Going to London to See the Queen?

By RICHARD CORLISS

Catch a nine-lively musical called Cats

"Well, the theater's certainly not what it was," growls old Gus the backstage cat in Cats, the nine-liveliest entertainment in London or anywhere. If they cannot get in to see this new Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, Americans visiting London this summer to sample the royal wedding hoopla and the glories of the English-speaking stage may be tempted to agree with gloomy Gus. Scanning the local entertainment guide, one finds seven Broadway musicals, from Oklahoma! to The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, as well as several plays (Amadeus. Translations, The Elephant Man) that are old news back home, and of course, the usual West End sex farces. Of the two major repertory theaters, the National is coasting with revivals of Shaw, Moliere and Pinter, and the Royal Shakespeare is just concluding the third and "final" run of its 8 1/2-hour triumph, Nicholas Nickleby.

Itinerant theatergoers are advised to be patient. If the 1981 London season is not vintage, it has pleasures enough to satisfy a variety of tastes. Tom Conti's turn in the Neil Simon hit They 're Playing Our Song may qualify as musical slummery for the gifted star of stage (Whose Life Is It Anyway?) and the small screen (The Norman Conquests), but it is a joy to watch him high step his way through the role, all the while speaking in a New York City accent he must have picked up from watching Laurence Olivier's cantor in The Jazz Singer. In Duet for One, a drama about a violinist stricken with multiple sclerosis, Frances de la Tour guides her character from genteel resignation through eloquent anger to the brink of suicide. Penelope Keith, also in The Norman Conquests, is reason enough to see a domestic comedy called Moving; she navigates the play's low-level turbulence like a serene Lady Blimp.

Even a failure--the West End's most ambitious failure--contrives to entertain while it exasperates. In Goose Pimples, Mike Leigh's incendiary comedy, we are introduced to four members of England's upper working class, who have money but no style, or, rather, their idea of style is a slimy amalgam of conspicuous consumption and xenophobic conservatism. The early view is appallingly funny as a slice of high-gloss low life, but by the end of the evening, a few laughs at the expense of a Saudi Arabian businessman have turned into a Virginia Woolf-style Walpurgisnacht--an endless orgy of humiliation. Goose Pimples is strong, rancid meat for London theatergoers. Considering its repulsive characters, the play might have been called Creeps.

Disintegration in the celebrity spotlight is the theme of a modest, moving piece, Hank Williams: The Show He Never Gave. Williams, the country singer responsible for such hits as Your Cheatin' Heart, Jambalaya, Half as Much and Hey, Good Lookin', was a prototype of the doomed, dark star: drink and drugs sent him on an inevitable trajectory to death at 29 in 1953. Maynard Collins' play is conceived as Williams' last concert, in which he performs 22 of his songs while telling his version of an entertainer's life and self-inflicted hard times. As the performance progresses, and Hank periodically darts offstage for a "glass of milk," he becomes more surly, maudlin, fatalistic. His life is crumbling; he knows it and, trouper to the end, makes a slam-bang show out of it. So does Carl Chase, who plays Williams. He does not look like Hank; he does not sound much like him. But through craft or luck or force of will, he becomes Williams. The competition is tough, but Chase is giving what may be the finest, fiercest performance on the London stage this summer.

Chase, Conti and Keith are one-man bands strutting their magnetic stuff; but it is in ensemble work that the London stage shines. In directing Nicholas Nickleby, Trevor Nunn juggled 43 actors in 138 speaking parts to create the propulsive bustle of Dickens' London. Now he and Choreographer Gillian Lynne have brought an informed anarchy to Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical settings for T.S. Eliot's exercise in whimsy and social satire, Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats. When it appeared in 1939, Practical Cats comprised 14 poems; Valerie Eliot, the poet's widow, discovered others, which have been incorporated into the production, and notes that suggested a structure and a setting. John Napier, the show's designer, has transformed the New London Theater into a giant playground for cats, cluttered with trash cans, an auto carcass, bicycles and tires.

He is the only one in the theater who would even bother to try. Here is a show that puts meaning back into the phrase "all singing, all dancing." The show's 30 members are almost always in view and forever on the move: prowling through the junk, licking themselves and leapfrogging one another, prancing down the aisles. Compared with these athletic toms and tabbies, the companies of most Broadway musicals seem positively inert.

Eliot cast most of his Cats verses in the ricky-ticky septameter that served lyricists from Gilbert to Kipling to Lear. The challenge to Lloyd Webber was to compose a score that did not sound like outtakes from The Pirates of Penzance. Because of this metrical restriction, Lloyd Webber could not have matched the profligate melodiousness of his score for Evita if he had tried. He has not; he works mostly in the loud Europop vein, hurling his listeners up against the caterwaul.

But he has penned a splendid processional, all pomp and circumference, for Brian Blessed as Old Deuteronomy, the group's sage and patriarch. For Elaine Paige, who was the original West End Evita and here plays a tattered cat of the evening named Grizabella, Lloyd Webber wrote the show's first hit single, a melancholy bolero called Memory.

But Cats has more in mind than presenting a kitty Chorus Line. It means to investigate "the mystical divinity of unashamed felinity." In the second act, Cats turns ruminative, elegiac and theatrically spectacular. Old Gus (Steven Tate), who had wheezed his disapproval of life onto the current stage, suddenly metamorphoses into his dream role of Growltiger, a samurai pirate cat--and the playground bursts into a kaleidoscope of colorful costumes and Kabuki gymnastics. Rum Tum Tugger, the cool cat of rock (Paul Nicholas), tells the story of magical Mr. Mistoffelees (Royal Ballet Dancer Wayne Sleep), who displays twisting, spiraling, pirouetting feats of legerdepied. Finally, Old Deuteronomy bestows a rare gift on the down-and-out Grizabella: a tenth life. The stage becomes misty, an otherworldly light suffuses the theater, a giant tire rises eerily above the pussylanimous crowd, and Grizabella ascends, reborn and apotheosized, "up up up past the Russell Hotel, up up up to the Heaviside layer." This is heaven for cats and a stunning, vertiginous climax for the show.

Since its May opening, Cats has been London's hottest ticket. The show's composer and director plan to visit New York City soon to entertain bids for a Broadway version of Cats from some of the same angels who thought the project too risky to invest in when it needed funds a few months ago. So the Prince of Wales and his bride-to-be are not the only British couple who have reason to smile these days. Catch Lloyd Webber or Nunn off-guard, and you are likely to see a mile-wide Cheshire-cat grin. --By Richard Corliss

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