Love it or hate it, Cats is a song-and-dance sensation that’s been wowing audiences for 44 years. It’s back in South Africa with a sensational young cast, backed up by a creative team with decades of experience. Cats is “definitely not for the faint-hearted”, says Matt Krzan, a theatre performer who has had a close relationship with this era-defining musical for 22 years – that’s half his life spent with the show, on and off the stage.
London-based Krzan, who is both a veteran cat and a besotted fan, has been in Cape Town for the past two months teachingCatsto a South African cast for a new production that opens on 10 December atArtscapebefore a globetrotting tour during which it will ignite stages in at least half a dozen foreign countries. He says that, based on what he’s seen in rehearsals, there’s not a faint heart among them; rather, he says they are hungry to learn, eager to please and ready to endure the rigours of what’s considered the toughest musical there is. Aside from the sheer physical stamina demanded of the cast, there’s the level of buy-in to get not only under the skin and fur, makeup and hairdos of almost 30 different cats, but to accept as real the frankly loopy storyline developed by the show’s makers in a brave attempt to make the children’scat poems of TS Eliotcohere into something resembling a credible narrative.
Back in the early 1980s, much of that inventiveness fell to Trevor Nunn, the show’s original West End director, while it was composer Andrew Lloyd Webber who took Eliot’s words and set them to music that would captivate the world. It was Nunn who insisted in a letter to Lloyd Webber that the entire cast of characters “MUST BE CATS”, adding that it should include “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.” This central conceit – of a cast entirely composed of animals – was kept a secret from press and public until the show’s West End debut in 1981. Dench had been cast as Grizabella, the cat who sings the show’s indelible showstopper, Memory.
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Instead, it was received as a triumph and Dench’s replacement, Elaine Paige, belted out one of the most memorable songs in human history –Memoryis said by many to be musical theatre’s most successful song, with at least 600 covers of it in existence, including hit versions byBarry ManilowandBarbra Streisand. What Cats did, apart from confounding expectation, was become a global juggernaut that changed the manner in which West End and Broadway blockbusters operated by establishing long-lasting, highly recognisable brand identities. The pair of yellow cat eyes with silhouetted dancers for pupils remains an instantly identifiable logo that has helped lure anywhere between 73 and 81 million people to see the show.
Without foreknowledge of its success, you’d need to be a bit eccentric – mad, even – to imagine doing Cats at all. It’s built on a kind of surreal logic, an hallucinogenic creative impulse that’s as much deranged as it is magnificent: Grown-up audiences made to accept a stage full of grown-ups prancing about in leotards pretending to be cats. And the plot? It’s barely there, more a device used to make a series of children’s poems set to music make some sort of sense.
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