Cats

What Cats actually is

There is no story in the ordinary sense. A tribe of cats, the Jellicles, gather once a year for a ball at which one of them is chosen to ascend to the Heaviside Layer and be born again. Between the gathering and the choosing, the cats introduce themselves — which is where the poems come in.

The text is T. S. Eliot's <em>Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats</em>, published in 1939 and written for his godchildren. Almost every lyric is Eliot, set nearly as written. That is the show's real oddity: a musical whose book is a poetry collection, and whose author had been dead for sixteen years when it opened.

The exception is the one number everybody can hum. “Memory” has a lyric by Trevor Nunn, the production's director, assembled from two other Eliot poems — “Rhapsody on a Windy Night” and “Preludes” — because Grizabella needed a song and the book did not contain one.

What a ticket buys is dance. Gillian Lynne's choreography is the spine of the evening, John Napier's design puts the audience at a cat's eye level in a junkyard built at three times life size, and the cast are in front of you for most of three hours in costume and makeup. It is the rare musical that works for someone who does not follow plots — and the rare one that frustrates someone who wants one.