Cats -- Is Grizabella a prostitute? Episode 21 (Cats 7 of 8).

An already famous poet is working, for the first time, on something light and fun.  It’s a children’s book of poems about Cats.  All his previous work has basically been about the anxious terror in the modern world, but he is going to do something delightful, for a change.  His Dad likes cats, he likes cats, his friends have kids who like cats.   The book is about cats.

He’s a handful of lines in when he stops himself – he’s writing about a female cat, a fallen star, and he decides not to go on.  This super-educated man realizes that, probably unconsciously, he’s modeling his character study after something that’s been done before, albeit centuries earlier and in another language.  The risk of plagiarism doesn’t stop him, he just realizes that the story is just too sad to put in a book designed to entertain kids.

Those poems and finished and eventually are read on the radio on Christmas day in 1937 to a delighted English audience, and one of the youngsters who hears them is Andrew Lloyd Webber, who will go on to become what can safely be called the most powerful force on broadway.  He turns the poems into a musical, and with the help of TS Eliot’s widow Valerie combines the figure with some other poetry to produce the song “Memory,” which will become absolutely iconic.

TS Eliot pointedly did not sexualize the character.  Critics would write that the ALW production team would go out of its way to say nothing sexual about Grizabella or her past.  And yet, today, those who write about the character the most closely argue convincingly that she is widely understood to be a former prostitute…and she is, just not in any English language version.  

Why is she understood this way when there is no reference prostitution in the text for the musical, and when she doesn’t appear at all in the original book of poetry at all?  Does it matter, and if so, why?  We’ll trace the rumors on this episode of THM…

Transcript

Is Grisabella a prostitute?  (Cats 7 of 8)

An already famous poet is working, for the first time, on something light and fun.  It’s a children’s book of poems about Cats.  All his previous work has basically been about the anxious terror in the modern world, but he is going to do something delightful, for a change.  His Dad likes cats, he likes cats, his friends have kids who like cats.   The book is about cats.

He’s a handful of lines in when he stops himself – he’s writing about a female cat, a fallen star, and he decides not to go on.  This super-educated man realizes that, probably unconsciously, he’s modeling his character study after something that’s been done before, albeit centuries earlier and in another language.  The risk of plagiarism doesn’t stop him, he just realizes that the story is just too sad to put in a book designed to entertain kids.

Those poems and finished and eventually are read on the radio on Christmas day in 1937 to a delighted English audience, and one of the youngsters who hears them is Andrew Lloyd Webber, who will go on to become what can safely be called the most powerful force on broadway.  He turns the poems into a musical, and with the help of TS Eliot’s widow Valerie combines the figure with some other poetry to produce the song “Memory,” which will become absolutely iconic.

TS Eliot pointedly did not sexualize the character.  Critics would write that the ALW production team would go out of its way to say nothing sexual about Grizabella or her past.  And yet, today, those who write about the character the most closely argue convincingly that she is widely understood to be a former prostitute…and she is, just not in any English language version.  

Why is she understood this way when there is no reference prostitution in the text for the musical, and when she doesn’t appear at all in the original book of poetry at all?  Does it matter, and if so, why?  We’ll trace the rumors on this episode of THM…

[intro]

So a little book-keeping; we’re going to have an interstitial episode on Phantom of the Opera.  There is an entire series on the Phantom…episodes 4, 5, and 6, and that follows the overall pattern of this podcast where we start with the original book and end with the musical with some speculation about why it was so successful.  The new episode is going to do something both novel and obvious; I asked some listeners what makes the show work for them as audience members.  I thought it would be pretty straightforward, but let me just say that the Dirk Gently “it is all connected” edict did not let us down, and there are some amazing connections and overlaps that I found awesome, and I hope you will too.  That is coming up after these Cats episodes.

As always, your listening to these tales really makes what I put into them worthwhile, so thank you, thank you, thank you.  We are doing well enough that we’re about to launchy a serious marketing push…my goal is to make the show viable and self-sustaining.  But far more than what I do, what you all do is what is likely to determine whether we can survive past the one year mark, which we will be coming up on in August.  So: Please like this, share it, give it a rating especially on Amazon, Apply, or Spotify, and drop me a line just to let me know you’re not just downloading, but you’re listening.

We have already reviewed TS Eliot, the author who originally wrote the Cats poems, and traced that through the show and how the show came about, which as always includes a discussion of why I think the show works.  In a nutshell, and there is of course a lot more to it than this, but it is a show that is light on plot but heavy on sex and spectacle.  And I’m not just sliding that sex part in, there is more than one author and critic who thinks that the Cats are sexy, and that sexiness is a big part of the success of the show.  

Oh, and we have had a few side trips into TS Eliot and his relation to the occult.  If you like the mystery and supernatural part of this podcast, Cats has the least far to stretch to get to the spirit world: there are academic papers with titles like “TS Eliot and the occult.”  Anyway, that has occupied the recent attention of this podcast.

We are now down to two strains of inquiry that remain around the production   The one we’ll get to next time involves the failures of Cats…it is of course one of the most successful musicals of all time, and maybe one of the biggest and most lucrative entertainment projects of all time, but it has forayed into a few can’t-miss extensions of the francise that…missed.  And missed badly.  Figuring out why that happened will be what we take up in our next episode.

But today’s topic is about Grisabella, the glamour cat, who has fallen from grace, or maybe fame, or maybe the limelights, or maybe…prostitution.  Part of the most interesting thing about this question is why it is even a question.  So, let’s start with where Grisabella came from, and then what it’s like to be a prostitute, and then why there is a debate about whether Grisabella was a prostitute.

Where did Grisabella come from?  Well, she is not in the original TS Eliot book.  If you rewind to the start of the series, which I think started at episode 15, you will discover that TS Eliot was a very serious modernist poet, wrote a very grim and dark poem called the Wasteland that was the poem that launched him, wrote more dark and serious stuff, and eventually won a Nobel Peace Prize for literature later in life.  More than just about anyone else, he ushered in the modernist movement in literature, and it’s pretty disturbing.   The writing is concerned with industrial warfare, human alienation, a loss of faith, and a general ennui about society and humanity in general.  He also had a troubling anti-semitic streak that was pretty out on the open, and his best buddy was Ezra Pound, who was racist in all the ways one can be, up to the point where he signed on with the Mussolini government and was taken prisoner as a collaborator when Italy fell to the allies.

And then, right in the middle of that, he wrote a delightful little book of children’s poems about cats.  It was called “Old Possum’s Guide to Practical Cats,” and the only mark of any serious connection with anything is that “Old Possum” is the nickname that virulent racist Ezra Pound gave to TS Eliot, and that nickname came from the “Song of the South,” a group of stories so racist that Disney had to shutter the movies they had made under the title.

But, the stories started in correspondence he’d had with friends and the children of friends, and he really did just seem like a guy who liked cats and liked chatting with others about them.

And Grisabella is nowhere in that book.  He start a poem about a cat named Grisabella but scrapped it.  He both though the character he was developing was too sad for children, and also too derivative of a 1500s poem but a poet named Villon’s. The specific poem in question is about a woman who laments loss of youth and beauty…and even laments the loss of an abusive spouse, as in, she acknowledges the abuse but not only still wishes he’d come back but she kind of knows that if he does come back he’ll abuse her some more but that’s still OK with her because love or devotion or something.  It didn’t age well.  But if there is a historical Grisbella, La Belle Heulmeire by Villion.

But, it’s probably not that either because – repeating myself here – that character is not in the book.  Grisabella is in the musical because TS Eliot’s widow, Valerie Eliot, saw a workshop performance, turned over the unfinished poem to Andrew Lloyd Weber and his crew, including Director Trevor Nunn, and they added the bit about the Jellicle cats having a ball to pick who got to go to the heavyside layer.  They then took the poem scraps, combined that with another poem Eliot had written called “rhapsody on a windy night,” and created the character Grisabella and the song “Memory,” both of which were enormously successful.

Which is a long road that winds back to this thought: If Grisabella is a prostitute, that’s something that got created for the musical, because it is not in the book.  TS Eliot pointedly made the decision not to finish the poem and not to include it in his book of poetry.

The second bit of background context that’s probably important to understanding Grisabella is the nature of prostitution.  As I think I’ve mentioned on the show before, I helped develop a class on sexual communication and am a co-author of a book on the topic, so I feel safe in saying that there are two basic academic approaches to prostitution.

The over-arching motif for sexual values is that males should be sexual initiators and females should be the gatekeepers.  This results in expectations that males will always want sex with any attractive female, and generally pursue those relationships, while females will be careful in the selection of their sexual partners.  Partially, this might have some biological basis, since women are far more likely to get pregnant than men, and are also more susceptible to sexually transmitted infections.  But that is only a small part of it, and most of the whole initiator/gatekeeper thing is a huge social construction.

The end result is some massive sexual double-standards that I don’t have to tell the female listeners of this show about.  In particular, males who have sex with lots of different people are considered excellent initiators and most of the slang terms for sexually prolific males are positive.  In sharp contrast, females who have sex with lots of different people are considered very poor gatekeeper, and all the slang terms for females who freely have sex with many partners are negative.

There are, of course, nuances that I’m brushing over here, but let’s just say that there isn’t too much controversy around the question of whether there are sexual double standards in western culture.  Using the term “western” here informally for those of you who have read Edward Said, but let’s just say in US and UK culture, this is pretty standard stuff.

The double-standard is especially bad for prostitutes.  The research evidence pretty conclusively proves that only a tiny percentage of prostitutes are in the professional voluntarily.  Many are simply and literally enslaved by organized crime and sex trafficers, others don’t really have other economic opportunity, and if you made a pie chart of all the prostitutes in the world and why they were doing it the group of “had plenty of other economic opportunities and weren’t coerced but freely chose prostitution because they just enjoyed the lifestyle,” it would be the tiniest slice by a lot and you’d probably have to squint to see it.  And, even then, there is research to show there are a host of negative physical and psychological outcomes that effect those engaged in prostitution, even if they report that they are doing so voluntarily.

So: The sexual double standard is nowhere more ironic and unfair than it is with prostitution, where people (mostly women) are forced into doing horrible things they don’t really want to, at the cost of their bodily autonomy and physical and mental health, but are massively stigmatized because they are negatively and harshly judged as bad sexual gatekeepers.

All these themes, of course, are developed in great depth in Victor Hugo’s masterpiece Les Miserables. What’s it like to be a prostitute?  You are forced into giving your body over to others to do with as they wish, and then are harshly judged by society as being a moral failure for doing so.  There are double-standards and then there are tragedies, and this is way closer to full-on tragedy.

The academic world, as I said, has two different approaches to this.  One is to celebrate paid sex workers, point out that they are subject to a number of awful stereotypes based on double-standards.  This group would like society to get over it’s sexual hangups, treat sex as a natural thing that humans do, stop stigmatizing those who do sex work, de-criminalize it to improve the working conditions of those who work in the sex industry, including pornographic film workers, exotic dancers, and prostitutes, and eliminate the double-standard by legitimizing sex work and empowering those who engage in it.

The second approach is to attack the stigma, point to prostitutes as victims rather than criminals, offer greater protections, crack down more on those who sex traffic, and criminalize and prosecute male pimps and male customers as much as the prostitutes.  I’m sure you’ve already thought of two or three points for and against each of these stances, and I’m not going to pick, although I will add that it all seems to turn on how much you think the negative physical and psychological outcomes are the same even if prostitution is voluntary.

Which gets us back to Grisabella – if she’s a formerly glamorous performer, and maybe an attractive, sexy one – then you can read the song “memory” as a lament for the loss of status as her beauty and fame faded.  If you read her as a former prostitute then the double standard immediately splashes over the character; she’s a fallen woman, morally corrupt, given to partying, loose sex, and moral depravity who is now suffering the consequences of her immoral lifestyle.  Think of the slang terms you hear applied to prostitutes, apply them to Griselda, and that’s what happens to the character when she is thought of as a prostitute and not as a former stage star.

So whether or not Grisabella is a former prostitute changes quite a bit the interpretation of the character and the show.  There’s a pretty direct biblical connection between Jesus and his treatment of prostitutes – Luke chapter 7, Matthew chapter 21 – and Grisabella going to the heavyside layer.  Jesus said that there would be prostitutes who got into heaven before some religious leaders, and right here we watch a prostitute ascend into heaven before everyone else.  If indeed Grisabella is a prostitute, and if indeed the heavyside layer is heaven.  If she’s just a famous ex-star who’s lost her popularity, then she’s like an abandoned Great Gatsby, who’s hangers-on have abandoned her now that she can no longer fund the party.

And, there’s the titillation.  If she’s a prostitute the audience can kind of snicker at her a little more, thanks to the societal sexual double-standards.

So: Our main question: Is Grisabella a prostitute?

Well, it’s not in Eliot’s original poems, and there is no mention of Grisabella being a prostitute in the Cats script.  At all.  Just go to the local library and check out their copy of the libretto (that’s a fancy term that I just learned means a full copy of the dialogue and lyrics) and see if you can find it.  Any reference to her past sexual identity is innuendo, if even that.

And yet, Grisabella is thought of as a prostitute.  That’s casually mentioned in discussions of the various revivals and the commentary around the massively popular show.  For example, Aja Romano writes for Vox and was a 2019 fellow for the National Critics Institute, so they’ve got some chops as a theater critic, and their 2019 article has written this selection, quote “Then there’s the backstory for Grizabella, Jennifer Hudson’s once-glamorous dance cat who’s now, erm, a fallen cat prostitute. (I told you, Cats is weird.) The details regarding Grizabella’s journey from celebrated performer to sex worker have never been clear in any version — but in the film, they’re made even more bizarre. That’s because another cat, Macavity (Idris Elba), is now, somehow, her pimp and a catnip pusher. So instead of just having to accept cat sex workers, we have to accept an entire feline underground of sex and drug trafficking.”  We’ll talk about that movie in the next episode, but for now just notice how unequivocally 

And you will find much, much more on the fan wikis and more than one wordpress site.  

This seems to be one of those things that is untrue but everybody wants to casally drop to seem like they have insight.  Oh, Ty Cobb, one of baseball’s greatest hitters and earliest stars?  He was a mean bastard who killed a disabled man.  NOT TRUE, and Charles Leershen has written a book to prove it.  But that hasn’t really changed the common perception.  Or, in the first televised debate Richard Nixon beat JFK among radio audiences.  Also not true, but still widely believed.  David Schwinner, that loveable guy from Friends?  He cheated charities out of millions of dollars.  Also NOT TRUE, but almost impossible to shake.  Richard Gere, there was this gerbil.  I’m gonna stop there.  Let’s just say that, and I say this as a communication professional, baseless rumors are often given the weight of fact and are really, really hard to shake.

Oh yeah, Grisabella, she was a prostitute.  Also NOT TRUE.  Not for TS Eliot, not for Andrew Lloyd Webber.  Not in the book of poems, not in the musical script.

But Gris is constantly referred to as a prostitute.  Why?  Basically, because of a Japanese mistranslation.  And despite what I just said about Grizabella not being a prostitute in the original American production, she definitively is a prostitute in the Japanese production.

Here, I’m going to heavily crib from one source.  David Chandler works at Doshisha University, and wrote an article titled: We are all one Grizabella: Prostitution, Theology, and the cult of Cats in Japan, which was published in an academic journal called Studies in Musical Theater.

Chandler starts with two observations.  First, as the German syntho-pop band Alphaville would have put it, Cats is huge in Japan.  By 2006 it had been performed 6,500 times and has only recently been overtaken by The Lion King.  Second, the London and Broadway productions were huge tourist events where massive numbers of Japanese people would watch the show, and as we have discussed in previous episodes the fact that it’s not heavily plot-driven made it appealing to non-English speaking audience for whom the language barrier was less of an issue.  In the words of Chandler, “it is possible more seats to see Cats have in fact been bought by the Japanese than any other people.”

So, what is true of the Japanese production is likely going to have some influence on how the show is understood overfall.

Chandler reviews the paper-thin case for Eliot ever having conceived Grisabella as a prostitute, which includes some vague references from Valerie Eliot, but it’s pretty clear that whatever is true of her past in the English version is implication and innuendo.

Not so the Japanese version.  That version removes the specific reference to places in London, but it unequivocally identified as a prostitute in the Japanese version.  Here’s how that happened, all according to Chandler: In 1983 a New York Times reviewer named Stephen Holden was writing about Cats and made a passing mention to the “ruined prostitute Grizabella.”  

In 1983 the show was being translated into Japanse, and the translator was named Keita Asari.  Asari is the former general director of the Shiki Theater Company, who owns the performance rights to the Japanese version of Cats.  His translation was influenced by three factors.  First, he’d probably seen Holden’s comment.  Chandler finds it likely that this was extremely influential: “As I have personally experienced on hundreds of occasions, the Japanese are extremely – excessively – reluctant to trust their own interpretation of an English text and will gratefully, often uncritically, seize on any help they can get. They also tend to revere any intellectual authority who has been somehow institutionally sanctioned, and New York Times critics would certainly fall into that category.”

Second, the Shiki Company drew on the work of, and actually included in their programs, an essay by the scholar Shinsuke Ando of Keio University in Tokyo, where he vigorously asserted that TS Eliot’s work was serious work and not light verse.

And third, Chandler takes great pains to show that being a prostitute means something very different in Japan than it does in the US or UK.  Chandler writes: “Anyone living in a major Japanese city knows the sex industry is huge, visible, and for the most part tolerated, and any number of commentators have agreed with Stephen Mansfield that ‘No other country in the world offers the sheer variety of sexual services found in Japan’ (2003).”  Thus, when  Asari is writing the translation, “Asari presumably reasoned his audience would accept prostitution, non-judgementally, as a basic, albeit shadowy, part of the fabric of urban life.”

That’s what got it into the show.  In 2007 a theater critic with a journalist background named Shin Osani, who has now become an Associate Professor at Senshu University in Tokyo, wrote a book called Musicals in Progress.  Leaning into the belief that the TS Eliot work must be pround, he took the stance like most of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s work Cats was a religious story of ascent.  From there, the interpretation gets more and more elaborate, but they all depend on the ascent being religious and Grizabella being a prostitute.

Then, “In 2009, a far more significant and influential study appeared in the form of Masayuki Ikeda’s book Neko tachi no buto¯kai – Eliot to Musical ‘Cats’ (The Ball of Cats – Eliot and the Musical ‘Cats’) (2009). It is no exaggeration to say that most Japanese with a special interest in Cats now tend to view the musical through the lens of this cheaply priced study.”  Those arguments also get so twisted and detailed that rather than outline them Chandler just includes a 7-paragraph direct quote.  I won’t even attempt to summarize it all, the references are in the transcript for the especially cognitively involved, but it also involves Cats as a very serious work, Grizabella’s ascent as salvation and rebirth, and adds the dimension of sex, and I’m now reading directly from the Ikeda quote within the Chandler article: “The story of Grizabella’s salvation and rebirth in Cats is also connected t this issue of the nature of human life and sex.” And a few sentences later: “she has been living through this torn dualism of life and sex.”

Anyway: in these interpretations, understanding Grizabella’s role in the narrative means accepting that she is both a prostitute AND that her sexual nature is crucial to her role overall.  In a final flourish, Ikeda believes that Eliot intentionally obscured the meanings of his poems but that Webber and Nunn “managed the feat of scenting out the poet’s religiousness and sense of the tragic flowing through the bottom of the original [book], and made it into a musical of miracle.”  OR, they were just looking for a good song to anchor the show.  But what a great conspiracy: Eliot has deep and hidden sexual content but doesn’t include it in his book in the hopes that his scraps of unfinished poetry would later be combined with finished poetry and mashed together by two other geniuses who understood this crucial dualism of life and sex – whatever that is – and decided to put that into a musical where they would ALSO hide the explicit connections so that only super-enlightened critics could tease it out.  The DaVinci code isn’t that complicated.

Chandler reads all this and concludes that there is no “there” there, and as the kicker Lloyd-Webber, who is sort of a stickler for detail and insistent on retaining control over touring shows and foreign language productions, didn’t even bother to have the Japanese version of the script back-translated so he could catch the change, had it mattered to him.  If Lloyd-Webber didn’t know that Grizabella had been made into a prostitute in the Japanese version that kind of kills the Osani and Ikeda interpretations.

But, that cemented the idea of Grizabella as a prostitute in the Japanese rendition, and that was so large and the Japanese audience influential enough that it made a difference in how Grizabella is understood overall.  For English language audiences, Chandler quotes Rick Rylance in the year 2000 as saying: “Many professional commentators, and thousands of undergraduates, call this woman a prostitute for no reason that is explicit in the text.”  Chandler himself says “as more and more critics have described the woman as a prostitute, it has become hard to think of her as anything else and any new statement of the case can be supported by older ones.”

So now we know why Grizabella is thought of as a prostitute; a NYT reviewer made a side comment that a Japanese translator gave too much credit to, that change was latched onto by serious Japanese scholars and critics, and the entire cultural milieu was such that between when the show first ran in 1981 and when Rick Rylance was writing in 2000 it was widely accepted that Grizabella was a prostitute, just as it is widely accepted that Richard Gere…I’m gonna stop there again.  Neither are true.

In fairness to the Japanese audiences, they seem led by some serious literary works that go a little of the rails, which many literary interpetations can do, and at any rate they’re less judgy about prostitutes anyway, so it’s more like an additional layer to the character than a dirty joke.  For the English language audiences, it’s more just titillating monicker that lets you laugh and sneer a little bit more, probably without reflecting too much on the double standard behind the joke.

Now that we know what Grizabella is thought of as a prostitute…we might ask why does that matter.  So what if a character in a plotless romp is a fallen actress or a former prostitute.  She’s got the show-stopping song, right, and by the end we’re all cheering for her marvelous ascent, up a glorious truck tire, to a place with the marvelous title heavyside layer, which might be purgatory or hell or something but is probably heaven or maybe reincarnation – wait, that doesn’t fit ANY of the far-flung interpretations of the religious ascent theme – but whatever.  By the end of the show she’s the star – again – and maybe the hero.

One person who thinks it latters, a lot, is Kathryn Lowerre, of Michigan State University, writing in the Journal of Musicological Research.  Although the creators of the show describe Grizabella as universal and timeless, Lowerre sees her specifically female and decidedly Victorian, and that has some implications.

Lowerre makes some connections; Lowerre sees a connection between Lloyd Webber, Margaret Thatcher, and a conservative longing to, in the words of Lowerre, “revivify an idealized Victorian past.”  TS Eliot had also had a very public turn to conservatism.  Lowerre quotes ALW who said: “I have, you see, a very sort of Victorian work ethic, which means I am constantly lookin for things to do which I hadn’t tried my hand at before.”  That’s not exactly saying that he wants a return to a Victorian time, but when Lowerre writes “I find it interesting that at the same time, in their separate but related empires, both Lloyd-Webber and Thatcher are reappropriating [the word] “Victorian” and constructing it into a positive past” that is not far off.  

Lowerre also points out that the original poetry book is heavy on males, and that JennyAnyDots as the lone female character with a musical number besides Grisabella, and points out that another critic named Mantle switches between the use of the words “cat” and “woman” when talking about Grizabella, and that doesn’t happen when talking about the male characters.  And, as I’ve noted in prior episodes, there are those, including cast members, who find more than a faith echo of sexism in the show.

And the Victorian era was one with very limited roles for women.  Lowerre writes: “In her

groundbreaking work, Woman and the Demon: The Life of A Victorian Myth, Nina Auerbach famously argued that “the very rigidity of the categories of victim and queen, domestic angel and demonic outcast, old maid and fallen woman, concentrates itself into a myth of transfiguration that glorified the women it seemed to suppress.”  Even the ascent isn’t exactly a triumph of female empowerment: “redemption for Grizabella comes explicitly through the patriarch Deuteronomy and organized religion, not a lover and the promise of heavenly forgiveness.”  In fact, “As imagined by Lloyd Webber and Nunn, Grizabella is sick, ostracized, and often absent from view. She is no threat to the social order—rather, she passionately desires to return to it.”

In the end, Grizabella “functions as a warning to young, glamour kittens” both in the audience and onstage.  She is trapped in a trope of the fallen woman, taken straight from the Victorian era.  And Lowerre’s point is that it’s the very rigidly of the roles – even if you’re the Queen – that really need to be challenged.  Being a fallen woman who evokes sympathy and is redeemed by getting let back in to the same society that is rigidly enforcing the rules in the first place, well, that’s not really a story of liberation.  If it is a story about redemption, it’s worth asking what you’re getting redeemed into, and the ambiguity of the heavyside layer makes that one a little tough to untangle.

So the twins themes of Grisabella here are that her fall from societal grace is a little problematic…turning her into a prostitute isn’t probably necessary, it’s got weird cultural angles, but since English language audiences have so glommed onto the idea it feels, to me, like it’s a way of applying the sexual double standard when it really doesn’t have to be there.  Second, the redemption of Grisabella is worth asking about, since it’s not clear where she’s going, who’s saving her – in the words of Lowerre we see a lot about the machina but learn very little about deus – but it is clear that her story is not about challenge the social structures that pushed her out of society in the first place, but it’s a story about being let back in to an essentially unchanged set of rules and roles.

I do not mean this to be a buzzkill about the show – if you love the song and are cheering for Grisabella well so am I and who doesn’t like the underdog story?  But I do think it’s worth reflecting on the scholarly debates that have surrounded this show and the character, and it’s worth trying to figure out whether this is just a show about some Cats or if there’s something else there..and if there is, what it’s all about.  And there’s been more of that discussion around Grisabella than anyone else.

What have we learned about theater and life?  Well, mostly, what happened to Grisabella’s character has given the occasion to talk about prostitution, which is the focal point for serious sexism and sexual double standards. It’s a place where females are literally reduced to sex objects for men to use for money, all while have the moral blame largely placed on their own heads.  The fact that English audiences have been so ready to accept this interpretation says something troubling about or society – and frankly, it says something that we have to confront, fix, and put in our past.  Whether that is adopting sex-positive approaches to sex work, or removing the conditions that force people into prostitution, or changing the way we think about sex and sexuality, an important thing to do is, at least in the limited world of theater, put to death the idea that Grisabella is a former prostitute, and move on to interpreting the show and her song without that baggage.  That won’t crash the heteropatriarchy, but all wars are won a single battle at a time.

We have now reviewed one of the side quests surrounding Cats, and we’ve figured out what folks have to say about Grizabella.  We have one more episode before we leave our gang of Cats, and that has to do with the productions of Cats that didn’t take off.  As always, we’ll be looking for the lessons for life and theater, both in the places where things worked and those were it didn’t.  Our next episode will be broadcast direct from production hell, in our next episode of THM.