Cats

The weekend before the Easter long weekend, I went to see Cats the Musical. I’ve wanted to see it ever since the 80’s. I can remember seeing the ads on TV and hearing all this hype about how great it was and how everyone loved it. I had no idea what the show was about, of course – other than that it was about some Cats. Fair assumption, really. I think that’s probably the extent of most people’s knowledge of the show - that it’s about people prancing around pretending to be cats, and that it was written by Andrew Lloyd Webber. What else do you really need to know about it? It’s a musical after all; everything that you need to know they’ll sing about in the opening number.

One of the main reasons that I’ve wanted to see it for so long is that in the 80’s, you couldn’t go a week without hearing someone singing ‘Memory’ . You can’t hear something that regularly and not have it stick with you. It’s a pretty good song as far as musical numbers go, so I figured the rest of the show to be just like that – A lot of pretty good (if slightly 80’s-ish) musical numbers.

No such luck. It turns out Memory was the only song that was written from scratch for the musical. Everything else is just a bunch of TS Eliot poems set to music. What the hell! That’s just lazy! The poems themselves are reasonably amusing, but you can’t just string a bunch of poems together with some vague attempt at a plot so you can actually call it a story.

The costumes were phenomenal. The set was impressive. The choreography was great. The show, however, was terrible. There was no real plot. It was basically just a bunch of cats introducing themselves through long, drawn out songs that I couldn’t understand the words to.
I’m not sure if maybe I would have liked it more if I had of known what it was about before I saw it, but I didn’t, and because it was so hard to understand what they were singing about it was two of the most confusing hours I’ve spent in a long time.

At one point, the stage was full of people pretending to be cats pretending to be dogs and I couldn’t understand a single word of what they were banging on about – so it was really just a bunch of people in spandex with cardboard boxes on their heads chanting and occasionally barking like dogs. You don’t have to pay money to see that; you just have to find the right area of Melbourne and you’re bound to come across someone doing it for free.

So it was a total waste of time and money really. How sad. It did, however, confirm for me that my days of being amused by musicals are well and truly done.