O That Anthropomorphical Rag

By T.E. Kalem

CATS

Music by Andrew Lloyd Webber

Based on Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats by T.S. Eliot

The ecology of Broadway demands megahits, 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-Cos-tumer 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 purrfect.

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 ascend "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 Turn 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

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