I've Seen Cats Four Times - First Third

David Letterman/Paul Newman/Singing Cats

"Where the hell are the singing Cats?" 1993, David Letterman's first episode on CBS. Twenty-six and a half years ago, Cats was such an astonishingly common reference point in the American carnival that David Letterman could use Paul Newman to pull off an astonishing comic bait-and-switch in an extremely crucial episode for him, and everybody in America knew that 'the Singing Cats' was talking about this infected zit on the lip of Broadway that's run for nearly forty years...

Why was Cats a mega-hit? I have no idea except to say that it was sprinkled with that magic dust with which Andrew Lloyd Webber sparked his astonishing run of success. At the heart of Webber's musical talent, if it can be said to have one, is a real melodic gift. There's no question, his shows are proscenium slope-to-slope packed with tunes, are they great tunes? Well, it probably depends on whom you ask. I wouldn't say so, but even so, it's a real gift. Ask any composer how easy it is to come up with a melody, they don't grow on trees for most of us. But even if these are real melodies and astonishingly progenitive, they are so maddeningly catchy because they're not exactly complex melodies. They are so easy to remember that they're grating. Compare one of the most memorable tunes of Andrew Lloyd Webber (up to 0:40), it's the definition of four-square, eight completely symmetrical bars, the harmonies are just as predictable, not a surprise anywhere to be found. You'll find the same predictability in Close Every Door to Me or Don't Cry for Me Argentina. Now compare it with probably the most famous melody of his contemporary, Paul McCartney. A seven bar asymetrical melody, preceded by a three bar introduction, with chromatic walking bass line,  and then the intrusion of a string quartet. When it comes to musical creativity, this is the real thing, Andrew Lloyd Webber is extremely competent at what he does. Is it artistically creative? Well... not really.  It's generic purveyance of maddeningly catchy earworms with electronic scores and simple syncopations that sound uncannily like soft rock, Fleetwood Mac, Hall & Oates, Phil Collins, and yes, Billy Fucking Joel. Rock music completely defanged of its subversion, mass marketed and pastiched for an audience who thinks that everything in the world is just fine. The absence of musical content tarted up with literally millions of dollars strewn about the stage. The Broadway truism of the time was that you went home from Andrew Lloyd Webber shows singing the scenery. The true genius of Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals was not Webber or his lyricist Tim Rice, it was producers like Cameron Mackintosh and Bill Kenright, who perceived within the mindnumping catchiness of Webber's melodies a blank slate on which they could mount an unpredictable theater experience that is truly cinematic, with music and lyrics that are just barely good enough to support such high concept theatrical machines without drawing attention to themselves. It's also precisely what made Michael Jackson and Madonna, the true genius in their songs is not the songs but the videos which accompanied their release, and what you're remembering in their songs is not just the music itself, but the recall of the entire visual production. And so successful was this deceptive formula that after a not entirely successful run of shows that included Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Jesus Christ Superstar, and Evita, the Webber juggernaut realized that so based was their formula on production design that they could literally make a review show about cats with no plot whatsoever, and it would be a bigger hit than West Side Story or Gypsy. 

To be an unassailable success, production, not substance, is what it took to distinguish oneself artistically in late 20th century Anglophonia. Here's the first two paragraphs of Frank Rich's 1982 review, back when nobody knew he had a political thought in his head, and he was merely the New York Times' theater critic, known as 'The Butcher of Broadway.' And yet butcher Cats he didn't really. Quote:

THERE'S a reason why ''Cats,''... is likely to lurk around Broadway for a long time - and it may not be the one you expect.

It's not that this collection of anthropomorphic variety turns is a brilliant musical or that it powerfully stirs the emotions or that it has an idea in its head. Nor is the probable appeal of ''Cats'' a function of the publicity that has accompanied the show's every purr since it first stalked London 17 months ago. No, the reason why people will hunger to see ''Cats'' is far more simple and primal than that: it's a musical that transports the audience into a complete fantasy world that could only exist in the theater and yet, these days, only rarely does. Whatever the other failings and excesses, even banalities, of ''Cats,'' it believes in purely theatrical magic, and on that faith it unquestionably delivers.

'...Rarely exists in the theater... 'why is that? Because theater is not movies, and most attempts to make theater to look realistically high concept is a disaster. Obviously there are exceptions. But would it add anything to the experience if we the storm in King Lear had real water and we felt the wind blow? When the statue in Don Giovanni sends the titular antagonist to hell, would it really be any more frightening if we saw hell? The music in Don Giovanni already does such heavy lifting, all the stage needs to make it work is a trap door! Sweeney Todd's had a whole series huge, grandly operatic productions, but I can't imagine any Sweeney Todd was more devastating than the one I saw in London, 2004, which took place in a theater barely the size of a small lecture hall, every singer played an instrument to accompany the other singers, and the staging was as abstract as it is in any Greek drama. Theater as the long tradition of poetics always understood it has its roots as a religious rite for the worship of the Greek gods, and its synergy comes from the faith it generates within the audience that we are conjuring a different reality through incredibly false means. It was a much more complex vision of worship than much of what we have in today's monotheism, but that transubtantiation is at the essence of so many of the most basic religious rites, not just in the obvious - the Catholic Eucharist or Communion, but in any nearly element of Jewish Passover Seder which asks its participants to do nothing less than transcend time to partake in ancient acts of Jewish history through religious symbols, or even in the Islamic prohibition of images of the Prophet or Allah. In all three religions, the issue at stake is the belief that the most banal material can very easily become transcendent. It's all pure theater, but theater, good theater, and there's no better theater than religion, is very very real to the people convinced to believe in it. All of this partakes of the same process that Catholics call transubstantiation in which what was a moment ago completely terrestrial and humdrum becomes divine and of a different world.

But movies have their roots in science, the manipulation of light, which was once thought divine, by electricity, the forces of the divine given corporeal form. Movies are already fake, so on a movie screen, the more realistic the effects, the more vivid they are. Movies can take us to faraway fantasy lands, but admittedly with a lot of exceptions, particularly in movies early days, the fantasy must look plausible. If the space effects in Star Wars and the alternate universe of Lord of the Rings looked implausible, we would laugh at them. If the Velociraptors in Jurassic Park and the Terminator did not move as though they could jump out of the screen, we would never be scared. And if the violence in The Godfather or Raging Bull or Schindler's List looked fake, we would never remember these movies. Imagine a fake  looking desert in Lawrence of Arabia or The Searchers, imagine a Psycho that isn't cut quickly enough between shots to hide the fact that you don't see the knife going in. The effects in movies are so little unless we believe we've actually seen the real thing.

But the realness of theater is right in front you, you need fantasy, and for better or worse, nothing exists more in the land of the imagination than singing cats... I've never seen the show live, I can't imagine I'd like it much, but I completely understand why people do. Theater needs us to suspend disbelief, and nothing makes us suspend disbelief as quickly as... (Jellicle Ball... to 1:15)

But even a show that's good theater doesn't have to be anywhere near this stupid. How the fuck did a show this dumb ever sustain the cash flow year after year of a small country? The answer is that the economics of theater, the economics of America itself, demanded mega-production on a scale unextant before the oil crisis of 1973. In a balanced national economy, during a period when the world was so imbalanced that America controlled more than 50% of the world's GDP and a large American middle class was unassailably secure, it was very easy to make productions of middling expense, a success would make a medium amount of money, a failure would lose a medium amount of money, and whether the play ran for a week or a year, you would simply move onto the next show. But by the mid-70s, all that was over, and shows which failed stood to lose so much money that you had to bet everything on every show, because as always in the arts, some shows are guaranteed to fail, and therefore every success must recoup the costs of the failures. Even Andrew Lloyd Webber had two failures during the 70s when it seemed as though he could do no wrong! Therefore, these enormous investments require concepts that keep these millions of dollars as absolutely safe as can be. So rather than tell any number of astonishingly subversive stories, we get a musical about: (Mr. Mistophelees up to 2:13)

Cats is still on Broadway, thirty-eight years into its run, but as a whole, the world basically forgot about Cats, and there is so... little... reason... to remember it! Cats was a product of 1980, everything about it is bad David Bowie. The score is B-level synth pop, the costumes Ziggy Stardust with fur. It has no discernible plot, no discernible character development, virtually every song is based on an introduction to a different cat, and practically every cat is based on a cat pun (extra points if you get the pun in that sentence...). THAT IS THE ENTIRETY OF THE SHOW! IT IS LITERALLY A SHOW ABOUT CAT PUNS, AND IT'S RUN FOR NEARLY FORTY YEARS!

So yes, I saw Cats four times. Why? Because it's there! It is far and away my favorite movie this year.  No movie this year was as good as Cats was bad! I have also failed to see Cats twice. One time the movie had so many technical gliches that i took it as a sign it was bad juju to see such a terrible movie again. I then went to the theater to see it another four times. 

I was also thrown out of another showing....  my second that day. You heard both halves of that sentence correctly.... What happened was that I snuck a computer into Cats earlier that to take notes because, obviously, after all this, I had to do a podcast on Cats. I snuck the computer in again tonight to take more notes on whatever I had missed the first time, and considering that most of the last viewing was spent looking at my computer, it's highly likely that there was more to find out. So I go back late that night, and everything goes according to plan, no computer check even though I'd gotten so cocky that it's not even a bag, I just tucked it under the flap of my coat. I go into the theater, and of course a weekday 10:30 showing of a flop is utterly empty. But then, I realize, oh shit, I forgot to open the file on google where my notes are, and there's no wifi. So unless I want to take notes on my phone where the keyboard is of course extremely small, I have to go outside and ask them if there's wifi and hope that they have a sense of humor and pity. There are three at the desk, and two of them looked like they'd have been cool with it, but one of them is clearly more a stickler than the others, takes one look at me and doesn't let me go back in unless I give him the computer:

so I say: If I can't take my computer, I'm not seeing this movie, it's Cats!
he says: But this is the movie you came for!
I say I came to take notes on the movie!
Him: Why? Are you a reviewer?
... ... ... um ... yes ....
 ...Let me call the manager' says he.

(he calls the manager, the manager comes)

Manager say: It doesn't matter whether or not he says he's a reviewer, he might be here to record the movie illegally.
It's CATS!!!
 You might distract people with your typing and the light.
(beat) I'm the only person in the theater. IT'S CATS!!!!!!!!!
Manager: I'm sorry. The studio is very clear on this.
Me: Well, I'm here to write about it. If I can't write about it, there's no point in seeing the movie. You owe me a free pass.
he goes 'Alright...' and dejectedly gives me a free pass...

So I managed to stifle it until I got inside the car, but from the moment I got in I cry-laughed like Jack Nicholson's Joker for twenty minutes, and I still feel dizzy from the lack of control over my lungs.after six times in the theater I even feel like I've memorized the trailors. 

I also stayed routinely to count the credits, because the sheer amount of talent, skill, and love that went into this movie is on the same level as the Wizard of Oz. This is a perfect movie, it gets everything wrong. It takes the most astonishingly large artistic risks and fails at every single one of them! And like a great movie, its failure completely rewards repeat viewings. Any great work of art is self-renewing, every time you see it, you find new meanings, and every time I've seen Cats, I've found new ways in which this movie is risible.

Cats: the movie, cost NINETY-FIVE MILLION DOLLARS! Eighteen prop dressers, twelve model drawers, five third assistant sound editors, five shooting electricians, six rigging electricians, six more electrical riggers, ten costume standbys, six seamstress, eight hair and makeup artists, seven set pa's, three dialect coaches,  three unit medics, at least seven assistant directors, four physiotherapists, four conductors, six orchestrators, eight digital animators, five visual effects producers, fice visual effects coordinators, eric fellner, whoever he is, has four assustants, fice animation supervisors, twelve animation supervisors, twelve effects production managers, a couple hundred digital artists with twelve department heads, and roughly a hundred forty other special effects artists. And literally at least a thousand or many more visual effects supervisors. There's even a cat movement specualist! And all of this for a musical about cat puns!

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