TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/caps/82/82cats

Text File | 1990-10-10 | 8KB | 152 lines

Cats
O That Anthropomorphical Rag


CATS
Music by Andrew Lloyd Webber
Based on Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats by T. S. Eliot

The ecology of Broadway demands mega-hits, the kind of supercharged
shows that most ordinary playgoers have to wait months to see.  Cats
qualifies.  To a great extent, this musical is a phenomenon, a
process not substantially different from unveiling a new car model or
marketing a more dazzling toothpaste.

The tom-toms of publicity began thrumming from the moment Cats
registered as a smash hit in May 1981 in London, where it is still
selling out.  By last week's opening night in New York, anticipatory
salivation had generated a cash flow of $6 million, an advance sale
never before recorded in Broadway history.

In one sense, Cats needs every penny of that, which includes the sums
forthcoming from 330 theater parties that have signed up for special
blocks of seats.  The show cost a princely $4 million or so to mount.
It cost $2.5 million to strip-mine the interior and stage of the
Winter Garden Theater and construct a cats' Valhalla of a nocturnal
dump.  Cost of restoration when Cats eventually vacates:  an
additional $1.5 million.

That magic mountain of money is not conjured up by rubbing Aladdin's
lamp.  It comes from a gambling alliance that bases its calculations
on a measure of snob appeal and tested blue-chip talents.  After all,
no other musical can boast a T.S. Eliot as its lyricist, so to speak.
Even if Eliot was playfully doodling for his godchildren and friends
in his 1939 Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats, he remains a god in
the pantheon of 20th century poets.  Cats Director Trevor Nunn and
Designer-Costumer John Napier, of the Royal Shakespeare Company, took
Broadway's breath away last season with their monumental Nicholas
Nickleby.  And at age 34, Composer Andrew Lloyd Webber has achieved
the unprecedented feat of having three musicals playing
simultaneously in London (Evita, Cats and Song & Dance) and New York
(Evita, Cats and Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat).

In a way, show-biz royalty was saluting show-biz royalty on opening
night as a cavalcade of limos rolled up to the marquee of the winter
Garden, disgorging the likes of Bianca Jagger, Mikhail Baryshnikov,
Barbara Walters, Mary Tyler Moore, Placido Domingo and Joanne
Woodward.  Among them was the graciously articulate poet's widow.
Valerie Eliot,the artistic patroness of the production.  After the
performance, the whole glittering assemblage adjourned to the
Waldorf-Astoria for a celebratory supper.  Buoyed on the crest of the
show's commercial prospects, the festivities were not dampened by a
wave of initial reviews that were more mixed than the drinks.
Scarcely a headline writer in New York, it seems, could resist
pointing out that Cats was less than purr-fect.

Cats is a musical that sweeps you off your feet but not into its
arms.  It is a triumph of motion over emotion, of EQ (energy
quotient) over IQ.  One could say at the end of the evening what
someone says during the show:  "We had the experience but missed the
meaning."  In Cats, the spectacle is the substance.

It is a spectacle on a grand and staggering scale.  Napier's set is a
kind of automobile graveyard, but it contains far more than discarded
tires, battered wheels and disemboweled body parts.  He has
constructed a collage of the detritus of contemporary civilization:
smeared paper plates, unstrung tennis racquets, old Red Seal Victor
records.  Drambuie bottles and boxes of Tender Vittles.  Every object
is outsize, as a cat might see it.

Here the Jellicle cats, a flighty, exuberant lot full of larky
midnight madness, have assembled for their annual ball.
Choreographer Gillian Lynne has superbly schooled her topflight
troupe in clawing, stretching, rubbing and comic feline posturing,
yet no single dancer convincingly turns into a cat. Lynne is a fluent
choreographer, but uninventive.  She relies on three main modes--
jazz, ballet and acrobatics--which in reiteration become
anticlimactic.  When a huge boot clunks down in the middle of the
chorus in the first big dance number, the touch is deliciously clever
but later seems like a prophetic critique.

The Jellicles are assembled for a clan ritual.  Annually, the revered
elder, Old Deuteronomy, played like a benign biblical patriarch by
Ken Page, chooses a deserving Jellicle to ascent "up up up past the
Russell Hotel, up up up to the Heaviside Layer," and be born again.
While this serves as a passing and somewhat pretentious reminder of
Eliot's New England transcendentalism, it does not provide the
binding plot line that Nunn obviously hoped it would.  As it is, the
various Eliot cats come on doing star turns as if they were gifted
gypsies eager to escape the anonymity of the chorus.

Lloyd Webber's task was to find a musical vocabulary that parallels
Eliot's individual profiles of the cats.  Here, Lloyd Webber's bent
for the derivative is something of a help.  He moves easily from rock
to swing to ballad to full-throated hymnal invocation.  That he
overpowers as much as he underscores may be due to the Winter
Garden's rabid amplification.

Eliot had his own jazzy barroom tempos.  All is not gloom in The
Waste Land, where the line "O O O O  that Shakespeherian Rag" occurs.
As the droll parade of people-cats pads by in Cats, it forms an
anthropomorphical rag.  Terrence V. Mann makes Rum Tum Tugger a
prototype for an arrogant rock star.  As Skimbleshanks, Reed Jones is
endearingly batty about trains.  An impromptu choo-choo is assembled
on the spot out of large wheels, a lampshade and a teapot, which
delights him and the audience equally.

An even more endearing character is Gus, the Theater Cat, Stephen
Hanan makes him a dipsy old charmer who deplores the lack of
discipline in modern actors:

Now, these kittens, they do not get trained
As we did in the days when Victoria reigned.
They never get drilled in a regular troupe.
And they think they are smart, just to jump through a hoop
...Well the theater's certainly not what it was...

In another poem, Growltiger's Last Stand, Gus (Hanan again) gets to
play one of his earlier roles.  The entire poop deck of a pirate ship
unhinges from the stage ceiling with sampans sailing behind it on a
make-believe sea.  While Growltiger dallies with his lady love, the
saucy Griddlebone (Bonnie Simmons), in a hilarious parody of Italian
opera, a company of Siamese cats in full Asiatic regalia board his
craft and force him to walk the plank.

Macavity, so memorable in Eliot's verse, is a disappointment, not
because of Kenneth Ard, who plays him, but because a character who is
sought here, there and everywhere is bound to be nearly invisible
onstage.  It is left for Wendy Edmead and Donna King to describe the
Napoleon of crime in a sultry dialogue.  This points up a problem
that plagues the show.  The poems are written in the third person, so
that the dance action more or less mimes the lines that are being
recited.  As a twin to Ariel, who can spin on a dime and cover the
stage like a cougar, Timothy Scott's Mr. Mistoffolees is the least
troubled by this problem.

Throughout the evening a haggard, ragged figure called Grizabella,
the Glamour Cat (Betty Buckley) wanders across the stage.  The body-
stockinged beauties shun and mock her.  She is a fallen feline who
has roamed the lowest alleys.  With pungent pathos, Buckley belts out
her elegiac ballad of tristesse, Memory, which acts as the theme music
of Cats and is already a hit recording in Barbra Streisand's
unfalteringly knowledgeable delivery.

Naturally, Old Deuteronomy picks Grizabella for the ascension.  They
mount a huge platformed truck tire that rises like a UFO fantasy,
belching white seraphic smoke from underside jet valves, and are met
by a silvery ladder that slithers down from the sky, and Grizabella
climbs upward for the celestial connection.  The scene brings down
the house and probably deserves to.  But that moment of redemption
belongs to Grizabella, not the show.

--By T. E. Kalem