Cats: Leona Lewis brings glitz but no grit to Broadway debut
Her voice needs more than a hint of the gutter
The return of Cats to Broadway after 16 years was to have been a moment of loud-purring satisfaction for Nicole Scherzinger. The former Pussycat Dolls singer thrilled London audiences with her rendition of the show’s stand-out ballad Memory in 2014. Although young to be playing Grizabella — an aged, faded glamour-puss rewarded with an 11th hour ascent to the “Heaviside Layer”, where reincarnation beckons — the 36-year-old Scherzinger sang the role as if the character’s sorrow emanated from deep within; this was celebrity casting with claws.
Much to the fury of Andrew Lloyd Webber, in May this year Scherzinger dramatically pulled out of the American revival, opting to stay in the UK to resume her place as an X Factor judge on ITV. Into the vacancy has slipped Leona Lewis, the 31-year-old Londoner discovered (oh the irony) on The X Factor, which she won 10 years ago. She’s a chart-topper on both sides of the Atlantic — her 2007 debut album made her the first British female solo artist to top the US Billboard 200 chart in over 20 years.
If you go
Booking to Jan 15, 2017; catsthemusical.com/broadway/
On paper at least she’s the cat’s whiskers, but does her Broadway debut fulfil that promise? Grizabella is a slimline yet oddly pressurised part: she’s the one character upon whom all semblance of “drama” in Lloyd Webber’s 1981 treatment of TS Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats rests.
Having caught a preview performance at the Neil Simon theatre in New York, I can report that Leona Lewis’s star-wattage is strong — but she needs to lose some of her sheen. Even in tear-stained mascara and smudged lipstick, dressed in decaying, ghost-grey furs, she could almost pass for a blemishfree prom queen. Does she really belong in the shadowy junkyard where the “Jellicle Cats” assemble for their mysterious annual ball?
Her singing voice is loud and clear, but a touch too serene, needing more of a hint of the gutter. Elaine Paige’s originating performance has yet to be eclipsed: spontaneous as she tries and fails to reprise Cats. old seductive moves, emotionally cohesive in her approach to the song’s rag-tag assortment of lonely musings. Lewis, appearing coached in her moves, looks (far more than Scherzinger did) like she’s going through the motions. Still she makes a memorably vertiginous exit, atop a rising giant car-tyre and amid a welter of UFO-style flashing-lights.
The supporting cast are terrific: Quentin Earl Darrington is slow, sage and magnificent as the head of the tribe Old Deuteronomy; Christopher Gurr is an effete delight as the nostalgia-steeped, applausecraving Gus the Theatre Cat, and Ricky Ubeda jumps about with the force of a thousand fleas as The Magical Mister Mistoffelees.
Directed by Trevor Nunn, and choreographed by the great Gillian Lynne, this Cats remains an evening of fluff and nonsense, really, with leg-warmers and cutesy costumes that should be risible to a cynic’s eyes. Yet such is the innate confidence and innocent zest of this bizarre, feline spectacle that all cynicism just moults away.