Musical Review

Production: Cats

Company: Broadway Across Canada

Director and Choreographer for Tour: Richard Stafford

Venue: Edmonton Jubilee Auditorium

When: September 30 to October 5, 2008

Reviewed By: Xanthe Couture (Edmonton Correspondent – Canada)

A night at Cats spent watching and listening to Growltiger, Mungojerrie and Rumpelteazer, among others, sing about their lives as cats, is much more entertaining than spending a night at home with your average cat.

If you are seeing Cats for the first time as an adult, you will be wishing you could have seen it as a child. It is hard not to feel a slight twinge of jealousy as the children in the audience try and sit calmly with their faces painted as cats. Once the lights go dim and the familiar music starts, the cats slyly creep up and down the aisles and the spectacle of dancing, and singing cats begins.

Cats is based on original works by the famed T.S Eliot, who got it in his head to write some poems on what he supposed occurred in the world of cats for his friends and godchildren and compiled it into "Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats", published in 1939.

Cats opened on Broadway more than twenty-five years ago, in 1982, and it was the longest running Broadway musical of all time until it was knocked off the top spot by another infamous Alexander Lloyd Weber production, Phantom of the Opera. It has toured the world and been seen my millions. Yet Broadway Across Canada’s production of the musical still attracts an excited audience dressed up in all their finery to attend the play where the famous tune “Memory” was created.

Having this in mind, seeing Cats is like watching a musical fusion of literary and pop-culture history.

The characters of Cats are imaginative interpretations and unforgettable. There is the tired and embattled Grizabella, who was once the most glamorous cat of all the Jellicle cats, and sings of her "Memories" after the other cats have shunned her because of her tattered appearance. With heart wrenching lyrics such as: "It's so easy to leave me/ All alone with the memory/ Of my days in the sun", it's all too easy to forget that you are watching someone singing who is dressed in a cat costume.

Then there is Rum Tum Tugger, who is the epitome of a ladies’ man but in cat form. For added glamour, he wears a black bellbottom Elvis-style jumpsuit. Other memorable performances include Gus; an old cat that sings of his heyday in the theatre. The drab back alley stage transformed into a pirate ship, as Gus recounted one of his performances as Growltiger, a pirate who was forced to walk the plank.

From the “Naming of Cats” at the beginning where the odd nature of the cats’ names are explained, to the cats gathering under the moon for the Jellicle Ball where the cats dance and Mr. Mistoffelees magical feat to make Old Deuteronomy reappear, the feline infused ballet and at times, operatic singing are mesmerizing.

Known as the first hugely successful musical with over-the-top set design, effects and costumes, Cats remains a classic worth seeing. If not for its entertainment value, then at least for its history and lasting impact on what defines a successful and elaborate Broadway production.