All right let me give this one a shot. I’m not trying to torture anyone anymore than they already have been. I just think I genuinely have something to say you may not have heard yet. An actual researched and legitimate opinion that comes from a real place of knowledge about the source material. AND…my ability to respect that material and see past it, does lead me to agree with almost everyone else and anounce that yes, this movie is a piece of shit.
HOWEVER!
I do so deeply resent the scores of mostly younger than me, mostly male and nearly ALL non-dance going movie critics the first idiotic thing they write when its a few whiney sentences about how the plot of the movie made no sense to them!
Of course it doesn’t make any sense you morons! Did you do ANY research at allApparently not. They just immediately start bitching about the fact that individual cats spend most of the show introducing themselves, until one of them gets picked to go to cat heaven. Which anyone who has ever seen the show already knows. Thanks boys!
Now let’s be fair…CATS the musical is not a crap show by any stretch of the imagination. Despite what my fellow theatre nerds would have you believe, CATS is a decent musical that has been hideously, absurdly abused and abandoned almost completely over the years. The show won seven Tony awards including Best Musical for Pete’s sake! It is the 4th longest running Broadway musical of all time! Those numbers beat Wicked, Les Miserable. Even Rent which only slides in at a measly number 11. If you are even close to my age surely you remember the CATS commercial that inundated tv ads in the 80’s. It was on constantly! It said something like “Cats at the Wintergarten Theatre…now and forever.” Because it was so popular it was literally going to run forever!!!!
It was a craze folks! Everyone wanted to see CATS! It was the show that started the beginning of the megamusical. Before there was a Phantom of the Opera, there was CATS.
Ok, true there’s no plot. Very little goes on in CATS. It is essentially a strung together bunch of poems translated into songs and choreographed to the enth degree, beautifully, gorgeously and in a way that any dancer would die to be a part of. None of which makes it a bad musical!! It is a musical piece of theatre and dance that inspired generations of young singer/dancers who went on to fill countless cast of performers of this show all over the country. I saw the national tour come through my town eight time! I was convinced I would play Bombalurina one day. I had every one of her movements memorized.
Years later when I got my chance to audition, when I stood on that stage, with one if the directors and one of the assistants, performing the actual Cats choreo, I was so giddy and in absolute awe that I could barely move. I had frozen and forgotten how. But eventually I got myself through it. It wasn’t good enough to make the cut of course…but I got to do it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-VlCQ9jmpc
Can Taylor swift do that? Rebel Wilson? James Cordon? Don’t get me wrong, I adore Idris Elba and I could watch him all day long, but do we need to see him play McCavity in CATS?! NOOOO! We really don’t! Ian McKellen and Judy Dench I can buy. Hell Judy Dench was actually supposed to be in the original production until an injury forced her out and Elaine Page took over going on to imprint the song Memory into our minds forever.
I’d love to hear Jennifer Hudson’s version, but I won’t because I cannot bear to see this awful CGI version of a show that I have seen a dozen times for reasons that have ZERO to do with the spectacle that Tom Hooper has created. Remember this is the same man who yours truly heavily criticized a few years ago for patting himself on the back when he made all of his untrained actors sing live on the set of Les Miz and we all heard how painfully that disaster went (remember poor Russel Crowe).
CATS is a theatre experience at its core, one that the masses of us who enjoyed the production in such huge numbers over and over again in the 80’s whether we admit it or not, had to be up close and personal with the performers in order to appreciate the performance.
So it is with this new movie I imagine. Impossible to appreciate what is so far away on the screen, covered under miles of bad CGI, under performed by non dancers with bigger names all stuffed into a production that is way more interested in production that they are in a show about singing and dancing cats.
I think critic Peter Debruge sums it up best.
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