The real question is how did Cats ever get popular in the first place? Really, it’s TERRIBLE. And yet it was huge. For decades. It’s good the world finally got sane about it.
The characters might have looked different from the back of a crowded theater than they do in close-up, and on Broadway music and dance can make up for a lousy story. It’s not like people who like that sort of thing have a lot of new choices coming along, I guess.
Years ago, we took a family trip to New York. Everybody else went to Broadway to see ‘Cats’. I went to Bleecker Street to see George Coleman.
lol I remember wanting to HANG myself when I saw it way back 20 something years ago.
I went with a girlfriend and cracked jokes through the whole nightmare
I’ve never understood the appeal. If you don’t like actual cats, you don’t have any interest in people dressed up as cats. And if you DO like cats, you like CATS, not... people dressed up as cats. I just don’t get it.
I like the music from Cats. All of it.
I know it makes me a plebe but there is something about it that just works.
for me.
Some of the songs are decent but there isn’t much story to it, as far as I could tell. I don’t think it translates well to the silver screen.
Cats was an excellent Broadway production in NYC. It is based on lighthearted poems of TS Eliott an American/English poet. The Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats
The theater was decorated as a wrap around junk yard! The dancers were the very best. They performed on a swept stage which was at an incline towards the audience. (The original Grizabella blew out her Achille’s tendon.) They built an hydraulic lift into the stage for the elevation into the Heavyside Lair. The had to be graceful and quite atheltic.
The costumes were amazing! They used Yak hair for the wigs, which had to be custom made for each performer and glued on so as not to fly off during dances. I went several times and every time I would fall in love with one of the beautiful young ladies who graced the stage!
Some movies, plays, books, paintings, celebrities, songs, etc. just become a “thing,” regardless of their intrinsic merit. A form of mass hysteria, I guess.
In the early 90s there was a very funny short-lived sitcom starring Chris Elliott called “Get a Life” about a 30 year-old man who still delivers newspapers on his bicycle and lives with his parents (played by Bob Elliott and Elinor Donahue). In one episode, Chris puts on a stage production called “Zoo Animals on Wheels,” a hilarious take on Cats and another Lloyd-Weber musical, Starlight Express. Probably on YouTube. Also worth checking out on YouTube is a mock one-man show called “One Thousand Cats.”
you are way in the minority. One f the most popular plays of all time.
Best dancing.
The audience for the Broadway production was tourists from Kansas and such who thought that was what you saw in NYC. Also since it had virtually no narrative or character development, it can be consumed by tourists who don’t speak English.