Cats – Fond Memories Compete with the Trailer

Cats was the big thing the year that I moved to New York City after a year of trying to scratch out a living in New Mexico.  I had a real job in a real city – I was working as an actuarial trainee – and I was, by every standard of my life to that point, rich beyond my wildest dreams.  I had a salary of 16,000 dollars.  I was living in a big brownstone in Brooklyn – it was possible then to do that (splitting the rent with two others) – and feel rich beyond belief on a salary of 16K.  Don’t think that can be done now.  Cats had just opened – it was the hottest thing – and I took my parents and grandmother – who all came into town – to see the show.  My aunt and uncle, who lived in Jersey, came too (I don't think I was rich enough to pay for them, too, though). 

T.S. Eliot had written poems about cats.  The only one that I had really liked was the one about the naming of cats and their three different names – including the inscrutable name that only they themselves knew.  The poems were written to entertain kids – maybe his kids (though the rest of his writing seemed so inscrutable and dreary to me I could hardly imagine him having kids) – maybe his nieces and nephews – and maybe some random neighborhood kids.  I also imagined that he was writing for English kids, because the poems were a bit cute but also a bit – I don’t know – impenetrable, like much of the rest of Eliot’s poetry that was aimed for intellectuals.

So it was a glorious surprise that, when they were put to music by Andrew Lloyd Webber, and enacted by talented actors with great voices, they – both the poems – but also the cats depicted in the poems came to life.  I liked every song except the Memories song – the one poem Webber himself added - I thought was screechy, but it was the only one to hit the airwaves.

Was there a plot?  I don’t know.  There were a bunch of people playing at being cats – arching their backs and dancing and singing, and the Winter Garden Theater was turned into an alley – not just on stage but throughout – and there were cats all over – in the aisles and on pedestals in the audience.  It was fun.  It was a show.  It didn’t have depth or change my life – but it was cute – and in a good way.

That was 1983 and this is now 2019 and the trailer dropped for the movie version coming out at Christmas.  And it is getting widely panned.  And the movie is still 6 months away!  But I get it – there is something winsome and attractive about all of those alley cats just being themselves.  Don’t mess that up with CGI and I also get the criticism about casting a mixed race actress to play the white cat.   Will the songs win out?  It seems there is now a plot – the cats are singing to see who will get a new life.  Was that there before?  I don’t know.  If so, it was not played up. 

I have written before about how some things simply need to be on stage – the screen is not the right vehicle – and this may be another of those things.  Partially because, in this case, these poems, like short stories, are vehicles for descriptions of characters.  We may not be ready to look too closely at characters, feline or human – we may need the bit of distance that the theater affords – even the Winter Gardens made to feel more intimate than it actually was.

On the other hand, the music may carry – I don’t know – the characters.  We may be able to see them in spite of the garish colors and the weird perspective – they appear to be putting the people playing cats in furniture that makes them appear to scale.  Will that work?  Maybe when we see the film... I don't know. 

Of course, one of the concerns is the CGI – the features of the cats seem too human.  The irony, of course, is that the cats ARE human characters, thinly disguised as cats.  And yes, cats do have personalities, but the cats in Cats are cool cats – and, yes, they have the personalities of cats – and of people – and that’s what makes it delightful.

Will this version work?  Will we like it?  Let’s wait and see (and please don’t judge it by the Memories song which is the highlighted song in the trailer – that really is the worst song of the lot).  But I’m guessing we won’t like it, which is a shame.

I am working on an academic paper in which I am trying to defend the importance of having therapies that match the characteristics of each individual rather than creating, as some academics are doing, one size fits all therapy.  The Rum Tum Tugger does not need what Skimbleshanks needs.   Each of their next lives will turn out to be very different.

The question, I suppose, is whether either one needs to be seen on the screen, or whether they should just be seen in person…  I guess we’ll have to wait until December to find out.

(By the way - a weird coincidence - one of the cats dancing on the stage - she didn't have a singing role - later became one of my students.  This is a very weird and very small world we live in.  At that moment neither one of us was on track to become a psychologist - it was one of many options - that we ended up in the same room again twenty years later is just a little bit crazy...)

To access a narrative description of other posts on this site, link here.  For a subject based index, link here. 

To subscribe to posts (which occur 2-3 times per month), just enter your email in the subscribe by email box to the right of the text.