Last weekend, I revisited the 1981 musical Cats, screening it for the grandkids with a certain amount of festivity (pillows and popcorn). The connections they made were terrific, their questions spot on, and overall, it was a hit. A few days later, while reviewing video portions of Unit 5 from Discovering Music for a course I teach online at Memoria Academy, I stopped to consider how effortlessly we “clicked” Cats into our family room.

It’s easy to overlook the extraordinary technology that allows this to happen. Yet, in my comments in Unit 5, I was effusing over the fact that the Metropolitan Opera could beam live Saturday matinees into select movie theaters (and encouraging students to find them, drive to them, and take advantage of the experience)! My enthusiasm, appropriate in 2009, surely sounds quaint to today’s high schoolers whose lives are shaped by streaming.

For good or evil, the internet brings us everything. Those who choose its endless treasures can make fantastic material available to students (and to ourselves: case in point, my secret pleasure in 1970s British comedies). In the case of Cats, I had access to this production because of subscribing to a service called HD Broadway when preparing Show Boat for our January episode of A Night at the Opera.” Since then, I’ve taken advantage of the subscription to watch several musicals about which I was curious.

I remember the huge splash Cats made when it opened, both in the press and in the popular culture. Composer Andrew Lloyd Webber had steep hills to climb to get this unusual musical, staged in the round, in front of an audience (if I’m not mistaken, he took out a second mortgage on his home at one juncture). Its success is legion, opening in 1981 at the New London Theater for a run of 21 years. The Broadway production, opening a year later, ran for 18 years and garnered seven Tony awards in 1983. The show has been translated into at least 15 languages and seen by an estimated 73 million people.

Cats is based on a curious collection of poems by T. S. Eliot called Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats (1939) that he wrote for his godchildren. Fascinated by these poems, Lloyd Webber amplified them with other material by Eliot and some clever crafting to weave a solid plot. Cats is a visual kaleidoscope of dance and song, undergirded by a moral fable. The highly distinctive cats Rum Tum Tugger, Mr. Mistoffelees, Jennyanydots, SkimbleShankes, and others are not just randomly cavorting in the junkyard (albeit a glittery junkyard and precisely the kind of place you’d find a community of balletic stray cats); they are also competing in the annual Jellicle Ball wherein one of their members will be deemed worthy to ascend into the Heaviside Layer, a heavenly sphere, where the cat will be reborn.

Within this swirl, the antagonist McCavity Cat, enlarged from Eliot’s poems into a truly evil villain, is pitted against the wise, aged leader of the cat tribe, Old Deuteronomy. The last principal character is disdained by the community: Grizabella, an ancient dame of a cat who, though spectacular in her youth, has been reduced to a disheveled wreck. (Not wishing to spoil the show, so stop if you wish . . . ) Grizabella, surprisingly, will be chosen as the cat to receive rebirth and restoration, and those who ridiculed her are chastened.

I remember when Grizabella’s song “Memory” became a mega-hit. Before I saw the musical, I thought it was some kind of soaring, independent tune or the main hit of a formulaic romance where the spurned lover pours out her heart. Instead, this song serves as the leitmotif of the whole show, expressing many a truth about the mortal life and, through inspiring textual transformations, knitting together the whole drama.   

Maybe the greatest interest in Cats is not the poet, Eliot, or the composer, Lloyd Webber (who shortly thereafter would find even bigger fame with his Phantom of the Opera), but the choreographer, Dame Gillian Lynne (1926-2018). Her story is compelling and touching. A child who could not find her way, or even function in the British schools of her day, she was taken to a doctor who opened her mother’s eyes to the fact that this little girl’s entire being resonated to movement—dance. In what might seem a fairy tale, the mother enrolled the child in ballet and everything changed. Gillian became rooted, made exceptional progress, and was quickly identified as an important talent.

Her life did not stay a fairy tale long, though, because her mother was killed (along with three lady friends) in a terrible car wreck when Gillian was thirteen, leaving four families bereft of their mothers. This tragedy was followed by the outbreak of World War II. Still, for the rest of her life, she felt her mother’s joyful eye supporting her as a dancer and choreographer. Today, the New London Theater where Cats held its long run has been renamed in Lynne’s honor, a festive occasion which she lived to see. She also told her story in an autobiography A Dancer in Wartime: One Girl’s Journey from the Blitz to Sadler’s Wells (2011). I have not yet read this, so I do not know what to say, but it’s coming to my house soon, via snail mail.

It is hard not to smile, imagining what T.S. Eliot (d. 1965) might observe if he could return from his “Heaviside Layer” to sit in a modern production of Cats. Would he be pleased? Astonished? Would he grumble at the necessary liberties Webber took to fill out his theatrical “cats”? Would Eliot join with others in shedding a tear for the beauteous song “Memory”? One thing I do believe: the poet would be dumbstruck and thrilled by the complex, virtuosic choreography designed by Lynne, who taught (across many excruciatingly difficult rehearsals) a new generation of dancers to step out of their Nutcracker costumes and into the unpredictable, snippy, slinky world of cats, bringing these fascinating creatures to life as no one ever before did.