I can’t stand it. Not the music. Not the costumes. Not the dancing. Even thinking about it is making my stomach churn and my testicles try to crawl back inside my abdomen.
My first wife loved it and drageed me to the movie and to a local theater production of it. This is one time when I can say local amateurs were not worse than professionals.
Got an honest to God chill when I saw the thread title. I took my (adult) kid to see it about 2 years ago, so my hatred is still new, raw and ugly. My child has still not forgiven me. Horrible.
Okay, so maybe that’s a little strong. It was tedious, long and dull, but like Sampiro said, it did have one decent song.
It’s not my favorite musical, but it’s far from my least favorite. It really has some fun, catchy, hummable music. I’m not much of one for dancing, so I also kind of like the recording more than the show.
And Memory is a truly beautiful song. It’s just super overexposed. And it’s overexposed because it’s good.
Perhaps my favorite song from the show is The Ballad of Billy McCaw from the London cast album.
I didn’t think I’d have to spell it out. “Magical Mr. Mistoffelees” -> magician -> pulling a rabbit from a hat. Look at the lyrics.
*You ought to ask Mr. Mistoffelees!
The original conjuring cat–
(There can be no doubt about that!)
Please listen to me and don’t scoff; All his
Inventions are off his own bat
There’s no such cat in the metropolis
He holds all the patent monopolies
For performing surprising illusions
And creating eccentric confusions!
The greatest magicians have something to learn
From Mister Mistoffelees’ conjuring turn.*
The line about kittens fits right in with all the other images the song describes.
He can pick any card from a pack
He is equally cunning with dice
Hated it, and filed it under ‘an evening of my life I’ll never get back’. There are so many good and great musicals, I find it hard to understand why anyone given a choice would waste their time and ears sitting through this drivel. One very good song, yes, and some of the make-up and costumes are cleverly done, but these elements do not constitute either a good musical or a good show.
I saw the production in Drury Lane, London. I regarded the whole thing as tedious, but there was one aspect of it in particular that I feel qualified to comment on. At one point, one of the characters has to vanish in a supposedly magical way. Now, I’m a professional magician and I happen to know they achieve this effect using a variation on what is called the de Kolta chair vanish. As with any other example, there are very good and very bad ways to perform this particular illusion, and this was performed very badly. Clumsy, clunky, with poor timing and choreography, and absolutely no understanding of how magical it can look when it’s done well.
I know this is only one small part of the whole show, but for me it was indicative of how little thought and effort went into the show as a whole.
Yes, but… the lines about producing kittens are the last images in the poem. The final stanza is:
In this stanza the examples are all typical cat like behaviour but the final straw - the surprise twist - is that Magical **Mr **Mistoffelees, the supposed male cat, had kittens to the amazement of the family.
Which shows that the family is a group of proper twits, who are continuously amazed at perfectly ordinary cat behaviour, and bore their friends with endless stories of how clever their little moggy is.
The thing that annoyed me was the way it’s sung. In the poem it’s, “Oh! / Well, I never! Was there ever a cat…?” But they sing it like it’s one sentence. “Oh well I never was there…” It’s just odd.