Cats -- Feline Failures (productions that tanked), Episode 22 (Cats 8 of 8). Artwork

Theater History and Mysteries

I take a musical theater production and do a deep dive to find a richer understanding about the lessons the show has for theater and life. And, I’ll never miss an opportunity to pursue any mystery, bizarre coincidence, improbable event, or supernatural suggestion along the way because, in the words of Dirk Gentley, it is all connected.

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Music by Jon Bruschke and Andrew Howat, arranged, performed, and recorded by Andrew Howat.

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Theater History and Mysteries

Cats -- Feline Failures (productions that tanked), Episode 22 (Cats 8 of 8).

August 12, 2025 • Dr. Jon Bruschke, PhD • Season 1 • Episode 20

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I am writing this on Father’s Day, 2025, and to mark this occasion I will share my greatest parenting victory. Last spring, during Taylor Swift’s eras Tour my daughter did all the things one does to try to get a ticket. Tried the presale, pre-registered, looked at the fan resale sites, looked at the predatory reseller sites, put alerts on all her accounts. But, no dice. The only tickets that were available were well out of our price range.

And then, 2 days before the last concert in LA, a family friend found tickets we could – barely – afford, and asked if our daughter wanted to join. Sending the text message announcing that she had tickets made me feel like the parent of the year and, undoubtedly, badly interrupted her AP English class.

And so, with 48 hours to go, my daughter came home, disappeared into her room, and took to her homework like any good AP student would and announced that she needed to make sure that she had memorized every song that was on the set list, plus every song that might be one of the two “surprise” songs that Swift added to each concert performance. If there was any song, in any format, that Taylor Swift had ever recorded, my daughter was going to make sure that she could sing along with it word for word at the concert.

When she came home, she described the experience as a “fever dream.”

Ms. Swift, if you are out there listening to this podcast, or more likely the lectures I have uploaded to YouTube on advanced linear multiple regression heterogeneity tests, I just want you to know that you made my daughter’s year.

So imagine my surprise when I was researching this episode, asked her what she thought of “beautiful ghosts.” To my stunned amazement, she had never heard of it. Ever. Beautiful ghosts is the original song that Taylor Swift had recorded for the fraught, and failed, CGI animated version of Cats.

How is it possible to make a show with a budget that large, with an all-star cast, including the single most popular entertainer on the face of the planet earth (who can date whoever she wants but should really be cheering for Justin Herbert and the San Diego Chargers) – how can you put together a production with every single bit of mass marketed momentum going for it, and end up with a flop? That is a more commercial but harder to untangle mystery than most that we’ve dealt with, and we’ll be watching it from the cheap seats in this episode of THM.

Show watching

https://www.broadwayleague.com/research/statistics-broadway-nyc/

Musical artist net worth

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_music_artists_by_net_worth

The success of Andrew Lloyd Webber

https://www.londontheatre.co.uk/theatre-news/news/prepare-for-yet-another-very-andrew-lloyd-webber-summer

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Episode 8 – Feline Failures.

When she came home, she described the experience as a “fever dream.”

[intro]

Quick book-keeping..this is the last episode in our 8-part series on Cats. The next production up will be Jesus Christ Superstar, because so far what I’ve liked the most is starting with the books that originally inspired the musicals, and this time I get to start with the Bible. It seemed like it was divine intervention that got the book Phantom of the Opera to the screen and then the stage, but when you’re talking about Jesus Christ, Superstar, well, that’s a whole new level, isn’t it? Anyway, that’s our next stop on this mutual journey to get new takes on old musicals.

But before that, we’ll have a special episode that re-traces the Phantom of the Opera a little bit. I’ve covered that before, and relied on a whole lot of written commentary to figure out what lessons that show has for theater and life, but I have found five very special fans of the show and what they shared is, well, truly remarkable. As with most things on the this show, I read the cosmic connects with a tongue in my cheek and tasting a grain of salt, but if there was ever any doubt that it is all connected, these conversations make a stronger case than I had before. So: brief retrace to the Phantom, and then on to Jesus Christ. Superstar, that is.

And, there’s a temptation to pre-record this next bit since I say the same thing almost every time, but I’m keeping this live because deep gratitude is something that can’t be prepackaged and I really do want you to know how much I appreciate you listening. Our conversatings are always one-sided but it means a lot to know that you’re out there and that others find these different takes, deep dives, and repeated side quests as much fun as I do. The most important force that will make or break this show is you all, and if you can post about this on social media, drop a link to an episode you think is worthwhile for others, or leave a rating on the audio service you use the most, that will have far more important and far-reaching consequences than you know.

Ok, to set the academic context for today. Academic fields spring up, splinter, and reform all the time. So an English department adds public speaking then it becomes communication then you add communication disorders and journalism and what you now have are four subfields. Or you start studying human cultures and you have anthropology but then you start studying either evolutionary or cultural anthropology and pretty soon you have people doing things different enough that maybe you need separate departments, different conferences, and eventually different fields.

And if you’re studying culture, well, you can start with something called letters or humanities, and then maybe you need departments of different languages, and then cultural studies and then ethnic studies and then gender studies. And you can only imagine how this happens in the study of art, where you might have studio art, visual art, performing art, and THEN you add critical studies to all those things and you have areas like “critical musicology” or performance studies or critical performance studies.

And amidst all this division, recomposition, and academic mitosis, there has emerged a field which I find absolutely fascinating, and it goes by the name “failure studies.” Today’s featured scholar is Peter Kunze, who is writing for The Velvet Light Trap. Ok, Jon, take a deep breath, you can get through this in one sentence. He holds: Ph.D., Media Studies, University of Texas at Austin, Ph.D., English, Florida State University, M.A., English, Florida State University, B.A., Communications, Rowan University, B.A., English, Rowan University.

Here is his description of failure studies:” What might be learned from studying unproduced media? In fact, must media be produced to be studied? In “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Walter Benjamin observes, “If one asks with whom the adherents of historicism actually empathize,” then their “answer is inevitable: with the victor.” By extension, history tends to focus on successes, especially when the story of such successes casts favor unto the victor. To this end, what histories are suppressed when we celebrate success, and who is silenced in the process? Furthermore, how might a focus on failed media reveal the realities of media production, where success proves to be exceptional rather than normal?”

I could sidetrack myself for hours going off on these points, but let’s reflect for a minute: Say the purpose of academic scholarship is to study some topic deeply, mostly for the sake of just understanding it more. And now say you are studying theater, where most scripts are never produced, and most productions don’t succeed by any commercial or popular measure. Sure, there is a lot to be gained by studying those that DO succeed, but shouldn’t we also study the far more common case of a show that fails?

Kunze again: “The reality is that the media industries abound with failures. Jason Mittell, for example, argues that failure remains “the default norm,” thereby “help[ing] us [to] understand the limits of the system.”12 Since failure represents the rule rather than the exception, it warrants more careful consideration in our growing study of media production. In addition to commercial or critical failures, we need to study projects that never emerged from “development hell,” because attention to such failures may offer us more representative samples of industrial behavior and logics than a focus on successful media productions.” In simpler terms, isn’t is possible that we learn more from our failures than our successes. Like, in life? So maybe it’s worth studying what didn’t work.

Ok, enough of that. I am here today to talk about two failures concerning transforming Cats from a massively popular entertainment monolithic megalith – sure, maybe that’s a word – into a successful film endeavor. And I did say two – you’ve probably heard of the failed attempt at CGI Cats that was released in 2019. But there is an even bigger failure before that.

Against a field of massive failure – theater teaches resilience if only because most who audition don’t get the parts they want, most shows that are written are never performed, and most performances don’t get to Broadway, and most Broadway shows aren’t hits – this first attempt had absolutely everything going for it and should have been a sure thing.

The very, very first attempt at something like this, Kunze reports, is when none of than Walt Disney approached TS Eliot about producing an animated version of Cats. Eliot turned him down, not wanting his mischievous cats to become too tame.

There the idea sat, until on June 26, 1990, Universal pictures announced that Steven Spielberg was pairing with Andrew Lloyd Webber to make an animated version of the musical. Just to recap Spielberg’s body of work, it includes Jaws, Jurassic Park, the Raiders of the Lost Ark franchise, Schindler’s List, The Color Purpple, Saving Private Ryan, Poltergeist, Back to the Future, Close Encounters of the 3rd kind, and ET. And those are just the big ones. Other than that, he hasn’t done very much. And Andrew Lloyd Webber did Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Jesus Christ Superstar, Evita, Cats, and Phantom of the Opera, and more recently the School of Rock. A 2017 London Theater article called him “unstoppable” – in fact, there are many since Cats who have called him critic-proof, and the Wikipedia article places him as the 3rd wealthiest music artist in the world, just behind U2 and just in front of Coldplay. What? Coldplay? Paul McCarthy is #1, so that tracks. At any rate, he’s not just one of the top musical theater people in the world, he’s one of the wealthiest people in the entire entertainment industry and at one point in 2017 had 4 separate shows running on Broadway simultaneously.

If there were two guys who knew how to make it in the entertainment world, who could make a production happen pretty much just by saying so, it was these 2 guys.

So the production gets underway and, as Kunze writes, “Before Cats could be animated, it had to overcome one major difficulty: it’s plot – or lack thereof.” Kunze points out that the show has no spoken dialogue, and here I’ll quote again, “Cats has no discernible plot but rather follows a concert-like format” although he later says “plot was all but irrelevant, Cats was an experience to be cherished.” There is a little more to it than that, at least in theory there’s a Jellicle ball and the Cats are all making their pitch to be the one chosen for the heavyside layer. But you’re on pretty safe ground saying that the plot is a little thin.

But to make it work on the big screen, it was going to need more than that. A guy named Tom Stoppard was hired to work on the screenplay, and he found himself at odds with Trevor Nunn, who had been the director of the musical. The plot had a little more to it; McCavity and Grizabella had a failed fling which is why Grisabella was an outcast, and there’s a kidnapping sequence where Old Deuteronomy is taken hostage and then rescued. It was going so poorly that Stoppard didn’t have a signed contract and refused to do more work until he got one. Early attempts at animation just confused the animators, who were looking for how to characterize the different cats but couldn’t figure out what the story was supposed to be about at it’s core. Spielberg wanted there to be lead characters and picked Mungojerrie and Rumpleteazer, who he thought, and I’m quoting Kunze quoting Spielberg, “embodied the movie’s theme and microcosm.” Kunze thinks that there were cultural differences, where Spielberg communicated in a direct style the Brits found abrasive, and Lloyd-Webber and Nunn spoke in suggestions rather than demands. Spielberg was left wondering what they really thought and Lloyd-Webber wanted to know why Speilberg was being so rude. Moreover, in the words of Kunze, “The failure of Cats partially results from the inability to negotiate the storytelling conventions and industrial cultures of Hollywood and the West End.”

In 1995 Stoppard left the production under what Kunze calls “unclear circumstances.” The production company which had been founded for the film, called Amblimation, folded. In 1998 ALW’s production company, The Really Useful Group, produced a live-action, closed stage version in London, and that resulted in a video that aired on PBS and was released to home video.

Kunze has some take=home points – his main one is that too many cultural and industrial differences doomed the project. In the area of film Spielberg was the big dog and the rest were going to have to produce a script that he’d sign off on, and when that didn’t happen the show was basically over. Kunze also points to the strange notion of authorship, which TS Eliot really would have liked. The theory is that products of art are generally thought to be the product of a single author, or maybe a tight collaboration. But Kunze points out that for a modern Hollywood movie so many people are making so many creative choices that it's almost impossible to say who the primary author is. Kunze thinks that, ironically, by refusing to give Spielberg a script he liked Stoppard was able to preserve his “authorial agency” – that is, stay true to his own artistic vision. Had he made a script that became a successful movie he would have made money, but would have lost his central role as an artist.

So for Kunze, failure studies might conclude that Stoppard’s refusal to compromise on his script, resulting in the failure of the project, was actually a victory for preserving artistic vision.

For Kunze, at least two main insights failure studies contributes is that cultural differences can contribute to failure even when all other factors point to success, a conclusion that sits very neatly with the field of intercultural communication, where I am happy to say that CSU Fullerton houses one of the best programs in the world. The second is that holding the line on artistic vision might result in the failure of the production but also be an artistic success.

We’ll get back to some other reasons the Lloyd-Webber/Spielberg movie failed, but fail it did. No movie was ever made.

Which gets us to failure #2, the CGI Cats version released in 2019, which flopped. This also had a lot going for it – Tom Hooper directed it, and he’d done the 2012 Les Miserable movie which did just fine. It had Judy Dench; if you’ll rewind a couple of episodes she was the original Grisabellz but tore an achilles tendon weeks away from opening. She’s gone on to a bunch of really good stuff, so this was a natural redemption of sorts. It had James Corden, who seems endlessly and affably popular, Idris Elba, who’s just pretty good in most things, and by God, Taylor Swift. It was also produced by Universal Pictures, who were apparently committed to the idea even after the ALW-Spielberg movie flopped. That’s a lot of heft.

It grossed $75m, but had a net loss of $71 million.

I am going to read the Wikipedia page for the entry on the movie under the list of “worst movies of all time.” This will capture the flavor.

Rolling Stone wrote: "There are many, many other problems with Cats, ... but it was hard for anyone to focus on any of them when it just looked so shitty and disturbing."[47] Other critics also panned the performances of some of the actors, with James Corden and Rebel Wilson (who parodied themselves at the 92nd Academy Awards) receiving the most criticism.[736][737] As of June 2024, Cats sits at a 19% on Rotten Tomatoes.[738] The film won six awards out of nine nominations at the 40th Golden Raspberry Awards, including Worst Director for Hooper, Worst Supporting Actress for Wilson, Worst Supporting Actor for Corden, and Worst Picture overall.[739]

Early reviews for Cats were embargoed.[740][741] Manohla Dargis from The New York Times commented that "[a] doctoral thesis could be written about how this misfire sputtered into existence".[742] British newspaper The Daily Telegraph called the film an "all-time disaster" with reviewer Tim Robey giving the film "zero stars" in his review.[743][744][745] Critics from The Washington Post, Rolling Stone and The Detroit News wrote that it was a candidate for the worst film of the 2010s, with The Detroit News reviewer Adam Graham writing: "Cats is the biggest disaster of the decade, and possibly thus far in the millennium. It's Battlefield Earth with whiskers."[746][747][748] Graham later selected Cats as the worst movie he had ever seen.[600] Wade Major of CineGods.com slammed it as "Showgirls with fur", while Battlefield Earth screenwriter J. David Shapiro (who previously won the Razzie for Worst Screenplay) said Cats had usurped his film as the worst ever made.[749][750] Cats was included on Time Out's 40 Best Bad Movies Ever Made list.[84]”

The wiki article also has some quotes from ALW who also didn’t like the movie and, predictably perhaps, blames it on a failure to take enough creative and performance input from those who made the musical launch.

There are a couple of content notes worth mentioning. The movie did add the subplot where McCavity kidnaps Old Deutoronomy. It did get savaged by the critics, but it’s problems stared even earlier than that. Kayleigh Donaldson, writing for Screenrant.com, “After the first trailer dropped during San Diego Comic-Con, social media exploded with jokes, memes, and general questions as to what the hell had just happened.”

Zach DeLoach wrote a review of broadway revival for the Tribune network of news outlets, and in it he proudly proclaims himself a lifelong and unabashed fanboy. In it he says that he proudly owns a copy of the 1998 film – the direct-to-home-video result of the Spielberg-ALW collaboration -- but refers only to the 2019 movie as a “disaster.”

There is one author I found who valiantly defends something in the show of value and it is – Taylor Swift. Aja Romano I’ve introduced before, but they are a 2019 fellow of the National Critics Institute and write in Vox. Now, Romano is fully aware of the overall quality of the movie, reporting that “the new trailer that followed sent us into a grim, slow meltdown.”

To Romano, Taylor Swift is the perfect lyrical partner for Andrew Lloyd Webber. ALW needs good lyrical collaborators, Taylor Swift loves the musical cats, she loves actual cats, and she’s a fangirl who knows how to delivery an emotional core to songs. Cats very clearly resonated with the LGBTQ+ community, and that is Taylor Swift’s sweet spot.

For Grisabella, “With this one song, she goes from being opaque and silent to having depth, complexity, and a backstory that doesn’t involve her being a sex object.” OK, OK. That last bit relies the idea that Grizabella is a prostitute, which Romano takes as read, but as was heavily discussed in our last episode is a misreading of both the original poems and the musical. BUT – for Romano, the story does a lot more to develop the character than anything else in any production does, and they are probably right about that.

It is sung by Victoria to Grisabella, and in the view of Romano it gives a backstory that explains what Memory is all about; Griz was born into nothing, now has beautiful memories of a fulfilling past, and a strong sense that it has all been lost.

Romano is a rare voice who doesn’t like Memory all that much, at least as a plot point. They maintain that it doesn’t sound like it’s being sung by a cat…which is probably true, but maybe not more true of that song than anything else in the show.

Romano lands here: “when Victoria has her epiphany that she’s happy with her friends, and she loves her alley cat life, she shifts from singing enviously to Grizabella about the “beautiful ghosts” of her memories. Instead, she sings, “So I’ll dance with these beautiful ghosts.”

…

OMG YOU GUYS THE GHOSTS ARE THE CATS!

The ghosts at the end of the song are the cats! Victoria’s ghosts are flesh and blood, and also have you ever met a cat, cats are clearly ghosts, with their silent paws and their eerie glow-eyes, and their ability to vanish into thin air. Holy shit, the ghosts are the cats!!

Only Taylor Swift could turn a metaphor about lost memories into a literal description of cats that is also a metaphor for found families and friendship. Don’t argue with me, this is perfect.”

Romano will not be taking questions. She also used a stronger word that “crap.”

I will just say that be all that as it may, it did not land in my household with my daughter, and I think that is just about as definitive a yardstick as there is.

I guess we can give Tim Stoddard one style point for artistic integrity my refusing to produce a script that Spielberg wanted, and we can give Taylor Swift one style point for putting a good song in a bad movie.

Which gets us to the very end. Why did these 2 movies, that should have had everything going for them, and if nothing else be bland successes like, I dunno, Star Wars the Phantom Menace?

I think it comes down to two things. First, as we explored a couple of episodes back, the thing that makes the stage production work is sex and spectacle. Neither of those two were present in the CGI version. The cats do move in ways that are, I guess, kind of suggestive and there is by some accounts open prostitution, some have called Taylor Swift’s Bombualurina a seducress, but there’s little doubt that the CGI treatment made it all less sexy and, if anything, creepy. Anyway, the stage production isn’t really about sex per se, and TS Eliot’s poems sure weren’t – he could barely write about human sex in a way that wasn’t an anxiety-ridden gross out – it’s made sexy by the movements of the actors.

I don’t have a better way of saying this other than in the stage production the Cats seem to have a kind of animal-like, raw sexual energy, and if as an audience member you are able to fully suspend your disbelief and start seeing the characters as cats in humanoid shape moving as felines do, it’s kinda sexy. Watching film-based CGI versions – even of Taylor Swift – definitively do not have that effect. It’s just weird.

And second, the film just doesn’t have the spectacle. The show is frequently referred to as a rock concert. A rock concert doesn’t need a plot, and a rock concert film succeeds if it captures the energy of the live performance. You can’t add a plot to it. They’re all the same – there’s huge audience and backstage anticipation, then the show explodes with wild energy, then there’s an afterglow. The characters don’t develop more than “wow, that Jimi Page can really play the guitar.”

It is really, really hard to do that with a musical, and even the best film treatments of good shows are a faithful but less powerful documentation of the performance. Cats is a variety show – what is the best movie adaptation of a variety show that you’ve ever seen?

So for a movie to work, whether you are Toby Hooper, Steven Spielberg, or Andrew Lloyd Webber, you need a plot. Like, a real plot where characters make choices with consequences, action develops, and something is changed. That’s a lot more than having Taylor Swift add a better backstory to the key song, or slapping a kidnapping sequence on a character who is otherwise just one of the many characters.

A rock show doesn’t need a plot, a musical can grab that rock concert energy with it’s live performance, but a movie only gets its energy from a plot.

I will say that during covid I watched as many Fast and Furious movies as I could – I thought there were 9 but the internet insists there are 14 -- with the sound off as a thought experiment to see how well I could follow the plot withing knowing any of the dialogue. The answer I came up with was “almost all of it” which is not surprising because, with apologies to Vin Diesel, these are action flicks that don’t have a lot to them once you take the car scenes away. I also discovered that an amazing amount of all of the movies was just stock footage of someone’s hand shifting a gear or their foot stomping on the gas pedal.

But here’s the thing: If you took all those action sequences, even the best of them, and randomly ordered them into a 90-minute show, it would be awful. Even those with no deep connection to narrative plot development but love to see fast cars and under-dressed women wouldn’t pay to watch it. A movie can’t just be action sequences. You need a plot. Characters need motivation. You can’t, as TS Eliot successfully did, just introduce 9 characters and leave it at that. And remember, as discussed in past episodes, for ALW to get the rights to Cats he had to promise to stay true the original Eliot poems, and it was TS Eliot who, very posthumously, won the 1982 Tony for best book for the production of Cats.

To make Cats work as a movie you need to build a plot from the ground up, and you probably can’t do that and be true to the musical which had to be true to the original poems. Maybe the failure was inevitable, and there was nothing that even Steven Spielberg could do, that could make it work.

So what have we learned about theater and life after these 8 missives into Cats? The main thing, I think, is that there is power to the visceral experience of live theater. It might not be the cool new AI thing, it might not be the most lucrative thing, it might not be the next thing, but it is a deep and powerful thing, and it can’t be replicated in other media. Live music will always have something that recorded music does not, and live theater will always have something that video doesn’t.

And that means something in our AI-driven age, where it’s possible to communicate with a personal chatbot, have the AI generate and read an entire podcast, write a movie script, play virtual reality video games. Given all that, it’s nice to know that what makes a good party is still people hanging around and talking to each other, face to face, what makes a good concert is still a great live performance, and what makes good theater is still a great live performance.

In 2024-25, 14.7 million people saw a broadway show, a complete recovery since the pre-pandemic high of 14.77 million in 2018-19. The audience grew in size every year between 2002 and 2018, its increased every year since 2021-22. The average number of people seeing a show per running week has increased every decade since 1980 and every year since the pandemic. In 2024-25.563 people watched a broadway show for each playing week, the highest in any recorded year since 1980. The audience for live theater is growing, not shrinking. All this comes from the broadwayleague.com research statistics site.

The second lesson is that there are lots of parts of theater, including lighting, stages, directing, performing, playing music, composing. When we covered the POA, what really made the show work was Lon Chaney Sr., his performance as the Phantom, and even more than that his gravitas on the set to create the final product. In Cats, I think the real hero is director Trevor Nunn, and maybe a nose in front of choreographer Gillian Lynne. In a show without a plot, that succeeds because it creates a totally immersive world where anthropomorphized cats is kind of the only real point, Nunn and Lynne were able to give the performers a way of moving and interacting to develop relationships and give a sense of actuality to a whimsical fantasy world. John Napier’s sets did something similar. So I think the second main lesson from Cats is that it takes all the different roles to make a musical work, and the importance of each component will vary on the production. For Cats, it was definitely the sets, movement and direction that made the production work.

One final note. Earlier I said Taylor Swift should be cheering for the San Diego Chargers. Yes, the San Diego Chargers. The ownership group can sell out and take them wherever they think they can get the most money, but since I was 10 years old, and knew nothing about football other than that lightning bolt on the helmet was the coolest design in the NFL, they’ve been the San Diego Chargers to me. And in my heart they always will be. If Cats can make it seem real that there’s an entire Cat society singing and dancing, I can suspend my disbelief long enough to believe that Justin Herbert still plays in San Diego.

That will do it for this rendition of our show. Up next we’ll have the first audience-inspired attempt to interpret a great production. To be honest, I’m not a huge fan of podcast episodes that deviate from form for “ask me anything” segments or guest converstions…there’s nothing wrong with them, it’s just not my cup of tea. But I can promise you that our departure will be nothing like that; you will hear about five fascinating lives and how they all intersect around one musical production. We know how he can kill you, but we’ll find out how the Phantom of the Opera can save your life in the next episode of THM.