Broadway The Cats - The Musical That Broke All Records
The beginning of the eighties was a bad time for Broadway. Audiences had deserted theatres. At such a time, through a master stroke of inspiration, Andrew Lloyd Webber its music composer and Cameron Mackintosh its producer, jet-propelled to Broadway The Cats from London. It was being showed there at the West End theatre. The days that followed resulted in the turnaround of Broadway. So here is my review...
Directed by Trevor Nunn, Cats the Musical premiered at the Winter Garden Theater on Broadway on October 7, 1982. It played 7,485 live showings to jam-packed audiences in New York from then onwards until September 10, 2000 and made a total of $380 million. It became the longest running show in Broadway history on 19th June 1997, when it crept ahead of A Chorus Line, during its 6,138th performance. Its record was later broken only by The Phantom of The Opera, incidentally also by Andrew Lloyd Webber.
In 1983, Cats The Broadway Show received the Tony Awards for the Best Musical, the Best Original Score and The Best Book of a Musical. It also got the awards for Best Featured Actress, Best Direction, Best Featured Actor, Best Lighting Design, and Best Costume Design.
Andrew Lloyd Webber received the inspiration for Cats from the Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats by T.S. Eliot. It was the habit of Andrew Lloyd Webber to first compose music after a storyline had been decided and then ask a lyricist to write the lyrics for it. However, he used the other approach when he composed the music for the existing verses in the above book in 1977. The idea of a musical play based on the verses in the book occurred to him after composing the piece for the verse Tell Me On A Sunday in the book. Valerie Eliot, the second wife of T.S. Eliot, gave Webber various unpublished pieces of verse written by her husband in the summer of 1980. It included Grizabella the Glamour Cat. Reading the verse evoked dramatical and musical images in Webber's mind. Once the idea was born, Webber sat with Trevor Nunn. What followed became history. Cats the Musical did not have any spoken dialogues. Its storyline revolved around the selection of a suitable cat to ascend to heaven to be reborn. It was told on stage by artistes all in the garb of cats through 24 songs enacted in two Acts. It had feline dances and the whirling flourishes of the garish costumes of cat dervishes based on Gillian Lynne's acrobatic choreographic sequences. Nobody had expected Cats to do so well on Broadway, especially because of the slim plot. However, its music, songs, dances, costumes, and overall the vivid imagination that it evoked in the minds of its audiences was really the key to its success. After its great success on Broadway The Cats was also converted into a video by Andrew Lloyd in 1998. The film version was released on VHS and DVD.
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