There are musicals, and then there’s Cats. Andew Lloyd Webber’s show is often the one held up as a bewildering example by non-believers. People dress as cats in leg-warmers and sing children’s poems, and it’s a hit? The baffling body horror of the 2019 film didn’t do much for the show’s image, either. It was the 80s, loyalists say, it was a different time!
But Cats is back, and theatre producers would prefer we just buy a ticket and live in the past. Cats is perhaps best now as a fond memory, where you can forgive its wilted structure, stop-start pacing and tired stereotyping (don’t even try to count how often a female cat is there to sigh and swoon over a male one). There, you can enjoy how the score is drenched in 80s synth and peppered with pastiche, with hints of jazz, music hall, rock and a little opera (one of Lloyd Webber’s great loves); it is catchy as all get-out. Memory, the plaintive cri de coeur by fading glamour cat Grizabella, was a genuine chart hit, lingering in jewellery boxes and hold music. And Gillian Lynne’s original choreography, oddly sexy and determinedly feline, lives on in plenty of giggly shared stories between friends of sexual awakenings and Rum Tum Tugger.
