TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/caps/82/82cats

Text File | 1992-10-05 | 8.1 KB | 161 lines

                                                                                THEATER

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