# data[].attributes.headline
Idris Elba Can Really Explain What Cats is About

# data[].attributes.subject
Idris Elba Can Really Explain What Cats is About

# data[].attributes.body
This article talks about how supporting actor, Idris Elba, who also plays Macavity in Cats can't really explain the plot of Cats. This goes behind my reasoning in the essay that Cats does not really have a plot due to the musical being a concept musical.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
"The King's Speech" and "Les Miserables" director Tom Hooper is behind the upcoming musical adaptation.

The trailer for Universal's holiday musical tentpole " Cats" broke the internet thanks to the digital fur that transforms the human cast into feline characters. If you weren't reacting in horror to the look of the film, you were probably asking yourself what "Cats" is even about. Well, asking "Cats" supporting actor Idris Elba won't help you too much. During his appearance on "The Late Show" to promote "Hobbs & Shaw," Elba was asked to explain the plot of "Cats" by host Stephen Colbert.

"Ah, wow," Idris said. "What a way to throw me under the bus there! It's a classic. It's a big musical by Andrew Lloyd Webber. I guess it's about a cat? How am I doing?"

After struggling to find the words, Elba slowly took Colbert through a basic explanation of the musical's narrative: "It's one cat's journey toward what is essentially cat heaven. And the idea is that we all aspire to get [to] cat heaven. There's this young cat and she gets sort of taken on this story of how to get to cat heaven and what you should do to get into cat heaven. How am I doing? Does anyone know what the story is?"

Elba stars in the film as Macavity, a notorious criminal known as the "Napoleon of Crime" in the musical. The movie also stars Taylor Swift, Jennifer Hudson, Ian McKellen, Judi Dench, and Rebel Wilson. Wilson was asked recently by Cosmopolitan about the internet's extremely negative reaction to the first "Cats" trailer, but she said she's taking the polarizing response as a sign people are interested.

"I loved the reaction," Wilson said. "I think it was a bit polarizing and people will be super curious to see the finished product. What you got in that trailer was just some small samples of it, but it's going to be such a big movie. And the cast is obviously incredible."

Elba told Colbert the cast consulted with a professional who specialized in the physicality of cats and feline movements. Watch Elba's "Late Show" appearance in the video below. Universal Pictures will open "Cats" in theaters nationwide December 20.

Sign Up: Stay on top of the latest breaking film and TV news! Sign up for our Email Newsletters here.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Even 'Cats' Star Idris Elba Can't Really Explain What 'Cats' Is About

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
"The King's Speech" and "Les Miserables" director Tom Hooper is behind the upcoming musical adaptation. The trailer for Universal's holiday musical tentpole " Cats" broke the internet thanks to the digital fur that transforms the human cast into feline characters.

# data[].attributes.headline
Why Rebel Wilson is Responsible for the most disturbing scene in Cats

# data[].attributes.subject
Why Rebel Wilson is Responsible for the most disturbing scene in Cats

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
No 2019 release has become as instantly infamous as Cats. On paper, a big-screen adaptation of one of the most popular musicals of all time - directed by an Oscar-winning filmmaker, no less - seemed like a sure thing. In fact, many in the industry even considered the movie a potential Oscar contender. Then they saw the footage for the first time.

Director Tom Hooper's movie is famous for its surreal imagery. Cats is, of course, most notable because of the technology bringing the titular felines to life. But the film occasionally flirts with even deeper madness. But it's star Rebel Wilson, not Hooper, who is actually behind arguably the most upsetting image in the film.

Rebel Wilson at the 'Cats' world premiere | Roy Rochlin/FilmMagic

'Cats' is loaded with CGI human/cat hybrids

Onstage, Cats uses a combination of make-up and costuming to transform its cast of performers into characters with names like Skimbleshanks and Grizabella. But for the movie version, Hooper wanted to use modern technology to create realistic looking "digital fur."

With a combination of straight-up CGI and motion capture, Cats aims to create life-like feline bodies for its actors. But as soon as the first trailer dropped, moviegoers and critics balked at the surreal look of the film's cat-people. To many, the characters looked like something out of a horror film, rather than a PG-rated musical.

So, despite a cast of talented performers that includes Oscar winners Judi Dench and Jennifer Hudson, Cats fell remarkably flat at the box office. The film reportedly cost roughly $100 million to make. Yet, its worldwide total only reached $74 million, leaving Universal with a substantial loss.

Rebel Wilson contributed arguably the weirdest

The singing, dancing humanoid cats in the marketing may have kept audiences largely away from Hooper's film. But those who actually did buy a ticket faced an even more bizarre image.

Early in the film, viewers meet Jennyanydots (Wilson), a seemingly lazy cat who spends her nights teaching elaborate song-and-dance numbers to the household's mice and roaches. As she sings about her work, she pulls back a curtain to reveal her trained mice. Much to audiences' shock, the characters aren't just played by actors but by children augmented with CGI.

On the feature commentary for the Cats Blu-ray, Hooper revealed it was Wilson's idea to cast children as Jennyanydots' mice.

In the show, the cats play the mice, but of course, I thought it'd be fun to have the mice played by miniature humans. It was Rebel's idea that they could perhaps be played by children, which I thought was brilliant. And I tried to stay true to my idea or conceit that, just as humans are playing cats, humans also are playing mice but they're scaled-down again. But they also have fur on their faces so you get their real performances but also the sense of their mousiness from the design.

As if the notion of human children playing mouse-like mutants wasn't startling enough, Cats makes it pretty clear Jennyanydots is threatening her smaller animal friends with death if they mess up their performances. We even see her eat one of the roaches just a minute or so after meeting the mice.

'Cats' has been named the worst film of 2019

Likely, Hooper and his team had faith in such creative decisions while making Cats. But it's a testament to the disparity between what happens during production and what winds up on-screen. Maybe theoretically, children play the mice seemed like an interesting thought. The way Hooper executes it, the image provides an unsettling element to an intended comedic sequence.

No wonder many consider Cats one of the worst movies of 2019. The film already earned the top prize at the Razzies, which honors the worst cinematic achievements. Hooper's film falls drastically short of working, but it also makes such admirably bold, albeit ill-conceived, decisions. Cats may even find a new "jellicle" life as a cult classic, in part thanks to strange, horrific imagery such as the mice.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
'Cats': Rebel Wilson Is Responsible for the Movie's Most Horrific Image

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
No 2019 release has become as instantly infamous as Cats. On paper, a big-screen adaptation of one of the most popular musicals of all time - directed by an Oscar-winning filmmaker, no less - seemed like a sure thing. In fact, many in the industry even considered the movie a potential Oscar contender.

# data[].attributes.body
This article basically explains the trailer and gives background to the movie along with the characters and what to expect in the film.

# data[].attributes.body
This article goes deep into T.S Eliot's "Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats," which is the basis of the concept musical written by Andrew Lloyd Webber.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Scholars of literary modernism have spent relatively little time investigating T. S. Eliot's ardent and abiding love of cats. He had a lot of them, and he gave them names like George Pushdragon, Pettipaws, and Wiscus. He thought that the "great thing" about cats was that they possessed "two qualities to an extreme degree-dignity and comicality." In the poem that launched his career, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," which was published in 1915, when he was twenty-six, Eliot writes of a catlike "yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes," licks "its tongue into the corners of the evening," makes a "sudden leap," and curls "once about the house" before falling asleep. In 1931, Eliot sent an illustrated letter to his godson Tom Faber about his cat Jellyorum; this was the beginning of what would become " Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats," Eliot's only collection of light verse. A few years later, in a letter to his friend Polly Tandy-an adult-Eliot explained that there were "4 kinds of Cat the Old Gumbie Cat the Practical Cat the Porpentine Cat and the Big Bravo Cat; I suspect that yours is a Bravo Cat by the looks of things." In a letter to Polly's daughter Alison, from 1936, Eliot included a complete draft of his poem about the Old Gumbie Cat. He signed the note in his usual manner: "Your faithful Possum."

Eliot was given the nickname Possum by Ezra Pound, who got it from " Uncle Remus," Joel Chandler Harris's compilation of plantation folktales, which was published in 1880. Eliot called Pound "Brer Rabbit," in turn-the two men wrote to each other in black dialect for fun. (Eliot signed one postcard to Pound with the name "Tar Baby.") Eliot had grown up in St. Louis, a city that sustained a thriving black theatre scene and also regularly hosted minstrel shows. (Pound was from Idaho.) In his early twenties, he wrote a poem that parodied Booker T. Washington's autobiography " Up from Slavery " as " 'Up From Possum Stew' / Or 'How I set the nigger free!' " When he moved to England, in his twenties, and entered a literary establishment that was even more conservative than the one back home, he took to identifying himself as an uncivil outsider in a way that he regularly shaded as black. "I may simply prove to be a savage," he wrote in 1919. Eventually, he converted to Anglicanism and took British citizenship; in 1928, he mused on his experience as an "American who wasn't an American, because he was born in the South and went to school in New England as a small boy with a nigger drawl."

Pound and Eliot seemed to regard "the proximity of black speech to their own" as "both an opportunity to be seized and an affliction to be regretted," the literary critic Michael North writes, in " The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language, and Twentieth-Century Literature." Eliot's fondness for doggerel and light verse, in particular, was intertwined with a racist notion of blackness as a gateway to cultural disruption and linguistic play. "Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats" required an authorial persona that facilitated outright foolishness for Eliot, and though explicit racism largely vanishes within the actual text, it does jump out occasionally, most of all in "Growltiger's Last Stand," in which Eliot, describing Growltiger, a grisly pirate cat, writes, "But most to Cats of foreign race his hatred had been vowed; / To Cats of foreign name and race no quarter was allowed." The "Chinks" swarm Growltiger's vessel, and his lady cat screeches, "badly skeered."

The BBC broadcast a recording of Eliot's unpublished cat poems on Christmas Day, 1937. The broadcast was well received, and it was followed by two more installments, the last of which was called "Pollicles and Jellicles: Tales of Cats and Dogs in Verse." ("Pollicle dogs" and "jellicle cats" are Eliot's glosses on the way posh British people said "poor little dogs" and "dear little cats.") "Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats" was published in 1939 and contained fourteen poems. They are deeply weird: antic, hyperactive, dense with faux-pompous elevated diction, sometimes crisp and regular, sometimes nursery-rhyme nonsense. Eliot's cats are practical in an archaic sense of the word: they scheme and keep busy. (Macavity, a cat criminal, was based on Arthur Conan Doyle's Professor Moriarty.) Eliot drew the book's cover illustration: a dandy helping a line of cats climb over a wall. The book became a hit. For decades to come, parents bought "Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats" to entertain their children. Among them were a pair of musicians who lived in South Kensington and had a son who would go on to write the most popular musicals in the world.

In 1994, when I was five years old, I appeared in a children's production of Andrew Lloyd Webber's "Cats," in Houston, playing a nondescript black chorus cat with the noncanonical moniker of Peaseblossom. By that point, "Cats" was a global juggernaut, on its way to becoming the longest-running Broadway show of all time. (Another Lloyd Webber musical, "Phantom of the Opera," has since surpassed its Broadway run.) It ran for eighteen years in New York and for twenty-one years in London; a Japanese version has been running for thirty-six years straight.

"Cats" was my first experience doing musical theatre, and I can blame much of my subsequent decade of semi-committed chorus-line participation-and some of my ongoing attraction to cultural phenomena that reside on the border between hellscape and paradise-on this baptism into Webber's feline world. The magic began with the shimmery melodrama of the musical's overture, its melody descending like a diva on a staircase; then came the opening number, "Jellicle Songs for Jellicle Cats," which is lyrically unhinged but musically transporting, a series of syncopated adrenaline spikes and key changes, to which we flung our tiny cat selves around in a big, stupid whirl. The heavy-handed pop-rock pastiche of the "Cats" soundtrack turns adult sentiment into an accessible playground-I was entranced by "Macavity," with its "Pink Panther" burlesque swing, and "The Rum Tum Tugger," with its cartoonish version of rock and roll. Fittingly, the show's story line, insofar as it has one, is like something that a five-year-old would invent while coming down from dental anesthesia: there are a bunch of cats, and they're called Jellicle Cats, and they're about to go to the Jellicle Ball, which is where an old cat named Old Deuteronomy decides which cat goes to the Heaviside Layer to die and be reborn. One cat is named Skimbleshanks, and he lives on a train; one cat is named Mr. Mistoffelees, and he's a magician; and there's a fancy lady cat named Grizabella, except she's not so fancy anymore; and, in the end, Old Deuteronomy picks Grizabella and she dies and gets to ride a big tire up to heaven, and that's the end!

Lloyd Webber first had the idea for "Cats" in the late seventies. He grew bored one day during the technical rehearsals for "Evita" and got to thinking about writing music for existing lyrics, something he'd never done. Maybe he could use a book of poems-say, that old T. S. Eliot book his mom used to read to him. Those poems had a rhythmic flexibility, as though they'd been written to music. Later, Eliot's widow, Valerie, would tell Lloyd Webber that Eliot always composed his light poems with popular songs in his head. Lloyd Webber approached her in 1980, inviting her to an annual arts festival that he threw at his country home, called Sydmonton. There he played her four sample songs from the musical he envisioned. He had set "The Naming of Cats" as an eerie, dreamy admixture of sharps and flats and had given "Macavity" an undertone of prowling lust. Eliot had once refused an adaptation offer from Disney; Lloyd Webber promised Valerie that he wouldn't turn her late husband's chimeric creations into mere "pussycats."

Valerie came to Sydmonton with an unpublished scrap of a poem about Grizabella, a cat who had "haunted many a low resort." Grizabella made the postman sigh "as he scratched his head / You really would have thought she ought to be dead / And who would ever suppose that that / Was Grizabella the Glamour Cat." Eliot had thought Grizabella too sad for children, but Lloyd Webber saw her as a character to build a musical around. Valerie also brought a letter Eliot had written to his publisher, in which he describes the Pollicle Dogs and Jellicle Cats gathering for an event where they ascend "Up, up, up, to the Russell Hotel / Up, up, up, to the Heaviside Layer." ("There are several ways in which this might be a failure," Eliot noted.) For Lloyd Webber, these two faint signals, blinking out of a plotless void, suggested the narrative foundation for a show.

The idea proved anything but irresistible. No one wanted to finance the project: the show's producer, Cameron Mackintosh, had to solicit small-fry investors through newspaper ads; Lloyd Webber took out a second mortgage to make up the ultimate shortfall. He had composed an epic, genre-spanning score, using a Moog synthesizer to imitate meowing, but, when he played it for Twyla Tharp, hoping that she would choreograph what would have to be a very dance-heavy musical-Valerie would permit the production only if they relied entirely on Eliot's material, which left little room for plot or spoken dialogue-Tharp said no. A director candidate fell asleep while Lloyd Webber was pitching him. A Warner Brothers executive reminded him that half the world favored dogs. "But somehow that insane, incurable, blinkered optimism that overtakes reason and leads otherwise normal men to stage musicals had wormed far too deep," Lloyd Webber writes in his memoir, " Unmasked." He scoured London for a theatre that would fit his "suicidally stupid musical."

He was eventually able to secure a highbrow team of colleagues, and their presence won over a wavering Valerie. Gillian Lynne, a star since the fifties (she died last year, at the age of ninety-two) signed on as the choreographer. Trevor Nunn, the artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, agreed to direct, on the condition that Judi Dench be cast in the show and that Webber hire two of Nunn's previous collaborators: John Napier, to design the costumes and sets, and David Hersey, for lighting. Nunn had very strong feelings about the show's conception. "I believe all the characters MUST BE CATS," he wrote to Lloyd Webber in a letter. "Cats introducing us to other cats, cats telling us what only cats can ever possibly know; cats divulging secrets, cats arguing, cats of different classes, cats sexually or romantically involved with each other ... and finally cats remaining mysterious, inscrutable, unknowable and (need it be said?) inhuman."

The goal, for everyone, was to skirt the realm of the domestic. Lynne imagined the cats as a pagan tribe, and she led the cast through "vigorous exercises of an unusual nature, leading eventually to total freedom of what we could attempt physically," she writes in a commemorative book that was published in 1983. She wanted the cats to be "at once aloof, hypersensual, cold, warm, completely elastic and very mysterious." Napier designed a junk-yard set, full of beer bottles and car tires fabricated at cat scale. " 'The Waste Land' was what I based my entire modus operandi on," he told me. As far as costuming went, he knew that he had to avoid the literal. One day, drawing in a sketchpad during rehearsal, while Lynne was "just farting around, having everyone make cat shapes," he said, he realized that "all these kids had leg warmers, arm warmers, slinky tops of various kinds, and that was almost disguise enough-the arm warmers changed the shape of the wrist so it was more of a paw." He put "slightly punky" wigs on the cast, which he could spray into the suggestion of cat ears, and decided against full face paint-mostly cat noses, and dabs for whiskers. "I really tried to keep it quite earthy and unsophisticated, a little street-y," he said. "I thought, Sophistication is really the last thing this needs."

"Cats" had begun to coalesce at the end of auditions, after Nunn insisted that Lloyd Webber write a real centerpiece for the musical, by turning the Grizabella poem fragment into a ballad that could rival "Don't Cry for Me Argentina," from "Evita." Years before, Lloyd Webber had composed a Puccini-esque song that was so convincing in its homage that he'd asked his father, a classical composer, to reassure him that he had not inadvertently plagiarized it. (His father told him that it sounded like a million bucks.) Lloyd Webber played his Puccini pastiche for Nunn, and Nunn called the team over to hear it, telling them to remember where they were when they first heard this melody, which would soon become "Memory," a song that charted on the Billboard Hot 100 twice in the nineteen-eighties, with Barbara Streisand's version, in 1982, and Barry Manilow's, in 1983. This was one of the moments when the show's alchemy suddenly became visible to the creators: Nunn writes that, after the first onstage run-through, everyone cried.

More often, the process of putting "Cats" together was closer to disaster. On the first day of rehearsals, Lloyd Webber's musical director "slumped onto the piano keys and said he couldn't play anymore," then quit. Nunn clashed with Lynne. Lloyd Webber worried that his songs couldn't be sung properly through so much dancing. Twelve days before previews, Dench, who had been cast as both Grizabella and the Old Gumbie Cat, Jennyanydots, collapsed mid-rehearsal and cried out, "Who kicked me?" She had snapped her Achilles tendon. It instantly became gossip that "Judi's accident was an excuse for her to jump a sinking ship."

Five days before previews, Lynne threatened to quit the show over a set of elaborate costumes for the opening number, which Napier had spent ten per cent of the show's budget creating. (They were difficult to dance in; Lynne won the argument, and Napier, fuming, kicked the costumes into the gutter.) The same day, after witnessing a chaotic run-through of a number in which the cats pretended to be dogs, Lloyd Webber and Mackintosh told Nunn that what they'd seen "was not fit for a stage" and declared that they were "pulling the show." (Nunn ignored them.) Two days out, Elaine Paige, who had taken Dench's place as Grizabella, sang a version of "Memory" that featured lethally depressive lyrics by Lloyd Webber's longtime collaborator Tim Rice: "Daylight / I won't care if it finds me / With no breath in my body / With no beat in my heart." (Rice and Lloyd Webber were in the middle of ending their creative partnership, and the married Rice had recently begun an affair with Paige.) Nunn insisted on rewriting the lyrics for the final rehearsal, where Paige sang "Memory" with a crumpled sheet of paper in her hand.

On the Wednesday afternoon before the first preview, in the West End, Mackintosh and Lloyd Webber went to a bar to celebrate their respective careers in musical theatre, which they presumed might be over in a few hours' time. They had been hyping the production since a nationwide casting call, six months before, but they had kept aspects of the show secret; the public had no idea that "Cats" featured no human characters at all. That evening, Lloyd Webber steeled himself and went backstage. He looked at a young dancer whom he'd persuaded to join "Cats" by assuring her that it would be a life-changing experience. "In three minutes," he writes in his memoir, she "would run on stage as a cat caught in a car headlight and instigate one of the great moments of bathos in theatre history." The overture seemed to last forever, he recalls: "Has there ever been such an agonizing wait for an executioner's blow?" But when the cats ran onstage, the laughter that Lloyd Webber was expecting never came. There were waves of applause. The next night, Paige's big solo "took the roof off the building." The Guardian called "Cats" a "midnight pussy-convention" that managed to keep a "balance between the Eliotesque preoccupation with time and memory and sheer outgoing exhilaration." The show was ridiculous, but it was also funny, ecstatic, oddly sensual, and all-enveloping. By the weekend, audiences were giving it three-minute standing ovations.

"Cats," because it is about cats and not humans, pulls off a feat that, for good reason, mostly goes unattempted: it is a kid-friendly production that runs on an undercurrent of adult-and, literally, animal-sexuality. Its ability to convince an audience to accept the idea, for the duration of the show, that the "Cats" universe has existed parallel to ours for centuries-and that each performance represents some sort of breach in the space-time continuum-depends on the capacity of actors to embody, primarily through dance, felines with multiple lives' worth of experience. The contours of their bodies are not mysterious to them, nor are they to the audience. These are cats who have spent a lot of time having loud sex in the alley. They slink, they whip their hips around. For "Cats" haters, this is one of the worst aspects of the musical. (In 1996, a woman named Evelyn Amato sued the team behind the New York production for six million dollars, over a moment in which the actor playing Rum Tum Tugger invaded her space with his pelvis-grinding.) But to me "Cats" is proof of the ludicrous heights that can be reached with full-throated commitment. One human cat is a terrible acid trip; twenty of them is an unforgettable night out in midtown. In Eliot's book, Mr. Mistoffelees is a precious creation; in the musical, he is a gay icon, bedazzled like the night sky, sometimes pulling off twenty-four fouetté turns in a row. Lloyd Webber's music exaggerates the pure gusto of the "Cats" poems-the strangeness, doubled, somehow becomes mainstream.

The initial critical response to "Cats" was mixed, as it has remained. The Daily Mail called the London production a "marvellous piece of rubbish." Of the Broadway show, the Boston Globe wrote, simply, " 'Cats' is a dog." But this didn't matter: the show minted money. (The Broadway production débuted, in 1982, with a four-and-a-half-million-dollar budget-the most expensive in the history of Broadway at the time-and six million dollars in ticket pre-sales. It made half a million dollars in profit every week.) Celebrities flocked to it that first summer. Lloyd Webber threw huge parties at his house in Sydmonton, where he had a "magnificent vast hot tub" that could hold as many as thirty people; "nobody batted an eyelid about stripping off." The amount of sexual energy generated by the first production of "Cats" can perhaps be inferred from the fact that Lloyd Webber, Nunn, and Napier all married cast members.

The success of the London production of "Cats" quickly shifted from a surprise to a force that would reshape the world of musical theatre. The era of the tourist-friendly blockbuster musical, complete with merchandise, had begun in earnest; in the wake of "Cats," small shows would find it increasingly hard to compete. Throughout the nineties, TV ads for "Cats" blanketed New York. ("Cats: the magic, the mystery, the memory, will live forever," a male voice-over whispers. "Cats: the seven-time Tony Award winner, the once-in-a-lifetime experience.") In 1998, Lloyd Webber released a direct-to-VHS re-creation of the stage musical, starring many of the original cast members, which I owned and watched frequently. In 2000, "Cats" finally retired from Broadway: one actress, Marlene Danielle, had been in the show for its entire run.

The show was revived onstage in London, from 2014 to 2016, and in New York, from 2016 to 2017. Now a film adaptation by Tom Hooper is set for a Christmas-season release. The movie is crammed with stars: Dench is back, playing the traditionally male role of Old Deuteronomy; she is joined by Ian McKellen, Idris Elba, Jennifer Hudson, and Taylor Swift. The first trailer was released in July, and it set off seismic waves of fear and agitation online, mainly concerned with the computer-generated aspect of the costumes, which rely on what promotional material referred to as "digital fur technology." It appears to have plunged the actors deep into unexplored crevices of the uncanny valley.

I asked Napier for his thoughts on the trailer, but he told me that, out of friendly loyalty to McKellen and Dench, he was waiting to take in the whole movie with fresh eyes. I told him that the phrase "digital fur technology" had become a buzzword. "Oh, dear," he said. "I told Tom, you have to be very careful or they'll end up looking like werecats. Fur is dangerous territory. For example, what are you supposed to do about their testicles, and their dicks, and their tits?" (He is not the only person with anatomical questions.)

Expectations for the movie seem to be as low as Lloyd Webber's were for the musical's reception on the afternoon before the first West End previews. (As of this writing, days before the movie's première, it has not yet been screened for critics.) But "Cats" has always been an outrageously unlikely cultural phenomenon, and, the longer that it persists, the more unlikely it has become; somehow, this one particular chain of highly idiosyncratic creative impulses has proved so durable that we are now faced with the prospect of Jason Derulo singing a T. S. Eliot poem while clothed head to toe in digital fur. (Derulo plays Rum Tum Tugger in the movie-a character whom Eliot wrote as a finicky, demanding "curious cat," whom Webber reimagined as a Mick Jagger-esque sex symbol, and then reimagined again, for the 2014 London revival, as a rapper. I expect that Derulo will be playing Rum Tum Tugger as Jason Derulo.)

Two years ago, just before the Broadway revival closed, I went to see it with three of my friends. Two of them had seen the musical as children; both had loved it as soon as the house lights went down and the cat eyes began glowing in the darkness. (One of them had even bestowed the name Rum Tum Tugger on a stuffed animal afterward-a dog, nonetheless.) My third friend had no idea what to expect. "So they're literally cats?" the third friend kept saying, as we sat down. To my left was a man with a cowboy hat resting on his knee, who poked his wife every time a new cast member came onstage and said, "Look, honey-another cat!" Mamie Parris played Grizabella, and, when she belted the entire climax of "Memory" in a single superhuman breath, the dream logic of the musical overpowered the theatre completely; you could feel every hair on every arm standing on end. What an absolute nightmare, I thought, as all the other cats came out of the wings, ready to send Grizabella to her death. Here was a stage full of brilliant actors writhing around in cat wigs and face paint, singing psychotic Andrew Lloyd Webber songs with T. S. Eliot blackface lyrics. What a ridiculous hallucination this was, what an indestructible pleasure, what an unforeseeable gift.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Scholars of literary modernism have spent relatively little time investigating T. S. Eliot's ardent and abiding love of cats. He had a lot of them, and he gave them names like George Pushdragon, Pettipaws, and Wiscus. He thought that the "great thing" about cats was that they possessed "two qualities to an extreme degree-dignity and comicality."

# data[].attributes.body
Here, you can find more information about Grizabella the Glamour cat and the difference between the character in the movie vs. the original Broadway show.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Grizabella
The Glamour Cat

"

You see the border of her coat is torn and stained with sand, and you see the corner of her eye twists like a crooked pin.

"

Grizabella the Glamour Cat is a principal character in the musical Cats. Once a glamorous star among the Jellicles, she now lives in the gutter, exiled and disgraced. A central plot of the musical revolves around her plight and ultimate forgiveness by the tribe.

Grizabella is one of the most iconic characters in musical theatre canon, largely due to her singing the hit song " Memory".

Personality

Grizabella is characterized by her regret, rejection, and loneliness. She is portrayed as an older cat, although her decrepit state may make her look older than she really is. She usually moves slowly and carefully, suggesting stiffness or an injury. Grizabella is despised by the Jellicle cats for reasons unspecified. She is sad and wistful, dreaming of the days when she was young, beautiful and adored, as her songs describe.

The character is implied to have been a prostitute; the area of Tottenham Court Road, where Grizabella is stated to be seen regularly, was strongly associated with prostitution during Eliot's time. The imagery of the once beautiful star now residing with those shunned by society became a central theme for the character and the musical as a whole. During her entrance, Grizabella refers to herself as such:

Remark the Cat who hesitates towards you
In the light of the door which opens on her like a grin
You see the corner of her coat is torn and stained with sand
And you see the corner of her eye twists like a crooked pin

These lines are lifted from T S Eliot's "Rhapsody on a Windy Night" (which also provided inspiration for the lyrics of "Memory"), in which the woman being described is a prostitute waiting at the door of a brothel.

According to Harry Groener (original Broadway Munkustrap), Grizabella's implied "tawdry" past is not the reason for her exclusion from the tribe:

"

We call her 'the Glamour Cat,' not 'the Whore Cat.' Anyway, cats are promiscuous, so why would we reject her for promiscuity?

"

"

Grizabella is a survivor, but she is vulnerable, and now outcast from the tribe. She was once very glamorous, but with age her beauty is fading. Sings "Memory". An exceptional singer/actress with sensational, powerful vocals needed. Must possess a wide dynamic vocal range with rich lower tones, and wonderful high belt to Eb. Playing age 35 - 55.

"

Grizabella first appears as the cats are having fun with Rum Tum Tugger's antics. Her presence immediately kills the mood. Most of the older Jellicles start scratching, clawing, and hissing at Grizabella. The kittens are curious, some try to touch and welcome her but are quickly pulled away by the elders. Bombalurina and Demeter sing " Grizabella the Glamour Cat" to explain her story.

Grizabella longs to be accepted back into the tribe - hiding in the shadows and watching the Jellicle Ball. At the end of the Ball, she takes the empty stage and copies some of the dance moves but has difficulty due to her disheveled state. Grizabella then sings the first verse of " Memory", and reaches out her hand toward Old Deuteronomy, but walks offstage, unaccepted. This inspires Old Deuteronomy to sing " The Moments of Happiness" at the start of the next act, encouraging the cats to ponder and reflect on the meaning of happiness.

Grizabella appears once again just as Old Deuteronomy is about to decide who will go to the Heaviside Layer. She is now more desperate than ever to earn the acceptance of the Jellicle tribe. As she is singing a reprise of "Memory", she collapses. Some of the Jellicles reach out towards her in concern, but they are still hesitant to touch her. Then Jemima (also known as Sillabub) picks up her verse and helps Grizabella finish her song. Once Grizabella is finished singing, she reaches out her hand one last time. Victoria then reaches out and touches her, accepting her back into the tribe. The remaining Jellicle cats also finally touch her and accept her back into the tribe. Grizabella is at last forgiven and accepted by everyone.

She is then chosen by Old Deuteronomy to be reborn, and "come back to a different Jellicle life", and ascends up to the Heaviside Layer.

The character originated from an unpublished poem by Eliot titled "Grizabella, the Glamour Cat". The poem was not included in Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats (1939) because it was considered "too sad" for children. The name "Grizabella" is derived from "grizzle" which means either "grey" or "dishevelled", and "bella" which means "beautiful". Hence, "Grizabella"; "the grey beauty" or "the dishevelled beauty".

International Names

The following names have also been used for the character of Grizabella in various international productions:

As with most of the featured characters, Grizabella has her own instrumental motif that accompanies her every time she enters the scene. Her motif is a dirge-like cello ground bass, representing the dark mood which constantly surrounds her. Grizabella's ground bass line is composed in the key of A minor, though it moves up a semitone to Bb minor in her final entrance to accommodate "Memory".

A minor:

Note: .ogg files cannot be played on iOS devices

Bb minor:

Note: .ogg files cannot be played on iOS devices

Appearance

Grizabella wears a ragged and worn out fur coat, covering the remains of a black sequinned dress. She wears high-heeled shoes and stockings over her unitard, but one stocking has fallen around her ankle. Her wig is long and curly, the only wig in the show to be made of human hair rather than yak hair.

The 2014 London Palladium revival cast Nicole Scherzinger in the role, famous for her glamorous style, and Grizabella's costume was redesigned in keeping with Nicole's "Pussycat Doll" look. She was given long, straight hair, a corset and thigh-high boots, in a tan and black colour scheme. Her coat was more fitted, with short ragged sleeves and a more defined waist. It is also cut away at the front, revealing more of the tight-fitting outfit underneath. Her makeup was also made much less prominently "cat" and more glamorous, with no "age" lines, but a scar on her forehead. The inference is that she has had a head injury causing her downfall, but she is not particularly old. This new backstory and look for Grizabella has since been used in all European and US-based replica productions, including the 2016 Broadway revival.

Baby Grizabella

At the beginning of the show, the actress playing Grizabella is usually in the ensemble for " Jellicle Songs" and " The Naming of Cats", dressed as a chorus cat who is referred to as "Baby/Young/Basic Grizabella". Baby Griz is designed specifically to not stand out from the other cats. She has an unremarkable costume of greys and browns, sometimes with a black velvet ribbon around her neck. The unitard and simple makeup form the base of her featured costume, with heavy black lines added to the makeup, and dress and coat over the unitard.

Whether this ensemble character is meant to be a young version of Grizabella or an entirely separate character is up to interpretation. In an interview, Prisca Demarez describes her feelings about her chorus identity:

Marie Berson: I, for one, would be very curious to hear more about the cat you play at first with the Jellicles before Grizabella's entrance! Does she have a name? A role?

Prisca: It's such a delight to perform the opening number with the whole cast! That moment is very important to me. Of course she has a name! Her name is Baby Griz, but I call her Grizzy Baby. She has the same colours as Grizabella on her face. She's as pure as Victoria and doesn't know life's sorrows yet. She's a kitten. I think she rounds everything off. She embodies the beginning of life, in a family, before the choices and difficulties arise.
I'm often asked why Grizabella doesn't come back young and beautiful at the end. I think we actually see her at the start, as Grizzy Baby, like a new life, a blank page to be filled in. It's what Grizabella was when she was little. It's in that form that she'll come back from the Heavyside Layer - as a kitten.
She allows me to have a past with the group, a feeling of having danced with them before I couldn't do it anymore. And she's so joyful and light before she carries the weight of Grizabella's sorrow.

In the 1985 Oslo production, and those derived from it, Grizabella and Young Grizabella were played by different actresses, with Young Grizabella reappearing during "Memory" to sing with her older self (instead of Jemima/Sillabub).

For fandom headcanons and theories, CLICK HERE.

In the original London production, Judi Dench was cast to play Grizabella and Jennyanydots, doubling characters much as the actor who plays Asparagus also plays Bustopher Jones, without an implied link between the roles. However she was injured in rehearsal, and five days before the first preview Elaine Paige was cast as her replacement.

Even though she sings the most famous song in the musical ("Memory"), the actress playing Grizabella has the least onstage time of the entire cast. Dee Roscioli, who played the role in the 5th US tour, noted: "I was on stage for 17 1/2 minutes. I knitted a lot of scarves on that tour."

A wax figure of Grizabella that sings "Memory" is displayed in Madame Tussauds New York, alongside figures of Mistoffelees, Mungojerrie and Rumpleteazer.

A 1999 episode of the American sitcom Will & Grace titled "Saving Grace" (S01 E20), features Will telling Nathan that they should get two cats and name them Grizabella and Skimbleshanks the Railway Cat.

References

1. ↑ Trevor Nunn, CATS Ultimate Edition DVD extras

2. ↑ "Rhapsody on a Windy Night" - www.poetryfoundation.org

3. ↑ Harry Groener interview, Philadelphia Inquirer, Oct 24, 1982.

4. The Poems of T. S. Eliot Volume II: Practical Cats and Further Verses. Faber & Faber, 17 November 2015. Page 43. Quote by Eliot in a 1959 interview with Donald Hall for the ↑ Paris Review: "There's one about a glamour cat. It turned out too sad. This would never do. I can't make my children weep over a cat who's gone wrong. She had a very questionable career, did this cat."

5. The Megamusical, Indiana University Press (2006). Pages 158, 160. ↑ ISBN 978-0-253-34793-0.

6. ↑ FLYING HIGH ** Wilson native is Broadway's newest Wicked Witch of the West ** "WICKED' ON BROADWAY, mcall.com. October 24, 2009.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Grizabella the Glamour Cat is a principal character in the musical Cats. Once a glamorous star among the Jellicles, she now lives in the gutter, exiled and disgraced. A central plot of the musical revolves around her plight and ultimate forgiveness by the tribe.

# data[].attributes.headline
Even Andrew Lloyd Webber Hated James Corden in Cats

# data[].attributes.subject
Even Andrew Lloyd Webber Hated James Corden in Cats

# data[].attributes.body
This article particularly talks about James Corden and Tom Hooper's vision of character, Bustopher Jones, in comparison to Andrew Lloyd Webber's original vision.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Remember ? The nightmarish film adaptation of the hit musical feels as if it hit theaters 100 years ago, but it was actually only six months. Since then, real-life horrors have superseded those of the digital fur variety, but that doesn't mean Andrew Lloyd Webber is ready to let bygones be bygones. The composer recently recorded a commentary track for the filmed 1998 stage version of Cats, and in the process, had some less-than-charitable things to say about the recent movie adaptation - specifically James Corden 's performance as Bustopher Jones.

This story starts off on a bit of a sad note: Andrew Lloyd Webber's cat Mika was run over and killed last month. Sorry, sorry, I know that's bleak, but context is important. Anyway, Webber decided to record a commentary track for the filmed 1998 stage version of Cats in Mika's memory, during which he threw some shade at James Corden's comic relief portrayal of very fat cat Bustopher Jones. Corden is clearly doing a lot of off-the-cuff improv in the part, throwing out one-liners and quips that never quite land. And Webber took exception to that.

"Bustopher without interruption, as I wrote it," Webber said, referring to the 1998 version of the character. "Do not be beguiled by other versions. Other versions with unfunny interpolations which I begged to be cut out. I did manage to get the worst of them removed. I cannot tell you how absolutely un-[T.S.] Eliot it all was in this song."

Webber doesn't mention Corden by name, of course, but it's very clear who he's referring to. To be fair to Corden, I don't think the terrible Bustopher Jones performance is really his fault. A good director would've noticed how badly the constant quipping was going over and trimmed it down. But Tom Hooper was apparently all-in on whatever Corden was doing.

Corden has commented on the notorious film in the past. "I haven't seen it, I've heard it's terrible," Corden said on a BBC Radio 2 show around the time of the film's release. Later, Corden added that while the movie may have failed, he has good memories of making it:

"So, 1 is the least and 10 is the most. Well, here's the thing, I had the loveliest time making that film. It took me six days and I loved every single second of it. So, I think you've got to be careful not to... you've got to decide things on your own personal experience, and I had a really great time. So, I don't regret doing it at all because I decided to do it in the same way I decided to do many things. Some have worked, some haven't. So, I'm gonna put it at a solid 5... 4.5, 4.5."

That's fair. But you know who doesn't have good memories of the Cats movie? Andrew Lloyd Webber, that's who. At the time of the writing of this story, Webber had yet to comment on how horny all the cats were in the Cats movie.

Cool Posts From Around the Web:

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Did You Hate James Corden's Performance in 'Cats'? So Did Andrew Lloyd Webber

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Remember ? The nightmarish film adaptation of the hit musical feels as if it hit theaters 100 years ago, but it was actually only six months. Since then, real-life horrors have superseded those of the digital fur variety, but that doesn't mean Andrew Lloyd Webber is ready to let bygones be bygones.

# data[].attributes.headline
Why is 'Cats' such a disaster? Blame the concept musical curse 

# data[].attributes.subject
Why is 'Cats' such a disaster? Blame the concept musical curse 

# data[].attributes.body
This article explains as to why Cats really does not work as a movie in the first place due to the original writing of the Broadway musical as a concept musical.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
"Cats" tells the story of a group of cats as they gather for a competition: Who among them most deserves to be reborn. Each feline performs a number to introduce themselves and deliver their best pitch for the prize.

OK, I admit that the phrase "tells the story" is somewhat generous for such a thin premise. Narratively speaking, the nearly-two-hour movie-musical - which opened this past weekend to scathing reviews and a dismal $6.6 million at the box office - covers the same ground as a season-premiere episode of a reality competitions like "The Bachelor" or "Dancing With the Stars."

"If you see this movie - and I offer that up as a hypothetical, not a recommendation - and arrive at the theater not excessively inebriated, you will indeed learn about several different kinds of cat, with stripe and spot formations as impressively varied as their personality types and domestication levels," wrote Times film critic Justin Chang. "There are certainly worse characters one could spend time with, though I am hard-pressed at the moment to think of many worse movies."

The near universal frustration with the onscreen adaptation among film critics is part of the reason why "Cats" was such a cash cow onstage. The Andrew Lloyd Webber composition - borrowing character sketches from T. S. Eliot's whimsical 1939 poetry collection "Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats" - ushered in the era of the blockbuster musical, a kind of catnip for families and tired tourists. It won seven Tony Awards, and remains the fourth-longest-running musical in Broadway history.

"Cats" doesn't have much of a plot because it's a concept musical, which forgoes the traditional story structure of a linear plot in favor of vignettes that collectively discuss a shared subject. The scenes don't necessarily build narratively; instead, they complement one another intellectually or emotionally. Onscreen equivalents, arguably, are multi-arc movies like "Love Actually," "He's Just Not That Into You" and "Valentine's Day," as well as television shows like Netflix's "Black Mirror" or Amazon's "Modern Love."

"Cats" debuted during the early 1980s, when concept musicals had already gained great critical acclaim throughout the previous decades. Though the first attempts at the form were in the 1940s - Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II's "Allegro," and Kurt Weill and Alan Jay Lerner's "Love Life" - the genre became popular in theaters throughout the 1960s and 1970s, with titles like "Man of La Mancha," "Hair," "Pippin," "Cabaret," "Chicago," "A Chorus Line," "Company," "Follies," "Pacific Overtures" and more.

"These concept musicals are avant-garde Broadway book shows," wrote Scott McMillin in his book "The Musical as Drama." "The plots of the concept shows are unpredictable and original. They are driven by confidence that the book has become a narrative art in itself, requiring new ways of relating book to number."

Since concept musicals often stress spectacular stage-centric elements - like sentimental soliloquies and ensemble experiments that were considered groundbreaking at the time - they have often struggled to retain the same appeal onscreen. Many of the most celebrated examples - from "Pippin" to "Company" - have never even been adapted ("Cats" itself was in development off and on since the '90s). And most of those that have - including "Hair" and "Man of La Mancha" - were critical and commercial disappointments.

But by examining the past, through examples of two adaptations that worked and one that failed, maybe we can answer: Where did "Cats" go wrong?

'Cabaret'

"Cabaret" proved that it's possible to turn a hit concept musical into a hit movie. Directed by Harold Prince and featuring music by John Kander and lyrics by Fred Ebb, the 1966 stage musical is framed as an evening inside a Berlin nightclub during Hitler's rise. Its characters - an aspiring novelist, a self-destructive singer, a boarding house owner, a shopkeeper, etc. - act out scenes of a linear narrative, while the club's emcee leads numbers commenting on the topic at hand: how ordinary German citizens could get caught up in Nazi ideology. Wrote Times drama critic Cecil Smith in 1968, after "Cabaret" won eight Tonys: "This is not a play about individuals but of amoral human rot."

Its 1972 film adaptation, directed by Bob Fosse and starring Liza Minnelli, featured drastic changes - character names and backstories altered, numerous songs completely cut and replaced. With such an overhaul, the stage show and the movie only have five songs (plus the finale, a reprise) in common (its newly written songs were added into later stage versions). Still, the integrity of the concept remained largely uncompromised, and challenged the form of the movie musical in the same way the stage show did in its debut.

"'Cabaret' is an exquisitely sculpted milestone in the history of the film musical," wrote Times film critic Charles Champlin. "It is the most thrilling I have ever seen, the most adult, the most intelligent, the most surpassingly artful in its joining of cinema, drama and music to evoke the mood and events of a turning point (and turning place) in history. ... [It] is the kind of achievement - at once singular and collaborative - which the musical movie will have to be measured against hereafter."

The movie "Cabaret" was nominated for 10 Oscars and won eight of them, including the director prize for Fosse, who famously beat out Francis Ford Coppola for "The Godfather."

'A Chorus Line'

At the other end of the adaptation success spectrum lies "A Chorus Line," the Michael Bennett-directed musical that's structured as an audition, and the dancers in question are evaluated upon being asked to share something about themselves. With music by Marvin Hamlisch and lyrics by Edward Kleban, the vignettes offer momentary peeks into the emotionally tumultuous lives of these performers. In addition to the Pulitzer Prize for drama, "A Chorus Line" won nine Tonys and set Broadway records with 15-year run.

"The triumph of 'A Chorus Line' lay in its ability to thrill most people, its greatness lay in the artistry that was necessary to achieve that thrill," wrote critic Martin Gottfried in 1990. "This show was the theater's tribute to itself."

But the 1985 movie - directed by Richard Attenborough and featuring Michael Douglas in the cast - failed to capture this adequately onscreen. "If you were one of that legion who saw 'A Chorus Line' more than once in the theater, the film is enough to make you doubt your judgment. If you've never seen the stage piece, you may come out wondering what in the name of goodness all the fuss was about," wrote Times film critic Sheila Benson.

There are many reasons that the magic of the musical got lost in translation - as Benson pointed out, Bennett's "crisply elegant" choreography "had been all but erased," the movie's editing and cinematography choices were clever but counterproductive to showcase its dancers, and the reassignment of a climactic song from one character to another sabotaged the story: "It's indicative of the earnest, unsoaring, unimaginative conveyance that 'A Chorus Line' has become."

'Chicago'

"Chicago" was a far more successful adaptation attempt. When the Kander and Ebb musical opened on Broadway in 1975, it was presented like a 1920s vaudeville show, with songs that told the stories of "celebrity" criminals and satirically commented on the corruption of the criminal justice system.

Directed by Fosse, the original production only ran on Broadway for two years, but its 1996 concert-like revival from Walter Bobbie won six Tonys and remains the longest-running musical revival on Broadway. Times theater critic Laurie Winer called it "a fabulously confident revival for the post-O.J. era. ... In 1996 a theater-goer can relax and enjoy the show's sleek cynicism with a clear eye and a knowing heart."

The 2002 movie - directed by Rob Marshall and starring Renée Zellweger, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Richard Gere and Queen Latifah - drew inspiration from the revival, but flipped its framing: rather than having the entire story told on a stage to an audience, it was rejiggered into a linear narrative with cutaways to onstage performances that communicated characters' emotions. Multiple songs from the show didn't make it onscreen, while many scenes were restructured to visually and narratively accommodate settings left to the imagination onstage.

Though Times film critic Manohla Dargis didn't think the original text's "darkly cynical attitude toward the media and celebrity" carried over to the film - "denuded of satire, the musical now comes across as another charming if creaky theatrical contrivance," she wrote - the movie won six Academy Awards, including best picture, and grossed over $306 million worldwide. Its success was partially responsible for the annual wave of movie musicals that audiences are offered as of late - the most recent, of course, being "Cats."

So "Cabaret" and "Chicago" proved that concept musicals can be adapted for the big screen, with a bit of reframing to make up for a movie's missing suspension of disbelief, one that only soars when in the room with the performers and the rest of the audience. Ignoring this strategy can be the core detriment of the attempt, as it was for the "Chorus Line" movie.

'Cats'

One of the odd things about "Cats" - of which there are many, yes - is that, despite its commercial success onstage, "few with any real discernment thought the show was any good," explained Times theater critic Charles McNulty. "What ultimately rescued 'Cats' from failure was the directness of its theatrical appeal. This is a dance musical, in which the book is subsidiary to spectacle and motion."

The show's strongest assets were its subliminally erotic choreography, its complete commitment to the artifice, its inherently theatrical ask of an audience to go along with actors in cat costumes, hissing and purring through the aisles. Noted Chang in his film review, "That was the right aesthetic for that live performance medium; it was an example of how inventive stylization and stagecraft could bring a fantasy world to vivid life."

All of that disappears in Tom Hooper's adaptation, which presents viewers with the faces of Judi Dench, Ian McKellen, Jennifer Hudson, Idris Elba, James Corden, Rebel Wilson, Jason Derulo and Taylor Swift, edited onto bodies with "digital fur," human hands and human breasts. Not to mention, human-faced cockroaches. (No patch can fix that.)

"With its grotesque design choices and busy, metronomic editing, 'Cats' is as uneasy on the eyes as a Hollywood spectacle can be, tumbling into an uncanny valley between mangy realism and dystopian artifice," continued Chang.

It's too soon to say if the "Cats" debacle will affect future screen musicals, and how. But 2020 is already looking like a busier-than-usual year for the genre with Steven Spielberg's "West Side Story," Jon Chu's "In the Heights," Lin-Manuel Miranda's "Tick, Tick ... Boom!" and Ryan Murphy's "The Prom" all on the way.

And there are also more concept musical adaptations in the works - including a take on Stephen Sondheim's 1971 show "Follies," which meditates on theater nostalgia, self-image and aging. The clearest lesson those filmmakers can learn? Don't lose sight of its story's most appealing attributes, and make sure they are translated adequately to the big screen.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Why is 'Cats' such a disaster? Blame the concept-musical curse

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
"Cats" tells the story of a group of cats as they gather for a competition: Who among them most deserves to be reborn. Each feline performs a number to introduce themselves and deliver their best pitch for the prize. OK, I admit that the phrase "tells the story" is somewhat generous for such a thin premise.

# data[].attributes.headline
How Cats Compares To The Andrew Lloyd Webber Musical

# data[].attributes.subject
How Cats Compares To The Andrew Lloyd Webber Musical

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The big-screen adaptation Cats is finally out in theaters confusing audiences worldwide, but how does it compare to the original musical? Even in a week where a new film is dominating the box office and pop culture discourse at large, it's been impossible to escape the frenzied conversations surrounding Cats. Universal and Tom Hooper's adaptation of one of the longest-running musicals ever made has long promised to be, if nothing else, a memorable viewing experience. Few people, however, could have predicted how cataclysmic the end result would finally be. The opening weekend box office numbers were tragic, the reviews disastrous, and the much-vaunted "digital fur technology" so bad (and often unfinished) that the studio announced they'd be sending a new version of the film out to theaters with "improved" CGI.

Continue scrolling to keep reading Click the button below to start this article in quick view.

Cats was always going to be an especially strange and tricky story to adapt to the big screen. The musical premiered on the West End in 1981 and stayed there for 21 years, despite Cats' story being notoriously off-the-wall in terms of structure, character, and plot, or lack thereof. The original is based on a collection of poems by T.S. Eliot and as such doesn't really have a linear story to tie its many songs together. It's a show more interested in dance than plot, one where the costumes and sets take priority over the narrative. As such, it's hardly the first Andrew Lloyd Webber musical one would think to make into a studio's Christmastime family spectacle. Still, the musical remains very popular to this day and Universal clearly wanted to tap into that built-in fanbase, so Cats was greenlit and changes were made to wrangle this curious creature into something vaguely suitable for the cinematic experience.

Related: Cats' Rerelease Is A Terrible Idea

Writer Lee Hall of Billy Elliot fame was brought on board to wrangle the story into a manageable screenplay, and Andy Blankenbuehler, the choreographer of , took over from the iconic work pioneered in the original show by Gillian Lynne. Taking something inherently theatrical and making it cinematic is a process that has made many a director stumble. There was no way Cats could go from stage to screen with zero changes, and there are the major differences between the stage musical and the film.

Victoria is Now the Protagonist

On stage, Cats is an ensemble piece, one where no single character receives the lion's share of attention or story. At its core, this is a musical of introductions, where each song is an opportunity for a character to take center stage for a few minutes before passing the torch onto someone else. In the original musical, the character of Victoria the White Cat doesn't even get a song. She's mostly a dance-focused character, one typically played by a ballet dancer because of the complexity of the choreography. For the film, Hooper and Hall have made Victoria, as played by ballet dancer Francesca Hayward, the heroine, one the story follows from beginning to end. She becomes the point-of-view character who is the audience's avatar from song to song, rather than cats simply stepping forward and singing, like on stage.

Cats opens with Victoria's human owner - the only human we see on-screen - abandoning her in an alleyway where she is discovered by the CGI-costumed Jellicle cats tribe. She is quickly, if hesitantly by some, welcomed into the group and allowed to witness the Jellicle choice, to be made by Old Deuteronomy. Victoria is also the one character to fully welcome the exiled Grizabella ( Jennifer Hudson) into the group. In the musical, she is the first cat to touch Grizabella after her big "Memory" number but that doesn't happen until the end. In the movie, we see her slowly trying to bring Grizabella into the fold, despite the rejection of the other cats. At the end of the film, she is fully welcomed into the tribe as a Jellicle, and she also gains a love interest in the form of Mister Mistoffelees, something not present in the musical.

Macavity is the Big Baddie

Macavity, "a most wanted cat", is not in the stage musical all that much. The so-called "Napoleon of Crime", he really only shows up for one big scene where his henchmen kidnap Old Deuteronomy and he tries to return to the tribe disguised as him. His cover is quickly blown by Demeter, one of the two cats who sings the Macavity song, and then he escapes. A more conventional cinematic narrative calls for a villain, so Idris Elba as Macavity has been given a far more prominent role in the movie.

Macavity is now the feared antagonist of the show but, like the other cats, covets the Jellicle Choice and the opportunity to be reborn into a better life. This is why he ends up kidnapping various cats who are his main competition for the top prize, including Bustopher Jones ( James Corden), Jennyanydots ( Rebel Wilson) and Gus the Theater Cat ( Ian McKellen). After these cats' respective musical numbers, Macavity appears to magic them away to a barge on the Thames manned by Growltiger (Ray Winstone.) Macavity's magical powers are never explained.

Related: Every Song On The Cats Movie Soundtrack

Bombalurina, played by Taylor Swift, is now one of Macavity's henchmen rather than simply being one of the cats who sings about him. She enters the scene on a crescent moon and gets all the other cats high with catnip before singing her song. Demeter is nowhere to be seen, presumably because Swift didn't want to share her big musical number. During this moment, Old Deuteronomy is kidnapped and threatened with giving Macavity the Jellicle Choice or she'll be forced to walk the plank. She is saved from this fate by Mister Mistoffelees' magic. Macavity is last seen when Grizabella flies off to the Heavyside Layer on a hot-air balloon attached to a chandelier. He tries to grab onto the chandelier and fly off with Grizabella, but slips and ends up on Nelson's Column, stuck there indefinitely because all of a sudden his magical powers fail him (in the musical, only Mistoffelees has magic abilities).

Old Deuteronomy Is Now Female

On stage, Old Deuteronomy is a male cat, typically played by a baritone singer. The role was gender-flipped to allow Dame Judi Dench the opportunity to join the cast. She had famously originally been part of the first cast of the West End production in the role of Grizabella, which she pulled out of after snapping her Achille's tendon during rehearsals (she was replaced by Elaine Page.) This change doesn't really impact the story in any way except for one: Grizabella's tragic story is partly rooted in her being rejected by society for being an aged woman seemingly past her prime. The poignancy of that is somewhat lost when the revered leader of the cats is Judi Dench (but also not helped by Grizabella being played by a much-younger Jennifer Hudson.) The change made here to fix that problem is the heavy implication that Grizabella was a feline sex worker and that Macavity was her pimp. In a movie full of inexplicable changes, this may be the most baffling one.

The Setting Is Expanded

Due to the limitations of the stage, Cats as a musical takes place on one set, a junk yard set to scale so that the human cast seems cat-sized by comparison. Film gives storytellers the opportunity to expand the world, so Cats now takes place all across London. We see how the cats live in the streets, how they party in Trafalgar Square, and how they infiltrate places like a milkshake bar, a family home, and an abandoned theater where the Jellicle Ball takes place. It's one of the movie's smarter moves, but the inconsistency in the scaling of the sets and props is endlessly distracting. It's also a London where humans seem to disappear after dark.

Cats Is No Longer Dance Focused

When premiered, its dance-focused approach was considered ground-breaking for the medium in the West End. British musicals were mostly rather quaint affairs where the plot would stop and actors would sing songs, with little in the way of complicated choreography, especially when compared to Broadway shows like West Side Story or Oklahoma! Gillian Lynne's work on the show combined ballet, tap, jazz, and mime-style movement to allow the actors to tell the story through dance as much as song. Given the visual appeal of dance, one would think that Hooper and Universal would be keen to focus on that aspect for the movie. Alas, the show is startlingly uninterested in such things.

Related: Cats Bombs At Box Office With $6.5 Million Opening Weekend

There is a lot of dancing in the movie, but none of it is used to tell the story in the way it does on stage, and Hooper's direction and editing make it near-impossible for the audience to focus on it. The unfocused staging and decision to add more plot removes the necessity of the dancing, to the point where it seems like they may have been better off removing it from the show altogether. Victoria's status as one of the main dancers is removed almost entirely thanks to strange directorial choices, which sort of negates the need to have a ballet dancer play the role.

While Cats was always going to be tough to bring to the big screen, many of the reasons it doesn't work are rooted in the changes made from the stage musical. Some of them may have been necessary, but the implementation and reasoning behind them are sorely lacking; as a result, the end product is somehow even more confusing and nonsensical than the musical, which at least had the decency to embrace its inherent kitsch. Was there ever a way that a CGI-heavy Cats movie could have been good? That's debatable, but those choices made for the adaptation process certainly could have been executed better.

Next: Why Cats' Movie Reviews Are So Negative
About The Author

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
How Cats Compares To The Andrew Lloyd Webber Musical

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The big-screen adaptation Cats is finally out in theaters confusing audiences worldwide, but how does it compare to the original musical? Even in a week where a new film is dominating the box office and pop culture discourse at large, it's been impossible to escape the frenzied conversations surrounding Cats .

# data[].attributes.headline
Cats Review: The movie Cats doesn't even know what the musical Cats is about

# data[].attributes.subject
Cats Review: The movie Cats doesn't even know what the musical Cats is about

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
In an alternate universe, the new movie adaptation of Cats, the long-running Andrew Lloyd Webber dance musical about cats, could have been a glorious holiday gift to the world. I've written a lot this year about how weird Cats is, and believe me, Cats, a story in which lots of cats introduce themselves and then one of them goes to cat heaven, is inherently weird. But there's a vibrant, fun spark that runs through the musical's threadbare plot - after all, it's based on a book of children's poems by T.S. Eliot - and despite the public's generally baffled reaction to this movie's existence, Cats had the potential to be joyous and light.

But it also had the potential to be a giant embarrassment, and I was wary that Cats wouldn't be able to overcome either its own inherent quirkiness or the penchant of its director, Tom Hooper, to obliterate any emotional ebb and flow in his films and ratchet the pathos up to 11 at all times. His previous musical adaptation, 2012's Les Misérables, was Oscar-nominated but also critically lambasted thanks to Hooper's frequent misuse of fundamental filmmaking techniques, like close-ups and camera angles. As a fan of the stage musical's mix of spectacle and compelling human drama, I also felt like he obliterated most of the musical's emotional and scenic appeal.

So I was not optimistic. But I found it promising that Hooper was already a big Cats fan; plus, he had the assistance of Hamilton choreographer Andy Blankenbuehler, who also choreographed the recent Cats revival on Broadway, as well as Lloyd Webber himself. Maybe this would all go well.

Friends, it did not go well.

Some elements of Cats almost work. The set looks terrific, even though the scale is nonsensically inconsistent. The dancing is wonderful - when the camera manages to sit still long enough to showcase it. The music is essentially unchanged, and I happen to like the new song. It's got its share of tongue-in-cheek levity, my particular favorite being the moment Judi Dench's Old Deuteronomy solemnly instructs us, the audience, to address our cats thusly: "O, Cat." One musical sequence in particular came really close, for me, to capturing Cats ' effervescent whimsy.

But Hooper makes baffling directorial decisions at every turn. His staging misses key opportunities to bring the onscreen action in line with our expectations and especially with the music. This is a crucial point of objection, because Cats is primarily about the music and not much else. But Hooper's film far too frequently disconnects its audience from its musical score by making choices that undercut or distract from what the music is doing. And that contributes to the overall disjointed, confusing effect Cats leaves us with.

Here's a brief breakdown of the ways Cats maladapts its source material. (Some minor Cats spoilers follow.)

When the music of Cats is at its most happy and danceable, Cats the movie shows us lots of other stuff that is not a bunch of happy dancing cats

Embedded above is the discombobulating, jarring, trippy overture to Cats. There's a lot of discordant synthesizer noise at first that builds up, rather brilliantly, I think, to the introduction of Cats' main theme at 1:11 - the Jellicle cats theme. You can hear this very clearly in the orchestration: The single melody takes over from all the bombastic orchestral noise, the bottom drops out completely, and the only thing that's left is this slinky, delightfully feline melody.

What do you picture in your mind when you hear these soaring notes, my fellow travelers? Do you see, maybe, a row of curious, dizzying, daring cats venturing forth beneath an expansive London night? Or, perhaps, a single solitary cat leaping into the frame with all of the joy and majesty and agility that only a cat - or a human pretending to be a cat - could bring to this kind of bobbing, weaving melodic line?

Or do you see the visceral thump of a cat's helpless body as it bounces off an alley step after being abandoned by its owner?

Guess which option Tom " both feet in the bucket of cement " Hooper got excited about? If you prayed for the former, you are, sadly, wrong.

This is how Cats, the movie, opens - with a cat in a bag being physically abused in time to this music. What about this music screams "throw a cat down a bunch of steps at the climax," Tom Hooper? Who hurt you?! A dramatic moment like this could have been an effective way to open the film, but instead it has a fundamentally discordant effect. Which emotion are we supposed to be experiencing? The one connected to what we're seeing - a pet being brutally abandoned - or the one connected to what we're hearing, which is a jaunty musical theme meant to convey the essence of a cat's mystery and inscrutability?

Again and again, Hooper shoves stuff at us visually that has nothing to do with what we're hearing. The staging seems to ignore the dictates of the music to an infuriating degree; the camera often zooms in and out for inexplicable reasons and follows cats around the edges of the looming set while other stuff fills the background. It's difficult to get a handle, visually, on where we're supposed to be focused.

This spatial confusion meant that there were several times in which the film suddenly introduces us to major characters, only to be met with laughter by the audience at my screening. In a stage musical, character entrances should always be seeded dramatically with proper blocking, lighting, and musical cues - something a film can and should approximate, instead of just randomly cutting to someone we've never seen before. When something as simple as a character entrance is met with ridicule for being so abrupt and inexplicable, there is a serious, intrinsic problem with your movie musical.

Throughout this unfocused staging, the ensemble dancing that would ideally take precedent - you know, the thing you're here to see, dancing cats - is frequently happening way off in the background. It's maddening! In the 2016 Broadway revival, Blankenbuehler's choreography made ample room for large ensemble numbers, which suggests this paucity of ensemble dancing lies squarely at Hooper's feet. Particularly in the Jellicle Ball, which is supposed to be the big dancing cats scene, the majority of the number is now allotted to individual cats having random solo dance-offs. We don't care about these individual dance-offs, though, because we know next to nothing about these individual cats. We just came for lots of cats dancing together! Give us lots of wide, full-body shots of rows of dancing cats, Tom Hooper! JUST GIVE US THE DANCING CATS!

You know - like this:

It introduces lots of new stuff, but the new stuff just makes Cats more confusing, not less

You might not think it possible that Cats the musical could become more baffling, given the addition of new contextual material to its random and barely there plot. But you would be so, so wrong.

For instance: The movie starts with our abused and abandoned cat, Victoria (Francesca Hayward), being dumped on the street by her former owners and then immediately inducted into the ineffable world of Jellicle-ness. There's not a moment's pause between these events. She doesn't even get a moment to be sad! It's just thump-bounce-thump, welp, here's your new life, kid. This isn't just bad pacing, it's a muddled delineation of exposition. The movie then goes one step further and dramatically presents the idea that Victoria needs to learn her own secret Jellicle name. It stands to reason that this development means Victoria's narrative will end with her finding out what that name is. Nope! Never happens.

Then there's the backstory for Grizabella, Jennifer Hudson's once-glamorous dance cat who's now, erm, a fallen cat prostitute. (I told you, Cats is weird.) The details regarding Grizabella's journey from celebrated performer to sex worker have never been clear in any version - but in the film, they're made even more bizarre. That's because another cat, Macavity (Idris Elba), is now, somehow, her pimp and a catnip pusher. So instead of just having to accept cat sex workers, we have to accept an entire feline underground of sex and drug trafficking.

Was this more necessary to helping us understand Cats than, for example, actually showing us some of the fabulous scenes Gus performed in his acting heyday? While we're at it, did we really need an extended sequence of Rebel Wilson's Jennyanydots eating cockroaches? And why on earth was she wearing a whole fake catsuit over her actual cat body; did her schtick as a cat who's mostly active at night really necessitate cosplaying as ... a larger version of herself? Why did some scenes take every lyric literally, while others ignored the lyrics altogether? Why is it that every time Jennifer Hudson shows up, it feels like a completely different movie just walked onto the set and tried to tell you its melodramatic sob story when you just came out for some dancing? What is up with that random leg lift Deuteronomy does?! Is she horny for Gus?! And did we need to see Judi Dench being horny for Ian McKellan?!

I could live with one or two of these things being presented as part of the ineffable mystery of Cats, with no resolution sought or needed. But when every scene presents us with a pile of these endless bafflements, it becomes a giant, inexplicable mess.

With considerably less literalism, more attention given to the spirit of Cats, plenty of wider camera angles allowing the dancing to be the main focus as it always should have been, and clearer direction, this could have been a sincere pleasure. Instead, Tom Hooper has created a clusterfuck that will spawn an instantly ironic, mocking cult following.

I know this version of Cats had this squandered potential somewhere in its feline soul because of the one moment that somehow manages, despite everything, to be absolutely charming. That number, of all things, is "Skimbleshanks the Railway Cat," the random train song that features the world's most extra time signature (13/8, my god!) and one of Cats' most forgettable characters. But in the movie, there's a minor miracle: After a killer tap-dance break from Skimbleshanks (Steven McRae), we're treated to a glorious wide shot showing a line of cats dancing under the sky over the River Thames. And just like that, Cats suddenly becomes magical. It's a glimpse of another movie altogether - one that treats its story like a poetic child's dream of a cat's life, as T.S. Eliot originally intended, instead of this film's mostly heavy-handed, stone-cold, somber approach.

So here's my compromise. I'm just going to pretend that Macavity, the drug-pushing magical pimp, snuck onto the set of Cats and steadily vanquished all the sequences of that other, better film to the far realm of Growltiger's pirate ship. I'm going to pretend that Skimbleshanks was the only sequence from that other, better film that managed to escape and find its way to us. I will hold that other film-that-could-have-been close to my heart and hope this inferior, imposter version of Cats hasn't soured us too badly on movie musicals.

And when people ask me if I liked Cats, I will clutch my teal-sequined Cats premiere headband and say: Look - a new day has begun.
Will you help keep Vox free for all?
There is tremendous power in understanding. Vox answers your most important questions and gives you clear information to help make sense of an increasingly chaotic world. A financial contribution to Vox will help us continue providing free explanatory journalism to the millions who are relying on us. Please consider making a contribution to Vox today, from as little as $3.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Does Tom Hooper know that Cats is supposed to be fun?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In an alternate universe, the new movie adaptation of Cats, the long-running Andrew Lloyd Webber dance musical about cats, could have been a glorious holiday gift to the world. I've written a lot this year about how weird Cats is, and believe me, Cats, a story in which lots of cats introduce themselves and then one of them goes to cat heaven, is inherently weird.

# data[].attributes.body
Hooper made changes to one of Cats most recognizable and iconic characters, Grizabella the Glamour Cat. Rather than being a cat who had a glamourous life that turned into shambles, she is now a prostitute who's pimp is no other than Macavity.

# data[].attributes.body
Utilizing originator criticism, I will be critiquing Tom Hooper's adaptation of Cats. While doing so, I will be referencing DeWitt Parker's Logic of Aesthetic form, as mentioned in the textbook.

# data[].attributes.body
Macavity, unlike in the original Broadway production, is made out to be the film's main antagonist as he causes havoc throughout the movie.

# data[].attributes.body
Rather than having the CGI creepy cats, most audiences preferred that the film would pay homage to its originator by having the cast in costume and makeup as they would in the Broadway production.

# data[].attributes.body
Tom Hooper deeply trusted his cast and colleagues during the making of Cats. In Rebel Wilson's particular scene, she wanted to feature CGI mice as children and tap dancing cockroaches. Which in this scene, she portrays the most disturbing scene of the movie.

# data[].attributes.body
Since the release of the trailer for Cats, audiences complained how creepy and eerie the CGI characters appeared. Right before theatre release, they made CGI modifications.

# data[].attributes.headline
Live Commentary from Andrew Lloyd Webber

# data[].attributes.subject
Live Commentary from Andrew Lloyd Webber

# data[].attributes.body
In this video, Andrew Lloyd Webber directly critiques Tom Hooper's adaptation of Cats, in which his provides his own opinion specifically to Hooper's changes to the musical. As mentioned in my essay, Webber mentions his dissatisfaction with character Bustopher Jones in this video, mentioning the changes made by Hooper and performance done by James Corden.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
A Live Commentary from Andrew: Cats The Musical (1998)