B'way Cats Rings Down the Final Curtain
NEW YORK — After 18 record-breaking years, Broadway's Cats is now only "Memory."
The 7,485th and final performance of the longest-running musical in Broadway history was a combination of theatre party, going-away party, funeral and reunion.
The 1500-member SRO audience — populated with creators Andrew Lloyd Webber, Trevor Nunn, Gillian Lynn and Cameron Mackintosh, along with now-graying original cast members Betty Buckley, Ken Page, Terrence Mann, Harry Groener — was a flurry of hugs, kisses and oh-my-God's.
The cover of the program told the rest of the story: a big fat tear welling from one of the eyes of the familiar Cats logo.
The former kitties gathered on what turned out to be a sunny late-summer evening. As the press greeted the sharply attired crowd, a fan of the show, Danny Metviner, stood outside the door letting people pet his black cat J.J. for luck.
Lloyd Webber showed up in a cream-colored jacket, unusual for a post-Labor Day event, but actually appropriate, considering the subject of the play.
Once inside the Winter Garden, it was clear the place is ready for a renovation. After 18 years, the carpet is worn, the plaster crumbling and even the giant trash of the set - huge Coke bottles, Kool cigarette packs and Dannon yogurt tubs - are overdue for a dusting.
As Lord Lloyd Webber entered, the audience stopped buzzing and rose for a standing ovation, the first of many. The audience was in the mood to clap, and they did so lustily — for the pre-show announcements, for the first notes of the overture, for the final notes of the overture, even for the huge boot that slams onto the stage during the opening number.
There was a special and prolonged cheer for Marlene Danielle (Bombalurina) who was in the original cast, and stayed with the show for its entire run.
Otherwise innocent lines took on special meaning. When Munkustrap asks "Do actually see with my own very eyes a man who's not heard of a Jellicle Cat?," the audience, mainly comprising former Jellicle Cats, chuckled. Later, when Gus, the Theatre Cat, observes "the theatre is not what it was," there were cheers and applause.
As the "Jellicle Ball" sequence rose toward its athletic uptempo finale, one of the audience members shouted "Go for it!" During the intermission, the entire audience seemed to try crowding onto the stage to walk around, look out at the house, and take flash pictures.
The ultimate conoisseurs, the audience stopped the show in several unusual places. Sharon Wheatley stopped the show with "The Old Gumbie Cat," Roger Kachel and Maria Jo Ralabate did so again with "Mungojerrie and Rumpleteazer" and, in Act II, Gale Holsman and Marlene Danielle did so a third time with "Macavity."
However, unexpectedly, Linda Balgord's eleven o'clock number, "Memory," got only polite applause.
As the final notes of "The Ad-dressing of Cats" died away, news photographers rushed down the aisles to capture the curtain calls — and temporarily blocking Lloyd Webber and others in the audience from getting to the stage for curtain speeches.
Shubert Organization Chairman Gerald Schoenfeld said Cats "opened a new era in musical theatre" and hailed the show for sustaining the "road," the web of Broadway-size theatres around the U.S. that rely on touring shows for their survival.
Producer Cameron Mackintosh paraphrased Gus the Theatre Cat, saying, "It's fantastic to be part of the mystery and the make a little bit of history."
Director Trevor Nunn hailed the late poet T.S. Eliot, who, it is often forgotten, created the characters and supplied the words for Cats, and quoted him, saying, "'Every end is a new beginning,' or, in Broadway terms, 'Another op'nin, another show!"
For his part, Lloyd Webber reminded the audience that everyone involved in the original production felt they were taking a risk on the show, and that the show opened without its financing fully in place. "We risked everything," he said. "Musical theatre has got to take risks."
He also referred to Sept. 10 as the "the last night of Cats' first life on Broadway," leaving the door tantalizing ajar for a future revival.
At the conclusion of the speeches, three cannon blasted a hurricane of white, yellow and silver confetti into the Winter Garden - a mess custodians will have a year to clean up, in time for the Winter Garden's next booking, Mamma Mia! in October 2001.
Cats' unprecedented run lasted three years longer than that of Broadway's former record holder, A Chorus Line, which totaled 6,137 performances.
Cats' final curtain ended an era in which Broadway was dominated by the seemingly never-ending run of the musical with music by Lloyd Webber and lyrics by Eliot, based on Eliot's book of poems, "Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats." The show's advertising slogan, "Now and Forever" — seen on tv spots, buses, Shubert Alley, posters and newspaper ads around the city — became so familiar that they became part of the wallpaper of the city. And for the better part of a generation, it looked like the slogan would come true.
Cats would seem an unlikely choice for longest-running show. Cats was not a traditional book musical, like previous record-holders My Fair Lady; Hello, Dolly!; Fiddler on the Roof, or even Grease! and A Chorus Line. Like the book, the musical was a series of songs introducing various cat characters, such as the motherly Jennyanydots, the mischievous Mungojerrie and Rumpleteazer, the gourmand Bustopher Jones, the restless Rum Tum Tugger and the sinister Macavity, among a dozen more.
But director Nunn and choreographer Lynne wove a wisp of a plot from some vague references in the "Possum" poems, plus fragments of other Eliot poems and a previously "lost" cat poem — "Grizabella the Glamour Cat" deleted from the original collection by Eliot himself.
The story, such as it is, follows a tribe of the apparently very special "Jellicle Cats" as they prepare for their mystical Jellicle Ball, at which their leader, Old Deuteronomy, will choose one among them to mount a rocket-equipped car tire and ascend to the heaven-like Heavyside Layer, whence the cat will be reborn.
"Who will it be?" the Jellicles intone in the opening number, "Who will it be?"
The audience is left to make its own guesses as we meet like likes of the aforementioned, plus Gus the Theatre Cat, Skimbleshanks the Railway Cat, the Magical Mister Mistofelees and the Jellicles' nemeses, the Pollicle Dogs. Along the way Old Deuteronomy gets kidnapped, the scandalous Grizabella is shunned, Macavity gets electrocuted and many manners of capers are cut before the rockets fire up, the ceiling of the theatre opens, and the Chosen One mounts "up, up, up, past the Jellicle moon."
After an initial glow of hipness (the show won seven 1983 Tony Awards including Best Musical and was as hot a ticket as The Lion King in its day), Cats became spurned by Broadway insiders — though not actors, many of whose bills the show paid handsomely over the years. Off-Broadway's Forbidden Broadway revue parodied this dichotomy in the song "Stop Cats," to the tune of A Chorus Line's opening number "I Hope I Get It," in which actors auditioning for Cats sing "I really hate this show but, God, I need this show..."
And audiences needed the show, too. It was a G-rated production that whole families could see, and for many kids of the 1980s and 1990s, it was their very first Broadway experience. The Eliot lyrics were dense, but Lynne's choreography was so expressive that even many of Times Square's foreign-language tourists felt it was a friendlier theatregoing experience than some of the more traditional shows that relied on dialog to communicate the plot.
More than 10 million people saw the Broadway production, bringing a gross of $400 million to the coffers of producers Mackintosh, The Really Useful Theatre Company, David Geffen and The Shubert Organization. In addition, five touring companies of the show have sold more than 25 million tickets in North America alone.
Meanwhile the New York closing does not affect the original London production, which is still going strong after more than 19 years.
Theatre.com readers weighed in with a wide variety of opinion on what the show meant to Broadway, and how they feel about its closing. Click here to read the purrs and catcalls.
The big tire, along with the rest of the giant-junk pile the Jellicle inhabit, plus costumes and other memorabilia, will be sold at a giant Cats garage sale and auction Sept. 16.
Broadway's original Tony-winning Grizabella, Betty Buckley, didn't sing at the last performance; she had delivered her her signature song on Broadway earlier that sameday.
By Robert Viagas
