Cats -- Sex and spectacle; what makes the musical work! Episode 18 (Cats 4 of 8)

Episode #4

The year is 1982.  The liberatory vibe of the 1960s is long gone…Ronald Reagan is president, and it’s a bad time to be an air traffic controller, or a union member, or an Iranian hostage, or, maybe most tragically, if you’re gay.  But there remain progressive voices, and one of those is the Village Voice, still an open champion of the avante garde in the world.  If you have a new, edgy, and experimental piece of theater, the Village Voice should be your core audience.

But Michael Feingold, the theater critic for the Voice, does not like the genre-busting production he just watched, and he’s dripping acid off his pen to try to come up with something more demeaning than his previous paragraph, and by and large it’s working.  Jessica Sternfeld recounts his prose: “Feingold tidily listed each disastrous element and how it contributed to a show clearly doomed to failure…the poetry itself, Feingold began, struggled painfully and unsuccessfully…the music is such inane, characterless drivel that only a generation of stoned clones and TV drones could have summed it up…the music doesn’t sound composed.  It doodles randomly from chord to chord, never developing a theme or structure…Feingold did not further elaborate his problems with the music, but moved to the third horror, [the] choreography, which looked borrowed and represented all too directly the choreographer’s undistinguished career.”

“Cats,” wrote Feingold, “is a dog.”  And with a special crescendo: “To sit through it is to realize that something has been peeing on your pants leg.  For two hours.”  And for the finale: “It ought to be retitled 101 uses for a dead musical, a reference to the popular book 101 uses for a dead cat.”  

As we know, that view of Feingold would not be widely shared, and the musical would resonate with all those marginalized groups that the Village Voice would otherwise represent.  In fact, it would become the longest-running, most lucrative, and probably most popular musical of all time.  We’ll figure out what Feingold missed, with urine-busting scotch guard on our pants, in this episode of THM.

Transcript

Episode #4 -- Sex and spectacle; what makes Cats the musical work.

The year is 1982.  The liberatory vibe of the 1960s is long gone…Ronald Reagan is president, and it’s a bad time to be an air traffic controller, or a union member, or an Iranian hostage, or, maybe most tragically, if you’re gay.  But there remain progressive voices, and one of those is the Village Voice, still an open champion of the avante garde in the world.  If you have a new, edgy, and experimental piece of theater, the Village Voice should be your core audience.

But Michael Feingold, the theater critic for the Voice, does not like the genre-busting production he just watched, and he’s dripping acid off his pen to try to come up with something more demeaning than his previous paragraph, and by and large it’s working.  Jessica Sternfeld recounts his prose: “Feingold tidily listed each disastrous element and how it contributed to a show clearly doomed to failure…the poetry itself, Feingold began, struggled painfully and unsuccessfully…the music is such inane, characterless drivel that only a generation of stoned clones and TV drones could have summed it up…the music doesn’t sound composed.  It doodles randomly from chord to chord, never developing a theme or structure…Feingold did not further elaborate his problems with the music, but moved to the third horror, [the] choreography, which looked borrowed and represented all too directly the choreographer’s undistinguished career.”

“Cats,” wrote Feingold, “is a dog.”  And with a special crescendo: “To sit through it is to realize that something has been peeing on your pants leg.  For two hours.”  And for the finale: “It ought to be retitled 101 uses for a dead musical, a reference to the popular book 101 uses for a dead cat.”  

As we know, that view of Feingold would not be widely shared, and the musical would resonate with all those marginalized groups that the Village Voice would otherwise represent.  In fact, it would become the longest-running, most lucrative, and probably most popular musical of all time.  We’ll figure out what Feingold missed, with urine-busting scotch guard on our pants, in this episode of THM.

[intro]

We are coming up on 30,000 downloads, clipping along at 1,000 a week, and 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.  We’ve got a new email address … theaterhistorypodcast@gmail.com.  If you hear anything you like, want to argue about, or have good theater ghost stories drop me a line.  The website doesn’t have a good way for me to write you back so this is the best way for me to 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, or play this episode to your pet cat and report to me in detail the creature’s reaction.  Who better to tell whether me whether I’ve captured the essence of cats.  Don’t tell me your cat doesn’t have opinions about the podcasts you listen to – if you own a cat, you know.  And so do they.

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.’”  But I am here today to explain why I kind of like cats.

To recap:  Our first 2 episodes cover the life of TS Eliot, which in the interests of brevity I will summarize in 3 points.  First, he was very sexually reserved or maybe repressed. Second, he was a literary heavyweight but his cat poems were NOT part of his canons, or really taken very seriously by anyone.  Third, he was a social conservative, and not anybody’s champion for those living on the margins of society.  If you are Victor Hugo you are beloved for your constant focus on improving the lot of the poor, so much so that downtrodden of Paris shut the city down for days as millions mourned your passing.  If you are TS Eliot, thank god you wrote a book about cats because otherwise you would be remembered as nothing more than a general grump who probably would have loved Rush Limbaugh.  I mean, he did love Ezra Pound, who gave Eliot racist nicknames and pal-ed around with Mussolini, so Limbaugh is not really a stretch.

But Andrew Lloyd Weber, director Trevor Nunn, and choreographer Gillian Lynne took what were some mostly harmless children’s poems and turned them into a Broadway smash hit.  Smash as in smash all the records for theater in all ways that records are measured.  They would do it with 3 major swipes, most of which would have nothing to do with TS Eliot.  First, and as we discussed last episode, they added Grisabella, who was not a character in Eliot’s book, and and gave her the song memory.  That song was also not in the book but was based on another TS Eliot poem called “Rhapsody on a windy night” plus 8 lines of a poem fragment that Eliot’s widow and literary estate curator Valerie provided to ALW and crew.  All this has been heavily detailed in our past 3 episodes; today the task is to talk about the last 2 things that make Cats work and which are a departure from Eliot.

The second thing that makes the show work is sex.  Aja Romano, who uses they/them pronouns, and is a 2019 fellow of the National Critics Institute, write an article about Cats in Vox.  In their article is included a link to explain “why the cats are sexy.”  Similarly, Zack DeLoach, writing a highly personal take on a 2024 Revival in New York, succinctly brings two of our themes together in this quick blurb: “There’s not really a plot.  It’s strangely erotic.”

Jia Tolentino, another award-winning journalist, writes: “Cats,” because it is about cats and not humans, pulls off a feat that, for good reason, mostly goes unattempted: it is a kid-friendly production that runs on an undercurrent of adult—and, literally, animal—sexuality.” And later, “The contours of their bodies are not mysterious to them, nor are they to the audience. These are cats who have spent a lot of time having loud sex in the alley. They slink, they whip their hips around.”  Famously, Rum Tum Tugger goes into the audience and does a pelvis grind on an audience member, usually female, which also famously led to a $6 million lawsuit in 1996 by a definitely female audience member who was ground upon.  Today, we’d take consent more seriously, but then in was laughed off.  Either way, the show is not sexually ambiguous.  If you’ve got sex drive, there’s something about those cats to make your motor churn.

I will say that, although I am a big fan of Tolentino’s writing, the phrase “loud sex in the alley” is definitely an extrapolation – that’s not part of the show or the poems or the life of TS Eliot in any way – but it is not an unreasonable extrapolation of the cat character backstories.  As further evidence of the sexual nature of the show, Tolentino points out that ALW, Nunn, and costume and set designer John Napier all went on to marry cast members.  That’s maybe more of stretch, or something Tolentino didn’t mean literally.  I point this out because that’s how the sexuality of Cats works; you know its there, there’s nothing subtle about Rum Tum Tugger, but if you had to put into words exactly what it is that’s so sexy, it would be hard.

If you take the open sexuality as just an example of what the show constantly does, and does so successfully, it is a very impressive feat that only is really possible in live theater.  I’m gonna let Jessica Sternfeld, an eminent scholar now at Chapman University and author of the self-describing book titled Megamusical,  explain it: “The nature of the plot [JCB: Ug] points to one of the most important elements of Cats: Almost none of this plot is expressed in words.  A vast amount of information is imparted through action, mood, and music only.  Every cat has a personality, and only a handful is given songs in which to express it.  The rest of the personalities and relationships are made clear through continuous acting and interacting among the cast.  The acting which conveys this information was both created by and directed by Nunn, with input from Lloyd Webber and Lynne.”  

I really hadn’t thought about it that way before I read Sternfeld, and it is totally right.  The point of the show is to create universe of cat culture, and that doesn’t work unless you can sell to the audience that specific context.  And you have to do it through acting.  

Journalist Rich Juzwiak conducted a series of interviews with about 20 cast members in 2019 and published it under the title “Is the stage cast of Cats embarrassed?”  These are voices I truly enjoyed hearing, and they emphasize the total commitment to making the show work, and needing to do so physically.  They are almost all almost always on stage, and usually dancing.  He interviewed Georgina Pazccoguin of the New York City ballet and Juzwiak is very struck by the fact that she said Cats is the hardest thing she’s ever done.  Shonica Gooden, who played Rumpleteaser in the Broadway revival said, “Trust me, some audience member is always watching and waiting for you to come out of character.”

Of course, the key is having a human play a convincing cat.  Terrance Mann of the original Broadway cast reports that “everybody got a cat.”  

Trevor Nunn deserves, and takes, a good deal of credit for the physicality of the show. But I was struck by this account from Christopher Gurr who played 3 different cats in the Broadway revival: “Gillian Lynne had a brief amount of time with us.  In the time we had with her, she attempted to cram 35 years of feline essence into less than 15 minutes of rehearsal.  She did it.  With some words but, mainly, with one gesture.  ‘Now – I don’t want to disparage American performers, but Americans on the stage are usually saying, “LOOK AT ME!!!” she said, and her body did an odd little ghost of a George-M-Cohan-meets-Al-Jolston-meets-Liza-Minelli-meets-Liberace gesture.  “But cats…” her eyes lit up and narrowed at the same time, “cats say---” And in a flash, she shot up, one foot off the ground, and spun every line of her 89-year-old-body up-up-up in a plume of arms and hand and eyes and – “Look at me!”  It was a one-second move.  It said everything you’d ever need to know about cats.”

Now is as good a time as any to say that at the time of its original production the feeling was that UK theater was not that good at dancing, a point Sternfeld makes convincingly.  And if nothing else Cats is a dance-heavy show.  The fact that they were able to pull it off so successfully is, I think, quite a testament to Gillian Lynne.

So, the second thing that makes the show work is the raw physicality of the performance; it’s athletic, the meaning is frequently carried in movement and gestures, and it’s sexy.

And, if there’s one thing that is not, it’s TS Eliot.  If there’s one defining feature of Eliot’s love life its that it was not openly expressed, an if there’s one defining feature of his literary work it is that sex is angst ridden.  It’s in the last 3 episodes but I’ll briefly say his first marriage was a disaster in all ways, including sexually, his second marriage happened when he was in his 60s and his wife was 40 years younger than he, and there are 2 strangely intimate relationships he had with males that caused speculation about his sexual orientation, which is not relevant here other than the fact that he vehemently refused to publicly discuss his private life and especially the sexual part of it.  He has exactly zero poems, plays or essays about having loud sex in an alley.  That element of the show, and it’s contribution to the show’s success, is from ALW and the Really Useful Group and not any thought TS Eliot ever had.

As with so many things that are billed as sexy, they can also be sexist.  One final quote from Juzwiak’s article comes from Lili Froelich, who played Electra on the revival: “It is a pretty sexist show, but ultimately has a message of love and acceptance…We also had a fan base of LGBTQ+ teens and young people that found solace in the show, which made me love being a part of it even more.”

And that, also, is no part of TS Eliot.  Setting aside the speculation about any homosexual urges he might have had – which are not entirely unfounded or altogether prurient but which are also not confirmed or documented – TS Eliot was definitely NOT about love and acceptance.  He was more about rigid social structures, tradition, and strict religious observance.  TS Eliot did not pursue the character Grisabella because he saw here as a tragic and fallen woman.  But the Grisabella Webber and Nunn created was tragic, fallen, and redeemed, and not redeemed because she repented for her sins but redeemed because all the other characters had to confront their prejudices against her and accept her for who she was.  That is all introduced in the musical and entirely absent from the original book, or really anything TS Eliot ever wrote.

The first thing that makes the show work is the character Grisabella, which Eliot did not write, and the second thing that makes the show work is its open sexuality, which is antithetical to everything about the life and beliefs of TS Eliot.

It’s worth pausing to note that TS Eliot was no stranger to the theater – he had his own broadway hits.  And he probably didn’t have the musical chops to make anything into a musical, but I’m guessing that a Noble Laureate with a broadway hit to his credit could probably have found a musical partner who’d be willing to work with him.  But he just wasn’t interested in that, or even putting Cats anywhere near a stage, and that just underscores the point about how much of the success of Cats the musical is due to how far ALW and friends took the show beyond anything TS Eliot imagined.

The third thing that makes the show work is the visceral experience of raw theater.  The audience is not drawn in by the plot, because there isn’t one.  They are not, as so many Game of Thrones viewers did in vain, wait to see how the characters develop and resolve, because none of them develop and there are no conflicts to resolve.  Peter Kunze wrote “Plot was all but irrelevant; Cats was an experience to be cherished.”  According to Juzwiak, the performers repeatedly likened the experience to a rock concert.  

I recently had an awesome chat with David Ellenstein, the artistic director of the Laguna Beach Playhouse.  If there were two things that bonded us they were (a) we quickly discovered with both liked baseball, and (b) we both agreed that all video of stage plays sucks.  Qua rock concert, you can watch a rock doc or a concert footage show, and get some idea of what the performance was like, but it is a hollow shell and pale echo of the real experience of being in the audience and on the front row.  My own daughter – who’s allegiance to Taylor Swift will play a major role in coming episodes – described her upper-deck, back row seating experience at a TS concert as “like a fever dream.”  Fever dream wouldn’t be a bad metaphor for Cats, either.  Tolentino has written: “One human cat is a terrible acid trip; twenty of them is an unforgettable night out in midtown.”  DeLoach, who describes the show as his personal Roman Empire, describes it as “demented.”  ALL of the critics – and also probably all 76 million people who have themselves seen the show – describe it as an experience more than a viewing opportunity.

Fun side note – OpenAI, which produces hallucinations and seems likely to eventually hit a point of singularity where it becomes self-aware and kills us all Terminator-style – reports that the audience for Cats is 76 million but the number of households that own a cat is 74.3 million.  That means that we are also approaching a moment of feline singularity where the number of people who have seen humans playing cats on broadway will exceed the number of people who own an actual cat, at which point I think the poles reverse and household pets become a metaphor for human performers and not the other way around.  Chew on that, ChatGPT.

Back to the main point here, Tolentino writes: “Cats is proof of the ludicrous heights that can be reached with full-throated commitment.”  Full commitment.  To the idea that cats have a society all their own that humans are only barely aware of, commitment to the idea that such a society can be re-created in a theater, and commitment that you never, ever drop out of character or get a moment offstage for the full two hours that you are being a cat.  How full-throated is this commitment?  We will let Juzwiak interviewee Betty Buckley who played Grisabella in the original Broadway cast fill us in: “Grizabella is like my soulmate and my best friend and my teacher.”   Now that’s commitment to a character.

I will round this point off with a direct quote from Jessica Sternfeld: “I can find no rational explanation for Cats,” historian Mark Steyn write in the flippant tone of many critics, but then goes on to put forth a perfectly reasonable explanation, with which so many critics agreed: Cats is not a normal show.  It is an experience, difficult to define and thoroughly entertaining.”

If you can fully commit to the conceit of the show you can bring your audience along with you, and Cats does that to full effect.  And maybe, succeeds precisely because that’s almost all it does.  

Which, is why I kind of like Cats.  I can go to my grave peacefully if I never hear “Jellicle Cats” again in my life, but I have an unqualified respect for the performers who brought the show alive and I take the show as living proof that there is an element to live performance that is just not possible to recreate through other mediums.

Before we leave this, we should also briefly dwell on what didn’t make the show successful.  Jessica Sternfeld makes reference to the deep complexity of TS Eliot’s poetry.  Other’s have spoken of the intellectual heft that TS Eliot brings to the show as borrowed gravitas.  TS Eliot was an intellectual heavyweight and a deep thinker, but Cats was no part of that.  The two main reactions to the Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats are either that (a) it proves that Eliot really had a sense of humor or (b) that it didn’t mean anything at all.  Memory borrows some from a more serious poem, but when the Vulture Staff was doing a round-table discussion of the show Jackson McHenry pointed out that those lyrics aren’t deep so much as they don’t make any sense – “touch me/it’s so easy to leave me” – what does that even mean?  It’s a re-constituted lyric for a musical based on some fragments of a poem Eliot abandoned and another one that uses some imagery that appears in the show tune but has no other resemblance to the musical.  The deep thoughts of TS Eliot are not what makes this musical tick.  His clever rhymes inspired it, and the lively poetry animates it, but without the additions of the ALW crew and the concrete, corporeal manifestation of the show on the stage Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats will take a comfortably thematic spot on your bookshelf right next to Sandra Boynton’s classic, Moo, Baa, La La La.

You might put it next to the Starbelly Sneetchs of Theodore Geisel, except that book ends with an acceptance of differences which Old Possum does not, and Geisel was a strong champion of Jewish rights and outspoken critic of anti-semitism, whereas Eliot was the opposite.  Actually, put those 2 books right next to each other just to make Eliot nervous.  If you haven’t heard the last 3 episodes and are wondering why I’m throwing stones at Eliot for being antisemitic, give those a download and listen for the name “Ezra Pound.”

But for these reasons, or some I am simply ignorant of, and despite ALWs fear that an act of bathos was about to unfold just after the opening night curtain goes up, Cats is an immediate and  runaway success.

It opened on London on May 11, 1981.  Initial critics were divided then, as now.  But Jessica Sternfeld reports that the British press universally loved all the dancing, and in particular loved that a British company could do something so ambitiously choreographed and to such great effect.  Remember, the overall rap was that British shows couldn’t get the dancing right, so it was almost a point of national pride that they had spearheaded such a dance-heavy production.  The US got to the moon before Russia, but by God, the Brits got to Cats before the Americans did.  A critic named Sherdian Morely declared the night belonged to Gillian Lynne.

The critics noticed that there wasn’t really a plot, which held most of them back from fully embracing the show, but the Guardian and the Sunday Times, each prominent enough, gave it rave reviews.  An Irving Wardle of the London Times, the more respected paper in terms of art reviews, praised the set, which is a huge junkyard scaled to make humans appear about the size of a normal cat.  But he found the plot too thin to carry the show.  One James Fenton, another reviewer for the Sunday Times, panned it because he never liked TS Eliot’s original poetry.  But, it was pretty soon evident that the rave reviews outweighed the bad ones and the audience, of course, voted with their feet.  Within months Memory had hit the musical charts and the cast recording also made the top 10.  The Jellicle Ball was the the theme music to the BBC coverage of the 1982 world cup, maybe the only event in the UK that could possibly have been more prominent than Cats.  The show went on to run for 21 years.  

Then it jumped the pond to New York and play in the Winter Palace, where it opened in 1982.  They held open auditions, got more than 2,000 applicants, Trevor Nunn described the process in the coffee table book as much more brutal than that portrayed on Chorus Line.  By the end, he says, the performers were so indistinguishably awesome he couldn’t say more than who got the parts and who didn’t without being able to meaningfully articulate a difference.

 The critics again noted the absence of a plot, the grauduer of the set, and the phrase “theater magic” started popping up.  But using the phrase “by all accounts” Sternfeld reports that the opening night crowd loved the show.  It sold out straight for 17 years, won the Tony for best musical, best score, best direction, best costumes, best lighting, and tastiest concessions.  That last one wasn’t real but let’s just call it a sweep for the awards season.

23 openend, only 9 finished.  One called “A doll’s life” had a budget of $4m, closed after only 3 days, and was still nominated for a tony.

The New York Times would have stories about how long the show was running, which I think counts as famous for being famous.  The records started piling up; in 1989 it became the longest-running musical in British history, surpassing ALW’s own Jesus Christ Superstar.  On the 19th of June 1997 it became the longest-running musical in Broadway history, with 6,138 performances.  It would go on to see more than 6,500 performances in Japan.  That same year its overall gross would hit $2.2b.  

On the 20th of February 2000 the NYT announced that the show would finally be closing in June, but that just got thousands more to clamor to see it before it shut down and another $1m in tickets sold in 5 days and the run would extend to September 10.

The impact of this show on musical theater can almost not be overstated.  Sternfeld wrote that the show might have been critic-proof and that after it ALW would be unstoppable – although we will see in later episodes that maybe the only person capable of stopping him was ALW himself, which he in fact managed to do – and Sternfeld concluded, rightly in any estimation, that Cats changed the theater world forever.  Even it’s critics couldn’t deny its influence, they could only quibble with whether it was good or bad. 

So that gets us from TS Eliot in Oxford to Andrew Lloyd Weber in New York.  There is no doubt that Cats the musical is probably the mega-musical which has come to define what modern musical theater is and what counts as success.

But it is not all there is to know about either Eliot or Cats.  For Eliot, we still need to know about his involvement in…the occult.  Yes, the occult.  Am I stretching here?  Well, I’m certainly not above it, but I will say that the academic journal Texas Studies in Literature and Language has an article titled “TS Eliot and the Occultation of Knowledge and Experience,” and that probably means I’m not the first to notice it.  But I might be the one person more interested than anyone else, and we will definitely figure out what’s up with that.  And although we now know that Grisabella is the key to the success of Cats, and so is the sexuality, there remains the open question – is Grisabella a fallen woman, a fallen woman redeemed, AND…a prostitute?  More than one article has pursued that question and so we will we on upcoming episodes of THM.

[references/footnotes in episode 1 of Cats]