Imagine: a musical based on a bunch of
poems by T.S. Eliot, about moggies… and they think that will fill the
West End’s biggest theatre for 12 weeks! It will, of course, although
it remains as eccentric an idea as it was when it premièred in 1981
(and nevertheless ran for 21 years). But this revisitation will do the
business, simply because it is
Cats.
And what is
Cats? You know
already. I don’t think I have ever seen a show that is so completely
and utterly just what you expect.
You know the Lycra-and-legwarmers look of the cast (much less funky and
transgressive now). You know the junkyard setting and the strategy of
having the purrformers roam through the audience, although that aspect
is greatly attenuated in a traditionally-structured theatre such as the
Palladium. You certainly feel as if you know Andrew Lloyd Webber’s
score, which tends towards the light-pop end of his repertoire rather
than the light-classical (although the latter vein yields the show’s
best-known number “Memory”, sung movingly by former Pussycat Doll and
X Factor judge Nicole Scherzinger
as Grizabella). You know the arrangements, which are unregenerate
1980s, right down to the artificial-brass synthesizer sounds used. And
you know the English whimsy of (American-born) Eliot’s verse, a series
of portraits of idiosyncratic felines, except when an occasional
extract from
Four Quartets is
imported to add a touch of metaphysics. All of which Trevor Nunn’s
production, on John Napier’s set design, with Gillian Lynne’s more or
less uninterrupted choreography, delivers now as it did a third of a
century ago.
What it delivers is very much on its own terms. It strikes me that
Cats is tellingly like cats
themselves: you rather need to be a cat person in the first place,
prepared to accept their scratches, be fascinated by them doing just
what they choose to do and accept that the entire relationship is
determined by whim, and not by yours at that. In only one respect is
Cats like dogs: you can be fairly
sure that despite the claims of limited run, they’ll return in due
course and settle down for another long stay.
Written for the Financial
Times.