Four decades on, ‘Cats’ roars still
There are U.S. impeachment hearings, battles for democracy in Hong Kong and a new Canadian cabinet — but if you checked Twitter earlier this month, it would be easy to think the biggest story in the world was a bunch of celebrities leaping and pirouetting in human/cat hybrid bodies with “digital fur technology.”
That’s when the second trailer dropped for Tom Hooper’s film adaptation of “Cats,” Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical theatre juggernaut, inspiring ridicule such as this article in Vulture: “Why Do the Cats in Cats Have Human Breasts?”
The real sin, according to a piece for Elle Magazine titled “The Second Cats Trailer Has Broken Me,” is that the trailer “fully commits to revealing the mythology of the Cats world … For decades, it has been a commonly agreed-upon practice to keep the plot of Cats an open secret.”
Based on T.S. Eliot’s “Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats,” “Cats” famously uses very little dialogue and a bare bones plot about a community of cats vying for extensions of their nine lives. In 1981, it worked: “Cats” premiered in London’s West End and ran 21 years, with a further 18 years on Broadway, pioneering what we now know as the blockbuster musical.
“People love ‘Cats’; people love to hate ‘Cats.’ It’s the thing you can’t stop looking at,” says Andy Blankenbuehler, someone who knows both the stage and film versions intimately.
A Broadway director and choreographer, he choreographed Hooper’s film as well as the 2016 Broadway revival that’s now on tour, coming to Toronto’s Princess of Wales Theatre this week.
“Everyone has always been astounded by ‘Cats,’ like, ‘What the hell is the show?’ ” he continues. “So now that our options of how we tell it have increased, the perplexity is going to increase. But it’s the same obsession. Wait, they’re on two feet. Wait, they have human bodies. But you get to a point in the piece when you’re in on the ride, it’s bizarre.”
“Cats” has unmistakable ’80s esthetics: hair metal makeup with aerobics bodysuits on a semi-sci-fi, larger-than-life junkyard set, and Webber’s songs are classic mega-musical showstoppers. But even as “Cats” grew more dated, its notoriety and its popularity never really waned. So Blankenbuehler faced a challenge when he was brought on board by Webber and director Trevor Nunn to update the slinky, balletic style of original choreographer Gillian Lynne (who died in 2010) for a younger generation.
“It was a hard process, I’m not going to lie. It’s always hard to revisit something and redefine how much of it you want to change,” he says. But, with the direction that the original set was going to remain, he targeted his interventions carefully, a more energetic, almost hiphop-influenced Mungojerrie and Rumpleteazer, for instance.
Blankenbuehler’s choices were more about suiting the show to new audiences than changing the content.
“A lot of things have happened in those 40 years. People have gotten so much faster. People are impatient, people are scattered, people compartmentalize so quickly; they multi-task at a ridiculous rate. Things like Cirque du Soleil have happened, immersive and non-linear pieces that captivate the imagination,” he says. “‘Cats’ in the commercial theatre was a rare non-linear experimental piece. It was breaking ground.”
Blankenbuehler was a devotee of “Cats,” one of the most challenging shows to dance in musical theatre history, when he decided to be a performer.
“I moved to New York City to be a dancer in ‘Cats.’ That was my single goal … Me in Middle America, there was no ‘So You Think You Can Dance.’ There was no YouTube. There were very few things that said to me, ‘Follow this path.’ And so I needed it as a teenager.”
Since then, he has become one of the most sought-after choreographers in the business, having a particularly successful working relationship with writer and performer Lin-Manuel Miranda. In fact, Blankenbuehler was brought onto “Cats” as he began work on another genre-defining show, “Hamilton.”
“I think it’s a very interesting parallel because when they made “Cats,” they were a group of artists totally at the top of their game. And when “Cats” happened, no one knew what to do about it. People didn’t know how to talk about it. There was a big similarity with the feeling when “Hamilton” first opened: ‘Oh this is something different and these guys are taking big chances here,’ ” he says. “It just was a weird science experiment that worked and then the audiences went crazy for it.”
Despite the changes, Blankenbuehler is confident that those with strong attachments to the original stage production won’t feel out of place watching the revival. It’s Hooper’s film that takes the show to much more diverse places, including celebrity cameos from Taylor Swift, Jason Derulo and Idris Elba.
“There’s definitely a much more contemporary language in the film; even though it’s set around the Great Wars, it feels timeless. We had the liberty of pulling in movement vocabulary that was all over the charts,” he said.
But the pieces of the story remain: A ragtag group of cats share tales through song as they vie to be chosen to venture into a cat version of heaven. “Cats” seems to be getting a whole new life.
“Cats” is at the Princess of Wales Theatre, 300 King St. W., Wednesday to Jan. 5. See mirvish.com for more.
Carly Maga is a Toronto-based theatre critic and a freelance contributor for the Star. Follow her on Twitter: @RadioMaga
Blankenbuehler was a devotee of “Cats,” one of the most challenging shows to dance in musical theatre history, when he decided to be a performer.