judi’s accident was an excuse for her to jump a sinking ship.”  

JCB interlude: This is not accurate; Dence would want to be in the show quite badly and her trouble did not end with the Achilles tendon.  I’m going to step out of the Tolentino quote and pick up with Trevor Nunn himself: “When nearly 3 weeks later Judi joined me in a deserted theater in the Haymarket where we had been rehearsing, she could hardly move and she was as vulnerable as only the truly ill can be.  The theatre creaked, ghosts walked and she sang her songs into the darkness of the empty auditorium for the only time.  Two days later, when she came determined to rejoin the show as scheduled, she lost her balance in a flurry of crutches and pitched off an entrance ramp into rows ov ungiving seats and hurt herself worse than before.”  Back to the Tolentino quote.

Five days before previews, Lynne threatened to quit the show over a set of elaborate costumes for the opening number, which Napier had spent ten percent of the show’s budget creating. (They were difficult to dance in; Lynne won the argument, and Napier, fuming, kicked the costumes into the gutter.) The same day, after witnessing a chaotic run-through of a number in which the cats pretended to be dogs, Lloyd Webber and Mackintosh told Nunn that what they’d seen “was not fit for a stage” and declared that they were “pulling the show.” (Nunn ignored them.) Two days out, Elaine Paige, who had taken Dench’s place as Grizabella, sang a version of “Memory” that featured lethally depressive lyrics by Lloyd Webber’s longtime collaborator Tim Rice: “Daylight / I won’t care if it finds me / With no breath in my body / With no beat in my heart.” (Rice and Lloyd Webber were in the middle of ending their creative partnership, and the married Rice had recently begun an affair with Paige.) Nunn insisted on rewriting the lyrics for the final rehearsal, where Paige sang “Memory” with a crumpled sheet of paper in her hand.

On the Wednesday afternoon before the first preview, in the West End, Mackintosh and Lloyd Webber went to a bar to celebrate their respective careers in musical theatre, which they presumed might be over in a few hours’ time. They had been hyping the production since a nationwide casting call, six months before, but they had kept aspects of the show secret; the public had no idea that “Cats” featured no human characters at all. That evening, Lloyd Webber steeled himself and went backstage. He looked at a young dancer whom he’d persuaded to join “Cats” by assuring her that it would be a life-changing experience. “In three minutes,” he writes in his memoir, she “would run on stage as a cat caught in a car headlight and instigate one of the great moments of bathos in theatre history.” [bathos is a word that means amusing failure at attempted artistic greatness]  The overture seemed to last forever, he recalls: “Has there ever been such anagonizing wait for an executioner’s blow?” END QUOTE

The sense of gloom was shared.  A Warner Brothers executive predicted Cats would “go to the dogs.”

So what goes right?  There are, I think, 3 things that make this work.  The first is Grisabella, and we need to dig to see where she came from.  ALW took those 8 lines of poetry that TS Eliot had discarded and mashed it up with another TS Eliot poem called “Rhapsody on a Windy Night.”  And although the character was no part of book, she is central to the musical.  The big song, of course, is Memory, and what a success that song is.

There is a composer named Puccini who ALW admired, and parts of the music for the song Memory were taken from some earlier musical experiments ALW had made with the style.  He had to take the song to his Dad, who remember was a musical teacher, to assure him it was only in the style of Puccini and not plagiarism of Puccini.

I think it ended up being better than Puccini.  Quick – name your favorite Puccini song.  I’m drawing blanks.  But memory is – memorable.  According to Jessican Sternfeld, PhD from Princeton, lifelong musical theater fan.  Was at Rhode Island College but now at Chapman Univ. wrote a book in 2006 called “The Megamusical,” the song has been recorded more than 600 times.  It’s been in the top 10 twice, once by Barbara Streisand and once by Barry Mantilow, but also recorded by Johnny Mathis and Judy Collins.  According to Sternfeld, it took over 1980s piano bars. 

What cats famously does not have is a plot.  This point has sparked some of the wittiest comments among those who comment on show, including both those who love and hate it.  Peter Kunze, writing about movie adaptations, wrote that the movies have “one major difficulty: its plot—or lack thereof.”  Sternfeld notes that the huge foreign audience for the show can be due in part to the fact that not speaking English isn’t really a barrier to missing the plot, and goes on to note “a large number of English audience-speaking members also seem to miss a great deal of the text.”  Sarah Kaufman, writing a review for a 2016 revival, put it this way: the show “begins and ends with feline fascination and goes nowhere in between.”  

The show is nominally about how Cats get their various names, and maybe doing expositions on different types of cats – think of characters without action – and that’s a pretty thin edge to balance your production on.

But the one moment that unites it all is that the Jellicle ball is an occasion for the cat Old Deuteronomy to pick who gets to the heavyside layer.  The heavyside layer is also a TS Eliot idea that is not part of the original cat poems, but is mentioned in one couplet in the poem Rhapsody on a windy night.  The director Trevor Nunn and ALW used it as a uniting element for the show.

That’s not much, but at least it gives the show some focal point.  We’re meeting all these cats because one of them is going to get elevated somewhere, either to die or be reborn or get 9 more lives.  What will motivate an audience to care about that?  The answer is Grisabella and Memory.

Peter Kunze Writing for The Velvet Light Trap.  Has a PHD in English from Florida State, was a candidate for radio-tv-film degree at Texas Austin when his article was published in 2017 so he just might have two PhD’s by now.   According to him, “Grizabella becomes the emotional core of Cats through her show-stopping performance of “Memory.””  Jessica Sternfeld points out that it’s not only the 11-o-clock number, it’s a thread that runs through the show and is intentionally previewed earlier on.  Sternfeld also points out that it’s a power-pop number that has widespread appeal outside the context of the musical.

The fallen woman redeemed is the figure that brings the rest of the chaos together, and that’s all due to Andrew Lloyd Webber and Trevor Nunn.  So: A memorable and sympathetic character who delivers a power-punch number right at the close is enough to pull the show together and give it an ending.  We’ll talk later about what others make of Grisabella, but her presence in the musical, which is not part of the book, is an absolutely integral part of what makes the show work.

And, in the face of everything Aristotle and Quintillian have to say about good rhetorical form, I’ll end it there.  We’re almost a an hour in.  And we’ve only got to point of the three things that probably make this musical work.  But we will talk about the other two, which involve sex and spectacle.  And we’ll do it on the next episode of THM.

[references/footnotes in Cats epiosde #1]