Cats
Opening Night: July 31, 2016
Closing: December 30, 2017
Theater: Neil Simon Theatre
Andrew Lloyd Webber’s long-running classic returns to Broadway!
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July 31, 2016
If I soon end up in a psychiatric ward, could someone please send the bill to Andrew Lloyd Webber? It has been some four days since I saw the revival of Mr. Lloyd Webber’s nigh-legendary musical “Cats,” which opened on Sunday at the Neil Simon Theater. And it’s been four days of persistent earworms. The show’s electric opening song has been hounding me — no feline metaphor applying — when I wake in the morning, when I sit down at my computer, when I pick up a volume of Trollope, when I go to bed. Because jellicles can and jellicles do Jellicles do and jellicles can Jellicles can and jellicles do Jellicles do and jellicles can
READ THE REVIEWJuly 31, 2016
“Cats.” The “Hamilton” of its day? When Andrew Lloyd Webber’s love-it-or-hate-it musical transferred to Broadway in 1982, tickets were tough to get. Rather than wait a year for seats, my grandma paid $10 each so our family could stand in the back of the Winter Garden and hear Betty Buckley belt out “Memory.”
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July 31, 2016
Cats was always divinely snarkable, beginning with its provenance. How could anyone look at the morally knotty and verbally profound oeuvre of T.S. Eliot and say, yes, let’s make a musical out of Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, that collection of dorky ailurophile doggerel he extemporized for his godchildren? Yet that’s what Andrew Lloyd Webber, a fan of the material since youth, chose to do, setting the faintly embarrassing adventures of Rum Tum Tugger, Mungojerrie, Jennyanydots and the rest to melody and, with the director Trevor Nunn, arranging the results to suggest a story.
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July 31, 2016
My gateway show was not Cats—nor was it Les Miz or Phantom. I grew up, like any self-respecting theater snob, disdaining such tourist trash from afar. Lacking youthful nostalgia for Andrew Lloyd Webber’s synth-heavy score and the trademark image of actors writhing about in leg warmers, hissing through face paint, I’ve now seen the real thing live and up close. It blew my mind a little—like experiencing someone else’s déjà vu. Mainly I’m shocked that this ran from Reagan to Clinton. Most 12-year-olds have terrible taste; you can’t blame them, they’re only kids. They probably didn’t say to themselves: This show is amazing, but is it any good?
READ THE REVIEWJuly 31, 2016
For the entirety of the two hours I sat watching Cats, which is back on Broadway after a 16-year absence, I had a version of the Muppets’ Statler and Waldorf routine going on in my mind. This revival is TERRIBLE, I thought; hideously dated, boring, empty, meaningless, unfunny, kitsch without meaning to be, complacent, simultaneously bloated and undernourished. Bringing it back was a terrible idea and Trevor Nunn, who directed the original and has been re-engaged for the revival, should be thoroughly ashamed of himself.
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