The Improbable Insanity of “Cats”

How Andrew Lloyd Webber and a team of collaborators turned a strange book by T. S. Eliot into a baffling cultural phenomenon.
Characters from the musical Cats
The success of “Cats” quickly shifted from a surprise to a force that would reshape the world of musical theatre.Illustration by Faye Moorhouse

Scholars of literary modernism have spent relatively little time investigating T. S. Eliot’s ardent and abiding love of cats. He had a lot of them, and he gave them names like George Pushdragon, Pettipaws, and Wiscus. He thought that the “great thing” about cats was that they possessed “two qualities to an extreme degree—dignity and comicality.” In the poem that launched his career, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” which was published in 1915, when he was twenty-six, Eliot writes of a catlike “yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,” licks “its tongue into the corners of the evening,” makes a “sudden leap,” and curls “once about the house” before falling asleep. In 1931, Eliot sent an illustrated letter to his godson Tom Faber about his cat Jellyorum; this was the beginning of what would become “Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats,” Eliot’s only collection of light verse. A few years later, in a letter to his friend Polly Tandy—an adult—Eliot explained that there were “4 kinds of Cat the Old Gumbie Cat the Practical Cat the Porpentine Cat and the Big Bravo Cat; I suspect that yours is a Bravo Cat by the looks of things.” In a letter to Polly’s daughter Alison, from 1936, Eliot included a complete draft of his poem about the Old Gumbie Cat. He signed the note in his usual manner: “Your faithful Possum.”

Eliot was given the nickname Possum by Ezra Pound, who got it from “Uncle Remus,” Joel Chandler Harris’s compilation of plantation folktales, which was published in 1880. Eliot called Pound “Brer Rabbit,” in turn—the two men wrote to each other in black dialect for fun. (Eliot signed one postcard to Pound with the name “Tar Baby.”) Eliot had grown up in St. Louis, a city that sustained a thriving black theatre scene and also regularly hosted minstrel shows. (Pound was from Idaho.) In his early twenties, he wrote a poem that parodied Booker T. Washington’s autobiography “Up from Slavery” as “ ‘Up From Possum Stew’ / Or ‘How I set the nigger free!’ ” When he moved to England, in his twenties, and entered a literary establishment that was even more conservative than the one back home, he took to identifying himself as an uncivil outsider in a way that he regularly shaded as black. “I may simply prove to be a savage,” he wrote in 1919. Eventually, he converted to Anglicanism and took British citizenship; in 1928, he mused on his experience as an “American who wasn’t an American, because he was born in the South and went to school in New England as a small boy with a nigger drawl.”

Pound and Eliot seemed to regard “the proximity of black speech to their own” as “both an opportunity to be seized and an affliction to be regretted,” the literary critic Michael North writes, in “The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language, and Twentieth-Century Literature.” Eliot’s fondness for doggerel and light verse, in particular, was intertwined with a racist notion of blackness as a gateway to cultural disruption and linguistic play. “Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats” required an authorial persona that facilitated outright foolishness for Eliot, and though explicit racism largely vanishes within the actual text, it does jump out occasionally, most of all in “Growltiger’s Last Stand,” in which Eliot, describing Growltiger, a grisly pirate cat, writes, “But most to Cats of foreign race his hatred had been vowed; / To Cats of foreign name and race no quarter was allowed.” The “Chinks” swarm Growltiger’s vessel, and his lady cat screeches, “badly skeered.”

The BBC broadcast a recording of Eliot’s unpublished cat poems on Christmas Day, 1937. The broadcast was well received, and it was followed by two more installments, the last of which was called “Pollicles and Jellicles: Tales of Cats and Dogs in Verse.” (“Pollicle dogs” and “jellicle cats” are Eliot’s glosses on the way posh British people said “poor little dogs” and “dear little cats.”) “Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats” was published in 1939 and contained fourteen poems. They are deeply weird: antic, hyperactive, dense with faux-pompous elevated diction, sometimes crisp and regular, sometimes nursery-rhyme nonsense. Eliot’s cats are practical in an archaic sense of the word: they scheme and keep busy. (Macavity, a cat criminal, was based on Arthur Conan Doyle’s Professor Moriarty.) Eliot drew the book’s cover illustration: a dandy helping a line of cats climb over a wall. The book became a hit. For decades to come, parents bought “Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats” to entertain their children. Among them were a pair of musicians who lived in South Kensington and had a son who would go on to write the most popular musicals in the world.

In 1994, when I was five years old, I appeared in a children’s production of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Cats,” in Houston, playing a nondescript black chorus cat with the noncanonical moniker of Peaseblossom. By that point, “Cats” was a global juggernaut, on its way to becoming the longest-running Broadway show of all time. (Another Lloyd Webber musical, “Phantom of the Opera,” has since surpassed its Broadway run.) It ran for eighteen years in New York and for twenty-one years in London; a Japanese version has been running for thirty-six years straight.

“Cats” was my first experience doing musical theatre, and I can blame much of my subsequent decade of semi-committed chorus-line participation—and some of my ongoing attraction to cultural phenomena that reside on the border between hellscape and paradise—on this baptism into Webber’s feline world. The magic began with the shimmery melodrama of the musical’s overture, its melody descending like a diva on a staircase; then came the opening number, “Jellicle Songs for Jellicle Cats,” which is lyrically unhinged but musically transporting, a series of syncopated adrenaline spikes and key changes, to which we flung our tiny cat selves around in a big, stupid whirl. The heavy-handed pop-rock pastiche of the “Cats” soundtrack turns adult sentiment into an accessible playground—I was entranced by “Macavity,” with its “Pink Panther” burlesque swing, and “The Rum Tum Tugger,” with its cartoonish version of rock and roll. Fittingly, the show’s story line, insofar as it has one, is like something that a five-year-old would invent while coming down from dental anesthesia: there are a bunch of cats, and they’re called Jellicle Cats, and they’re about to go to the Jellicle Ball, which is where an old cat named Old Deuteronomy decides which cat goes to the Heaviside Layer to die and be reborn. One cat is named Skimbleshanks, and he lives on a train; one cat is named Mr. Mistoffelees, and he’s a magician; and there’s a fancy lady cat named Grizabella, except she’s not so fancy anymore; and, in the end, Old Deuteronomy picks Grizabella and she dies and gets to ride a big tire up to heaven, and that’s the end!

Lloyd Webber first had the idea for “Cats” in the late seventies. He grew bored one day during the technical rehearsals for “Evita” and got to thinking about writing music for existing lyrics, something he’d never done. Maybe he could use a book of poems—say, that old T. S. Eliot book his mom used to read to him. Those poems had a rhythmic flexibility, as though they’d been written to music. Later, Eliot’s widow, Valerie, would tell Lloyd Webber that Eliot always composed his light poems with popular songs in his head. Lloyd Webber approached her in 1980, inviting her to an annual arts festival that he threw at his country home, called Sydmonton. There he played her four sample songs from the musical he envisioned. He had set “The Naming of Cats” as an eerie, dreamy admixture of sharps and flats and had given “Macavity” an undertone of prowling lust. Eliot had once refused an adaptation offer from Disney; Lloyd Webber promised Valerie that he wouldn’t turn her late husband’s chimeric creations into mere “pussycats.”

Valerie came to Sydmonton with an unpublished scrap of a poem about Grizabella, a cat who had “haunted many a low resort.” Grizabella made the postman sigh “as he scratched his head / You really would have thought she ought to be dead / And who would ever suppose that that / Was Grizabella the Glamour Cat.” Eliot had thought Grizabella too sad for children, but Lloyd Webber saw her as a character to build a musical around. Valerie also brought a letter Eliot had written to his publisher, in which he describes the Pollicle Dogs and Jellicle Cats gathering for an event where they ascend “Up, up, up, to the Russell Hotel / Up, up, up, to the Heaviside Layer.” (“There are several ways in which this might be a failure,” Eliot noted.) For Lloyd Webber, these two faint signals, blinking out of a plotless void, suggested the narrative foundation for a show.

The idea proved anything but irresistible. No one wanted to finance the project: the show’s producer, Cameron Mackintosh, had to solicit small-fry investors through newspaper ads; Lloyd Webber took out a second mortgage to make up the ultimate shortfall. He had composed an epic, genre-spanning score, using a Moog synthesizer to imitate meowing, but, when he played it for Twyla Tharp, hoping that she would choreograph what would have to be a very dance-heavy musical—Valerie would permit the production only if they relied entirely on Eliot’s material, which left little room for plot or spoken dialogue—Tharp said no. A director candidate fell asleep while Lloyd Webber was pitching him. A Warner Brothers executive reminded him that half the world favored dogs. “But somehow that insane, incurable, blinkered optimism that overtakes reason and leads otherwise normal men to stage musicals had wormed far too deep,” Lloyd Webber writes in his memoir, “Unmasked.” He scoured London for a theatre that would fit his “suicidally stupid musical.”

He was eventually able to secure a highbrow team of colleagues, and their presence won over a wavering Valerie. Gillian Lynne, a star since the fifties (she died last year, at the age of ninety-two) signed on as the choreographer. Trevor Nunn, the artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, agreed to direct, on the condition that Judi Dench be cast in the show and that Webber hire two of Nunn’s previous collaborators: John Napier, to design the costumes and sets, and David Hersey, for lighting. Nunn had very strong feelings about the show’s conception. “I believe all the characters MUST BE CATS,” he wrote to Lloyd Webber in a letter. “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.”

The goal, for everyone, was to skirt the realm of the domestic. Lynne imagined the cats as a pagan tribe, and she led the cast through “vigorous exercises of an unusual nature, leading eventually to total freedom of what we could attempt physically,” she writes in a commemorative book that was published in 1983. She wanted the cats to be “at once aloof, hypersensual, cold, warm, completely elastic and very mysterious.” Napier designed a junk-yard set, full of beer bottles and car tires fabricated at cat scale. “ ‘The Waste Land’ was what I based my entire modus operandi on,” he told me. As far as costuming went, he knew that he had to avoid the literal. One day, drawing in a sketchpad during rehearsal, while Lynne was “just farting around, having everyone make cat shapes,” he said, he realized that “all these kids had leg warmers, arm warmers, slinky tops of various kinds, and that was almost disguise enough—the arm warmers changed the shape of the wrist so it was more of a paw.” He put “slightly punky” wigs on the cast, which he could spray into the suggestion of cat ears, and decided against full face paint—mostly cat noses, and dabs for whiskers. “I really tried to keep it quite earthy and unsophisticated, a little street-y,” he said. “I thought, Sophistication is really the last thing this needs.”

“Cats” had begun to coalesce at the end of auditions, after Nunn insisted that Lloyd Webber write a real centerpiece for the musical, by turning the Grizabella poem fragment into a ballad that could rival “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina,” from “Evita.” Years before, Lloyd Webber had composed a Puccini-esque song that was so convincing in its homage that he’d asked his father, a classical composer, to reassure him that he had not inadvertently plagiarized it. (His father told him that it sounded like a million bucks.) Lloyd Webber played his Puccini pastiche for Nunn, and Nunn called the team over to hear it, telling them to remember where they were when they first heard this melody, which would soon become “Memory,” a song that charted on the Billboard Hot 100 twice in the nineteen-eighties, with Barbara Streisand’s version, in 1982, and Barry Manilow’s, in 1983. This was one of the moments when the show’s alchemy suddenly became visible to the creators: Nunn writes that, after the first onstage run-through, everyone cried.

More often, the process of putting “Cats” together was closer to disaster. On the first day of rehearsals, Lloyd Webber’s musical director “slumped onto the piano keys and said he couldn’t play anymore,” then quit. Nunn clashed with Lynne. Lloyd Webber worried that his songs couldn’t be sung properly through so much dancing. Twelve days before previews, Dench, who had been cast as both Grizabella and the Old Gumbie Cat, Jennyanydots, collapsed mid-rehearsal and cried out, “Who kicked me?” She had snapped her Achilles tendon. It instantly became gossip that “Judi’s accident was an excuse for her to jump a sinking ship.”

Five days before previews, Lynne threatened to quit the show over a set of elaborate costumes for the opening number, which Napier had spent ten per cent of the show’s budget creating. (They were difficult to dance in; Lynne won the argument, and Napier, fuming, kicked the costumes into the gutter.) The same day, after witnessing a chaotic run-through of a number in which the cats pretended to be dogs, Lloyd Webber and Mackintosh told Nunn that what they’d seen “was not fit for a stage” and declared that they were “pulling the show.” (Nunn ignored them.) Two days out, Elaine Paige, who had taken Dench’s place as Grizabella, sang a version of “Memory” that featured lethally depressive lyrics by Lloyd Webber’s longtime collaborator Tim Rice: “Daylight / I won’t care if it finds me / With no breath in my body / With no beat in my heart.” (Rice and Lloyd Webber were in the middle of ending their creative partnership, and the married Rice had recently begun an affair with Paige.) Nunn insisted on rewriting the lyrics for the final rehearsal, where Paige sang “Memory” with a crumpled sheet of paper in her hand.

On the Wednesday afternoon before the first preview, in the West End, Mackintosh and Lloyd Webber went to a bar to celebrate their respective careers in musical theatre, which they presumed might be over in a few hours’ time. They had been hyping the production since a nationwide casting call, six months before, but they had kept aspects of the show secret; the public had no idea that “Cats” featured no human characters at all. That evening, Lloyd Webber steeled himself and went backstage. He looked at a young dancer whom he’d persuaded to join “Cats” by assuring her that it would be a life-changing experience. “In three minutes,” he writes in his memoir, she “would run on stage as a cat caught in a car headlight and instigate one of the great moments of bathos in theatre history.” The overture seemed to last forever, he recalls: “Has there ever been such an agonizing wait for an executioner’s blow?” But when the cats ran onstage, the laughter that Lloyd Webber was expecting never came. There were waves of applause. The next night, Paige’s big solo “took the roof off the building.” The Guardian called “Cats” a “midnight pussy-convention” that managed to keep a “balance between the Eliotesque preoccupation with time and memory and sheer outgoing exhilaration.” The show was ridiculous, but it was also funny, ecstatic, oddly sensual, and all-enveloping. By the weekend, audiences were giving it three-minute standing ovations.

“Cats,” because it is about cats and not humans, pulls off a feat that, for good reason, mostly goes unattempted: it is a kid-friendly production that runs on an undercurrent of adult—and, literally, animal—sexuality. Its ability to convince an audience to accept the idea, for the duration of the show, that the “Cats” universe has existed parallel to ours for centuries—and that each performance represents some sort of breach in the space-time continuum—depends on the capacity of actors to embody, primarily through dance, felines with multiple lives’ worth of experience. The contours of their bodies are not mysterious to them, nor are they to the audience. These are cats who have spent a lot of time having loud sex in the alley. They slink, they whip their hips around. For “Cats” haters, this is one of the worst aspects of the musical. (In 1996, a woman named Evelyn Amato sued the team behind the New York production for six million dollars, over a moment in which the actor playing Rum Tum Tugger invaded her space with his pelvis-grinding.) But to me “Cats” is proof of the ludicrous heights that can be reached with full-throated commitment. One human cat is a terrible acid trip; twenty of them is an unforgettable night out in midtown. In Eliot’s book, Mr. Mistoffelees is a precious creation; in the musical, he is a gay icon, bedazzled like the night sky, sometimes pulling off twenty-four fouetté turns in a row. Lloyd Webber’s music exaggerates the pure gusto of the “Cats” poems—the strangeness, doubled, somehow becomes mainstream.

The initial critical response to “Cats” was mixed, as it has remained. The Daily Mail called the London production a “marvellous piece of rubbish.” Of the Broadway show, the Boston Globe wrote, simply, “ ‘Cats’ is a dog.” But this didn’t matter: the show minted money. (The Broadway production débuted, in 1982, with a four-and-a-half-million-dollar budget—the most expensive in the history of Broadway at the time—and six million dollars in ticket pre-sales. It made half a million dollars in profit every week.) Celebrities flocked to it that first summer. Lloyd Webber threw huge parties at his house in Sydmonton, where he had a “magnificent vast hot tub” that could hold as many as thirty people; “nobody batted an eyelid about stripping off.” The amount of sexual energy generated by the first production of “Cats” can perhaps be inferred from the fact that Lloyd Webber, Nunn, and Napier all married cast members.

The success of the London production of “Cats” quickly shifted from a surprise to a force that would reshape the world of musical theatre. The era of the tourist-friendly blockbuster musical, complete with merchandise, had begun in earnest; in the wake of “Cats,” small shows would find it increasingly hard to compete. Throughout the nineties, TV ads for “Cats” blanketed New York. (“Cats: the magic, the mystery, the memory, will live forever,” a male voice-over whispers. “Cats: the seven-time Tony Award winner, the once-in-a-lifetime experience.”) In 1998, Lloyd Webber released a direct-to-VHS re-creation of the stage musical, starring many of the original cast members, which I owned and watched frequently. In 2000, “Cats” finally retired from Broadway: one actress, Marlene Danielle, had been in the show for its entire run.

The show was revived onstage in London, from 2014 to 2016, and in New York, from 2016 to 2017. Now a film adaptation by Tom Hooper is set for a Christmas-season release. The movie is crammed with stars: Dench is back, playing the traditionally male role of Old Deuteronomy; she is joined by Ian McKellen, Idris Elba, Jennifer Hudson, and Taylor Swift. The first trailer was released in July, and it set off seismic waves of fear and agitation online, mainly concerned with the computer-generated aspect of the costumes, which rely on what promotional material referred to as “digital fur technology.” It appears to have plunged the actors deep into unexplored crevices of the uncanny valley.

I asked Napier for his thoughts on the trailer, but he told me that, out of friendly loyalty to McKellen and Dench, he was waiting to take in the whole movie with fresh eyes. I told him that the phrase “digital fur technology” had become a buzzword. “Oh, dear,” he said. “I told Tom, you have to be very careful or they’ll end up looking like werecats. Fur is dangerous territory. For example, what are you supposed to do about their testicles, and their dicks, and their tits?” (He is not the only person with anatomical questions.)

Expectations for the movie seem to be as low as Lloyd Webber’s were for the musical’s reception on the afternoon before the first West End previews. (As of this writing, days before the movie’s première, it has not yet been screened for critics.) But “Cats” has always been an outrageously unlikely cultural phenomenon, and, the longer that it persists, the more unlikely it has become; somehow, this one particular chain of highly idiosyncratic creative impulses has proved so durable that we are now faced with the prospect of Jason Derulo singing a T. S. Eliot poem while clothed head to toe in digital fur. (Derulo plays Rum Tum Tugger in the movie—a character whom Eliot wrote as a finicky, demanding “curious cat,” whom Webber reimagined as a Mick Jagger-esque sex symbol, and then reimagined again, for the 2014 London revival, as a rapper. I expect that Derulo will be playing Rum Tum Tugger as Jason Derulo.)

Two years ago, just before the Broadway revival closed, I went to see it with three of my friends. Two of them had seen the musical as children; both had loved it as soon as the house lights went down and the cat eyes began glowing in the darkness. (One of them had even bestowed the name Rum Tum Tugger on a stuffed animal afterward—a dog, nonetheless.) My third friend had no idea what to expect. “So they’re literally cats?” the third friend kept saying, as we sat down. To my left was a man with a cowboy hat resting on his knee, who poked his wife every time a new cast member came onstage and said, “Look, honey—another cat!” Mamie Parris played Grizabella, and, when she belted the entire climax of “Memory” in a single superhuman breath, the dream logic of the musical overpowered the theatre completely; you could feel every hair on every arm standing on end. What an absolute nightmare, I thought, as all the other cats came out of the wings, ready to send Grizabella to her death. Here was a stage full of brilliant actors writhing around in cat wigs and face paint, singing psychotic Andrew Lloyd Webber songs with T. S. Eliot blackface lyrics. What a ridiculous hallucination this was, what an indestructible pleasure, what an unforeseeable gift.