In case you’ve made your way to this blog without knowing me, I’m a big musical theatre fan. Very big. I probably see 30 or 40 plays a year, most of them musicals, I listen to cast recordings, I take frequent trips to New York to see Broadway shows. But there are some shows I simply cannot stand. Two and a half of the most miserable hours of my entire life came a few summers ago when I was forced to sit through a youth theatre production of Cats. Now, it wasn’t the production itself that was the problem. The performers (well, the leads, at least) were all very talented, the set and lights were well done, the choreography was well executed. But how the hell this show ran for eighty million years on Broadway, I have no earthly idea.
The show, for those of you who have been lucky enough to avoid it, has only the barest thread of a plot (something about a Jellicle Ball and a magic tire that rises to heaven out of a junkyard or something…yes, it’s really that messed up). It is essentially just a string of T.S. Eliot poems set to an execrable Andrew Lloyd Webber score.*
Now, there’s nothing wrong with a revue–I can certainly appreciate a good one. But a good revue has variety. The songs differ from each other in style, tone, and subject matter. In Cats, all the songs are the same damn thing: one cat after another describes himself or herself. You cannot make a musical out of thirty-two billion descriptive songs, especially if only one of them has any semblance of a melody, and that only because it’s almost a Puccini rip-off. A good score is a mix of exposition, narrative, examination of characters’ feelings and thoughts, love songs, uptempo numbers, and so forth. Sure, Lloyd Webber traipses through a few different kinds of pastiche in his score, but he’s hemmed in by the lyrics–there is no variety in those. And while the lack of variety might not be a problem if you’re reading a book of poetry, it’s a huge problem if two or three hours of your life is spent in a dark theatre being bored by the monotony of it all.
Cats is really the worst of the 1980s Eurotrash invasion of Broadway. Some of those shows I can stand, but even the best of the lot are overwrought, charmless, formulaic, and sung-through. Sung-through! What’s wrong with writing a scene or two to break things up? Was Cameron Mackintosh to cheap to hire bookwriters? Some sung-through shows are great, but usually only because the scores are so good they make up for the book’s shortcomings. Jesus Christ Superstar comes to mind: the score is fantastic, but on stage it tends to fall a little bit flat. There are some great numbers for the entire chorus, and some great solos as well, but the song-scenes for two or three or four people often fail. Tommy works better, I think, but where it succeeds it does so mostly on the strength of its score–people forgive the fact that the plot is, to put it mildly, ridiculously implausible.
Cats, however, does not have a score to make up for its almost non-existent plot. And if the book sucks, and the lyrics suck, and the music sucks, what are you left with? A show that sucks. Apparently people really like cats, or dancers acting like cats, or cat costumes, or something like that. Since I don’t like those things, this musical is pretty much the worst thing ever written. Don’t go see it. Ever. If anyone ever tells you it’s any good, don’t believe them, and don’t listen to anything they ever say about musical theatre ever again.
P.S. I should also mention that Cats probably has the most mentally disturbed set of fanatical followers of any musical–it’s funny how the worse a musical is, the crazier and more frenzied its cadre of supporters. If you don’t believe me, read this. These people are INSANE, and should probably find something better with their lives than to obsess over the technical specifications of the sets of the various touring productions of Cats.
*After Jesus Christ Superstar and Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, it was pretty much all downhill for Lloyd Webber, aside from three good songs in Phantom of the Opera. Pretty much everything else is dreck that only middle-aged women like.
I saw Cats on Broadway as a kid and had all the same sentiments: “What the hell is this?” Then a couple years ago my local community theater took it on as their summer teen production. The kids danced their butts off, and I liked what I saw. The show can never be a proper play, but it can be made exceedingly enjoyable. I just don’t think professionals could ever pull it off, because the work comes too easily to them, and they look bored doing it, boring the audience in turn. I hope someday you can have an experience like mine…
Now, Robert, I certainly don’t begrudge anyone finding a few hours of entertainment in something I find mind-numbing, but there will probably never be a production of Cats that makes me like it. I’ll still hate the music, I’ll still hate the plot. You’re certainly right that sometimes a youth or community theatre production can bring something that a professional production lacks (though most of the time, it’s the other way around), but while the kids danced their butts off and many of them seemed to be having a whale of a time, I didn’t enjoy it one bit.
And as I instructed my readers, I can now no longer listen to anything you say about musical theatre ever again. Sorry.
Whoah…whoah…whoah.
I completely disagree with your assertion that after JCS and Joseph it was all downhill, as I think that Evita is the best show he’s ever written. Then it went downhill, and he did have a brief sojourn with quality, when he wrote Sunset Blvd.