The Cats of Christmas!
This holiday season, with a movie-musical version of Cats headed to the big screen, we celebrate the furry friends who make our lives so purr-fect.
“Cats, now and forever.” That was the onetime advertising tagline of the iconic musical. The adage still holds true—but we’re not just talking about cats of the singing and dancing variety. Big and small and just plain furball, the whiskered pets are just about purr-fect. In honor of the new Cats movie (in theaters Dec. 20), we’re celebrating all things feline. Hello, kitties! Behind the Scenes With the Cast
of Cats The Jellicle cats have gathered in a junkyard. Over the course of one night, they will individually make the case—via song—as to why they’re each worthy enough to enter the Heaviside Layer, the feline version of heaven, and be reborn as a younger cat. It’s up to Old Deuteronomy to decide which lucky cats will make the journey. For those who’ve forgotten or never experienced Cats before, yes, that really is the plot of the musical that ran nearly 18 years on Broadway.
“Oh, the entire concept of Cats has always been bizarre!” says late-night talk show host and lifelong musical theater aficionado James Corden. “Can you imagine what it must have been like rehearsing the show for the first time? You’re sitting around thinking, What are we making here? It’s absurd.”
But Cats—with music from the awardwinning composer Andrew Lloyd Webber and lyrics based on a 1939 book of poems by T.S. Eliot titled Old Possum’s Book of
Practical Cats—has proven itself to be more than just a musical with nine lives. Ever since Grizabella the Glamour Cat first broke into the show-stopping song “Memory” on London’s West End back in 1981, the show has been a phenomenon. It’s been presented in more than 30 countries (in 15 languages), won a Tony for Best Musical in 1983 and continues to play across North America.
Now a big-screen, live-action movie version is finally ready to strut its stuff. Cats boasts an all-star cast of Corden (as Busto
pher Jones), Judi Dench (Old Deuteronomy), Ian McKellen (Gus the Theatre Cat), Taylor Swift (Bombalurina), Idris Elba (Macavity), Rebel Wilson ( Jennyanydots), Jennifer Hudson (Grizabella) and newcomer Francesca Hayward (Victoria). Thanks to state-of-the-art motioncapture technology (as seen in the film’s much-talked-about trailer), the actors all appear cat-size with feline features. But just as in director Tom Hooper’s previous musical-to-movie, Les Misérables, the wall-to-wall singing is recorded live, not synced to a prerecorded vocal track. And Lloyd Webber himself contributed new material for the movie—and collaborated with Taylor Swift on a new song, “Beautiful Ghosts.” “It’s going to be a real spectacle,” says Wilson, 39, who previously sang in all three Pitch Perfect comedies. “We sing and it’s our own movements, so the performances are all live. And the dancing, from
ballet to hip-hop to tap, is just world-class.” Memories Ask the Cats cast members why they wanted to be a part of the movie, and the answers all circle back to, well, memories—of the original musical. Corden, 41, a Tony and Emmy winner perhaps best known for belting out music with celebrities on the hugely popular “Carpool Karaoke” segments on his Late Late Show on CBS, recalls seeing the production with his parents as a 13-year-old in London in the early 1990s. “I remember thinking, Man, this is a spectacle,” he says. “I knew the movie would be great fun.” Wilson, who attended theater school in her native Australia, was visiting London in the early 2000s and caught a performance from the cheap seats. “I had to watch it with little binoculars,” she recalls, “and I was still blown away.” For Dench, 85, the film served as a Cats homecoming. Back in 1981, she was slated to be part of the original production but had to pull out because of an injury. “We were concentrating every
minute of every day on behaving like cats and trying to translate that into a way of moving,” she says. “But I snapped my Achilles tendon during one of the rehearsals, and as anyone knows, that can take a while to heal.” She was “very pleased” to be invited to join the movie production.
For the film, Wilson shares that—in addition to vocal training and learning choreography, stunts and blocking for the musical numbers—she and the cast had to attend “cat school” in London to channel their inner felines. She also watched cat videos online to find comic inspiration.
When the ensemble finally came together to film in Leavesden, England, during the summer of 2018, the experience was surreal—and not just because Lloyd Webber often visited the set. “It was just mind-boggling,” Corden says. “There you are with this unbelievable cast, like Sir Ian McKellen and Dame Judi Dench, and we’re all playing old cats!” Seconds Wilson, “It was amazing to work with such a talented bunch.”
Corden insists that you don’t have to be a Cats person to embrace the extravaganza. After all, can 73 million fans around the world be wrong? “The greatest strength of Cats is that it’s a show where everybody is welcome,” he says. “Grandparents and grandchildren and everybody in between can enjoy it on various levels. That’s what Cats has always been, and why it will be around for the rest of our lives.”