The Last Meow: A Fence Sitter's Summing Up
Do I see with my own very eyes a man who's not heard of a jellicle cat?"
The speaker, bewhiskered, from the stage of the Winter Garden Theater - Munkustrap was his name — wasn't looking at me, but I felt the accusation. What kind of person was I, what kind of New Yorker, when for nearly 18 years I had never participated in the kitty culture of Grizabella, Old Deuteronomy and the Rum Tum Tugger? Until a few months ago, when its closing was first announced, I had never seen "Cats." So sue me
My defense? A bad one. Call it pride in avoidance, or elitism selectively applied. Certain popular phenomena so saturate our culture that for the ordinary purposes of staying current in a useful, rudimentary way it isn't necessary to see them. I never took in a moment of "Survivor," for example — that one I'm not apologizing for — but I was aware of the "10 Little Indians" rules of the game, and I know that a fellow named Richard Hatch, who was generally thought of as conniving and unpleasant, walked off with the $1 million prize. That's enough, right?
By the same token, I can whistle "Memory," the treacly anthem of "Cats" (under duress), and the show's inherent puddy-tat cuteness is something I managed to infer (accurately, it turns out) years ago. Still, "Cats" is no nominal survivor; it's the real thing.
It is beyond dispute that "Cats" — which opened on Oct. 7, 1982, and will have its 7,485th and final performance on Sept. 10, ending the theater's version of Joe DiMaggio's unassailable hitting streak — is more than a Broadway show. More than 10 million people have seen it on Broadway alone, where its gross ticket revenues have surpassed $400 million; the original Broadway cast recording sold more than two million copies. Its monumental success is so remarkable as to be laughable, an enduring (now and forever) joke on the theme of nine lives. How many Leno and Letterman monologues has it salted? How many New Yorkers, even those who have seen it (and perhaps claimed not to), have disavowed its allure as tourist fodder?
Even the producers — Cameron Mackintosh, the Really Useful Company Ltd., David Geffen and the Shubert Organization — engage in a kind of chagrin over the show's longevity, periodically releasing goofy statistics that make you shake your head at what they've spent their money on in support of profits. By last count, 59,705 condoms have been used to protect the singers' body microphones; maintenance workers have removed 237 pounds of gum from Winter Garden seat bottoms.
That "Cats" was once a hip, had-to-be-there ticket, that it won seven Tony Awards, including best musical, and a Grammy for best show album, ceased to be relevant years ago; its legacy is as New York City's longest-lasting cultural paradox, a paradigm for the restaurant that, in Yogi Berra's genius phrase, nobody goes to anymore because it's too crowded.
So, at last, I went. Twice, actually. First, just before it was supposed to close in June, and then again this week to refresh my, pardon the expression, memory. A panic, apparently, among ticket buyers who, like me, had assumed they would always have the opportunity, kept the show open through the summer on the force of popular demand.
It was fortuitous that I returned because, curiously enough, I enjoyed myself more the second time around.
I think that's because I knew what to expect from the stage and was willing — and more or less able — to set aside my fundamental distaste for many of the show's more prominent elements. My impressions aren't terribly original in this regard, but let's get them on the record and out of the way: Andrew Lloyd Webber's score makes syrup out of each and every pop genre he borrows from. Too many of the show's effects conjure up a Vegas-y cheese, unworthy of the director, Trevor Nunn; does Mr. Mistoffelees's toreador jacket really have to light up?
However gaudily effective John Napier's kitty costumes are (and they are), the others are just silly, particularly those of the Siamese invaders who overrun the pirate ship in the reverie of the old theater cat, Asparagus; the characters, bouncing around in silk pajamas with helmets that turn their heads into ornate teapots, look like the progenitors of Teletubbies.
The structure of the show — that of a feline revue, set in an alternative universe that looks like a cartoonish junkyard — is flaccid, unpropelled by a cogent narrative or singular choreography.
And the amplified sound muddles the lyrics, obfuscating what could be a terrific pleasure for English-speakers still in the audience (I heard five foreign languages while in line to pick up my tickets): the rhythmically virtuosic and delectable anthropomorphisms of T. S. Eliot's children's poems on which the show is based.
That's a lot to complain about, but "Cats" has never been a critic's show. (I'll be the one who finally shuts it down — ha!) The second time around, I willfully removed the critical half of my hat and sought only the pleasures that have been so evident to many.
Some have to do with the pure talent of performers. Jean Arbeiter (Jellylorum is her character) gives a lovely, bell-clear rendering of "Gus: The Theater Cat," the sweetly fond paean, a lullaby almost, sung by a young girl (kitten?) to the elderly and feeble Asparagus, played by John Dewar, whose response is perfectly on pitch — impressive given the character's trembly, if proud, old age. The two of them make the most of what is, by my ears, the purest melody of the Lloyd Webber score, turning one of the show's quieter and more unheralded scenes into its most affecting — shmaltz, sure, but delicate and touching as against furiously wrung out.
Some others are a little subversive. "Cats," like all successful musicals, has a sensual element to it; Broadway dancers are sexy, and though it sounds moderately perverse to say so, cats are, too.
"A cat is not a dog," Old Deuteronomy reminds us in the show's final number. (Jimmy Lockett, playing the role now, has a rumbling bass that gives the pronouncement a pleasing gravity.) But I'd had the thought already. During the show's busy and rather numbing dance production numbers, I found myself focusing on one or another lithe cat in a catsuit on the periphery and watching her stay in character. You have to overlook the whiskers, but overall it wasn't a bad strategy; cats bend and nuzzle in diverting ways.
Mainly, though, the available joys of "Cats" have to do with its well-conceived and executed plan to seduce the audience. It was, of course, the show that set the standard for the bells-and-whistles colossi that transformed Broadway artistically and economically in the 1980's (a bar Disney has recently raised), but extravagant as it was, it was extravagance skillfully and presciently deployed. It all begins with Mr. Napier's set, which, obviating the convention of a proscenium arch, rising to the stage rafters and wrapping around the balcony facade, turns the Winter Garden into what museums and theme parks now call an environment. It's probably the most glamorous rubbish heap the world has ever seen, and it makes you feel right at home in the recognizable detritus of civilization. (I found myself wondering whether the makers of Coca-Cola, Die Hard batteries or any of several cigarette brands, cereals and pet products paid a placement fee for their prominence as identifiable garbage. They didn't.)
That's theater magic — the proverbial word, for lack of a better one — of a particularly accomplished sort; if you can make people comfortable wallowing in the muck, you've suspended their disbelief big time. And the opening scene perpetuates the effective unveiling of a theatrical idea. As the actors slink and pitty-pat onto the stage in their various cat guises and gaits, snuffling and arching, rubbing against one another and the scratching-post props, a world is being populated and defined. The calculated brilliance here is that it's a world as comprehensible to a 5-year-old as to an adult, and it buys the show an enormous amount of good will.
Granted, it is calculated, and as "Cats" has evolved, it has come to milk its audience-friendly and, in particular, its child-friendly shtick. It's hard to imagine that when it first opened, the actors played to front-row patrons as often as they do now, or that they routinely danced with children in the aisles, or that such a significant percentage of the audience visited the stage at intermission; it's like the subway at rush hour up there these days. If you've come to see a show and not be part of it, it's all a little patience-trying, but you'd have to be a terrible spoilsport indeed not to recognize the democracy of "Cats," and not to delight in it. Happy young children, particularly if they're rapt and behaving, are buoying company. The same might even be said of giddy grown-ups.
All of this raises the question of value. Has the phenomenon of "Cats" been a force for good in the world? On the one hand, the argument goes, the show helped attenuate the traditions of theater art, educating audiences to be palliated by pageantry, special effects and brash sentimentality rather than provoked by well-constructed narrative, musical originality and emotional ambiguity and depth. On the other hand, how many ticket buyers who would never have entered a theater otherwise were drawn in by the show's fame and accidentally discovered what a cool world of possibilities the inside of a theater represents? How many of the rapt children who sat with me on Monday night and will beg their parents to bring them back are beginning a lifelong habit of theatergoing?
On the one hand, the argument goes, with "Cats" squatting at the Winter Garden, and the megamusicals that followed — "Les Miserables," "The Phantom of the Opera" and "Miss Saigon" — proving equally immovable, the clogging of theater real estate had a stultifying effect on the development of new work; where would it be presented? On the other hand, it's not as if anybody ever complains about too many musicals in the pipeline, and besides, "Tommy," "Rent" and "Bring In da Noise, Bring In da Funk," to name only a few, managed to arrive on Broadway and find an appreciative welcome. If the work is good enough, there'll be a place for it.
On the one hand, the argument goes, without "Cats" there'd be a bigger pool of ticket buyers for other, needier shows. On the other hand, with it, a lot of actors - not to mention ushers, stagehands and musicians — supported themselves and their families in ways that might otherwise not have been possible. In 18 years, 245 actors appeared onstage as part of the 36-member cast — a large number relative to other shows but also a smaller one than you might expect, which testifies mainly to how competitive and tight the job market for stage performers is.
In the end, it's a wash, I think. So hail, "Cats." And farewell.
Final Curtains
Bruce Weber
