The facts please: Cats premiered in May 1981 in London
and is one of the most successful and widely produced musicals in history. The
catalogue of places where it has not been produced is shorter than the names of
places where it has been.
Why do you want to see it? Here is a short catalogue of reasons.
You love cats and you want to see them dressed like human beings
(or is it the other way around?) sing and dance up a storm. You are a misanthrope (no that does not make
you a fan of Moliere) and you don’t like people on the stage. After The Lion King there are not many choices
where this if offered and you go to Cats repeatedly.
The
North American Tour Company of CATS.
Photo
by Matthew Murphy 2019
You don’t like cats and go to see Cats to confirm your
animosity to the creatures while secretly enjoying a rousing, rip-roaring
musical done by humans pretending to be cats.
You want to warm up to T. S Eliot and assuage your guilt and
ignorance about poetry. You were traumatized in high school when you tried to figure out how the evening is spread out against
the sky like a patient etherized upon a table in
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. You
suffered psychological damage leading to post-poetic metaphors syndrome when
you found out that The Waste Land is
not a John Wayne movie.
Well, with Eliot’s collection of
feline poetry, Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, you found something
readable and very useful to Andrew Lloyd Webber for his lyrics for Cats.
Served with music and memorable melodies, the musical lets you kill two cats
(sorry, make that metaphors) in one evening. You can sound haughtier than thou in
your literary knowledge and musical discrimination.
You find dialogue interferes with the flow of a musical and Lloyd Webber
has obliged you with a written-through approach and provided an extraordinarily
rich musical score.
You are a dance aficionado and the music with Gillian Lynne’s
masterpiece of choreography (with Andy Blankenbueler) is a choreographic,
scenic and athletic marvel. She combines ballet, tap dancing, jazz and modern
dances in a tour de force of a performing art.
You want a display of splendour, exoticism, glitz, extraordinary
energy and sheer magic. Cats presents a kaleidoscope of these
with sheer energy.
Keri René
Fuller as Grizabella. Photo by Matthew Murphy 2019
Your chances, realistically speaking, of convincing St. Peter to
open wide the Pearly Gates for you are pretty slim. You are curious about how a
tribe of cats chooses one of their group to ascend the upper Heaviside Layer
and then return as a new feline. Maybe you can pick up some pointers from the
plot of Cats to guide you to a place that has air conditioning, at
least.
You don’t like musicals that showcase only “stars” but admire
bravura ensemble performances. Cats has a bit of both and a few names from the
large cast may be à propos. Keri Rene
Fuller as Grizabella, the lady that sings the unforgettable “Memory,” Brandon
Michael Lase as the wonderfully-named Old Deuteronomy, Emma Hearn as
Bombalurina, McGee Maddox as Rum Tum Tugger and PJ Digaetano as Mistoffelees. “Memory”
is the only song sung solo and the rest involve more than one singer or the company.
A pleasure to listen to.
Among the crowded list of credits
you should notice that Trevor Nunn, one
of the top directors of England, directed the original production and it has
been kept alive since 1981.
__________
Cats by Andrew Lloyd Webber
(music), T. S. Eliot (lyrics) and Gillian Lynne (choreography) continues until January
5, 2020 at the Princess
of Wales Theatre, 300 King St. West, Toronto , Ontario . www.mirvish.com/ 416 872 1212 or 1 800 461 3333
James Karas is the Senior Editor - Culture of The Greek Press
No comments:
Post a Comment