Got tickets to Cats in Boston years ago before I knew anything about it other than it was supposed to be “magical” and “amazing” and “fantastic” and “now and forever.”
Sitting through that godawful disaster was an endurance test. I can’t imagine how anyone could last through more than five minutes of Cats, never mind actually enjoying it!
I love animals like nobody else…but I was praying a car to take out Rum-Tug-Tugger the minute he showed up on stage!
Quoth spoike:
My feeling on Webber in general is that he wrote two or three really good musicals, but he wrote them a few dozen times. After a while, most Webber just starts sounding the same.
There was a dream sequence on Candice Bergen’s show Murphy Brown once in which Murphy, a huge Mo-Town fan and Woodstock vet, was in Hell. She wasn’t sure where she until the loudspeaker announced the overture was about to start for their official 1 billionth production of CATS.
The closest I’ve ever come to actually seeing Cats was a clip of one song for a college course I took about live theater. (“Theater arts” I think it was called - sort of a general overview type of class.) No joke: watching it made me feel sick to my stomach. The thing produced in me a literal existential dread, like I was watching something that violated the natural laws of the universe. It was an absolutely horrible experience, and you could not convince me to sit through a full performance of that abomination for love nor money.
We started watching it in my Introduction to Theater class once. We never got all the way through it, and I’m glad, since all I did during the viewing was cringe for the actors. It was so cheesy! The cat costumes weren’t even pretty or cute either, which might have made watching it a little less painful. Just an awful mess. I don’t see the appeal.
Pretty much the same story here, when they came through San Francisco a few years ago. What a plotless piece of shit.
I never thought there was anything weird about that lyric. I just thought it was like pulling a rabbit out of one’s hat. You know, cause he’s a magician?
I saw **CATS **on Broadway when I was about 10 and I **loved **it. It was the best thing I had ever seen, I was completely captivated by it, and I played the album over and over until I knew all the lyrics by heart. When I next saw some clips from it, it was about 15 years later, and I didn’t think it was anywhere near as good as it was when I was 10, but I don’t hate it. It still has memorable songs & cool dancing. I don’t get all the hate for ALW. Forbidden Broadway got it correct when they said most people hate Lloyd Webber “because it saves time.”
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Funny, I always thought it was 'gelical, for angelical.
ETA: loved it. Saw it in London, got to sit by the rotating stage bit.
If 13 is the golden age of Science Fiction, 10 is the golden age of “Cats.” It’s really a children’s play - a very, very expensive children’s play.
I saw it for my 10th birthday, in the first couple years of its run at the Winter Garden in New York, and thought it was the cats pyjamas, so to speak. My memories of it are magical.
But when you think about a play in terms of Aristotle’s 6 elements (theme, plot, character, dialogue, music/rhythm, and spectacle) “Cats” is made up almost entirely of music and spectacle and almost nothing of the other elements. It is so dependent on its spectacle elements that I can only imagine a small or travelling production of it would be truly boring and blah.
There’s very cheesy Disco version of Memory that I quite like.
Sounded like “genital” to me, which I had a whole host of other issues with.
I saw it once when I was ten or so. I remember loving all the tight costumes on the female dancers. Other than that, I was unimpressed.
Ooh, reminds me. Saw it at the Fox, in St. Louis, 2nd row left stage (left looking out from the stage). Anyway, they hadn’t seated anyone in the 1st row for reasons that later became clear, so all my friends were congratulating me on scoring the great seats at regular floor price.
Turns out there was no one in the 1st row because at certain points – fr’ex, during the dogs vs. cats scene – some of the Cats come off stage to go do Cat Things in the audience. There was a pair playing hide-and-cat-slap between the 1st & 2nd rows. Right next to my college roommate, who was last sitting next to empty seats in our row.
He was absolutely, stone petrified. I’m not sure if he was afraid of the weirdoes in spandex cat costumes, or mortified by the entire thing, but he would not look or move. Once they went back onstage, he made his girlfriend switch seats with him… in case they came back. (They did.)
Oh, I remember that bit. The actor that had my favorite costume came over to our seats in the front row, and my friend petted her, and I felt bad afterwads that I was too shy to do the same.
Oh, my mom likes Cats and ALW, too. She’s never heard of the Cats=cheesy either. Maybe it’s a Planet Malleus thing, like people calling * an asterick. (BTW, I quizzed my shrink, who comes from Boston- she says it asterick, too).
It is one of my favorite musicals.Even named my cat(who is male,btw) Mr. Mistoffeles.
I like a lot of the music, and I’d listened to it as an album for years. It wasn’t until last year that I finally saw the show live, and I gotta say, I’m not a Cats person. I ended up spending most of my night watching Victoria because most of the other characters just weren’t interesting. Not sure if it was because Victoria spends most of her time downstage right(an eye-catching position), or because she was in pure white(an eye-catching color), or because of the talent of the performer(I enjoy ballet and good dancing), or something else, but I tuned out most of the rest of the show and just listened to it while I watched her. The disjointed storyline and incomprehensible motives of the characters made it very hard for me to get into. I realize this is intentional, as cat behavior is often incomprehensible, but it took me right out of the show. I’d much rather just enjoy the music than watch the musical. My wife felt similar, but our daughter(a total cat person) loved it and wants to move to New York so she can see it over and over.
I don’t think I understood how the show was put together from the cast album. I imagined it had a story and some sort of character development, instead of just being vignettes. Now that I have seen it, and subsequently researched the show a bit, I see why it is the way it is, and can appreciate it as a form of artistry which just doesn’t do anything for me.
I don’t think this falls into any of the OP’s categories of reactions to Cats, but that’s the way my relationship to the show evolved.
Enjoy,
Steven
I don’t like it, but only because of its lack of plot. I was expecting a story about the life of cats, and it seems to me it wouldn’t have been too difficult to create one and still fit all the songs in, but it instead was just a musical revue put on by cats.
And I also think Memories is a really horrible song.
However, I do think Andrew Lloyd Webber is a great talent.
I hated Cats as a kid (based entirely on the cast album) because it lacked a plot, was overly maudlin, and just seemed like a pile of goofy names.
My appreciation for it as a weird sort of overproduced surrealism has grown over the years, and I kinda dig it now. It’s kitschy, has a few decent tunes, and is pretty darn unlike anything else.
Still one of Weber’s weakest works, IMO, and I’m not much of a fan in general (with the exception of JCS, which I would rank as one of the top 100 pop culture thingies of the 20th century).
She’s not a magician, she’s a regular cat who does regular cat things, like steal things and sneak around. It’s one of the more “perceptive about cats” songs in the show.
I’ve seen it lots of times, once in London, several times on Broadway, and a few times in Philly. It is really a high class children’s show, and an excellent introduction to musical theater for young kids. My kids adored it - they were the reason we kept going back. The lack of a story is not a problem - each song is story enough. One time we wound up in a box where the dancers crawled on the rail right in front of us, and my younger daughter was thrilled. It’s just as silly comparing it to A Chorus Line as comparing the Disney Tarzan to A Chorus Line.
I despise Memory, but the rest of the songs are catchy. Not classic, but not bad.