Chris Eldon Lee reviews CATS, which is at Wolverhampton Grand Theatre until Saturday 30th March 2013
“Okay. Here’s the pitch. The idea is to write a musical with no dialogue and with an enormous and rather expensive cast who dance non-stop for two hours. It’s going to be based on a handful of challenging poems that nobody knows, written by a dreary dead American poet that few people have heard of. They certainly don’t know his first name because he never used it. I’m only planning to write two memorable tunes and then use them over and over again. I’m going to set it all in a smelly old rubbish dump and there probably won’t be any human beings in it. The characters will all have tricky names to remember and the plot will be incidental. I’ve already mortgaged my house, but I need another half million. So can I have some money please?”
History relates how Andrew Lloyd Webber’s passionate plea to a bunch of film financiers left them totally unimpressed. More fool them. It was rather like turning down The Beatles.
CATS has of course been a huge, world-wide stage success for the past 32 years and the whole caboodle has now purred into Wolverhampton for two weeks. The legendary show has got to the point of being famous just for being famous. But it is brilliant. Totally predictable, but utterly brilliant.
It’s the talent of the troupe that gets to you first. The pure energy and elasticity of the dance team is outstanding, especially when the whole ensemble moves with the kind of interweaving harmony of a flock of starlings at dusk, or a shoal of tropical fish in shallow water. They never put a paw wrong.
Overall, the show is like a night at a feline Music Hall with speciality acts between the chorus numbers. It’s the old cats that signpost proceedings; Nicholas Pound as Old Deuteronomy, Joanna Ampil as Grizabella (the part that ‘made’ Elaine Page); and particularly Paul F Monaghan as Bustopher Jones (the Toff) and Asparagus, the theatrical cat.
But even their delightful cameos are blown away by the energetic arrival of the amazing Joseph Poulton; exceptionally, a black performer whitened up for the part of Mr Mistoffelees. His Royal Ballet training shines through as he performs the kind of dazzling gymnastics last seen at London 2012.
Are there really only two tunes? Of course not. But there were only two hits; Memory and Mr Mistoffelees. Mr Webber makes the most of them as they swirl round the show again and again, tantalising the audience with tit bits until Miss Ampil and the Company finally give then their full attention. In writing them, Andrew Lloyd Webber clearly made direct contact with his muse – or should that be ‘mews’.
I’m told the show has barely changed over the decades, so the orchestration and instrumentation sound very 80s with Shaft-style wah-wah guitars and Vangelis keyboards. In other words, they’ve resisted the temptation to ruin it.
So far, 50 million people have seen CATS – which is pretty good going for a show once deemed to be suicidal. You might like to consider adding to that number.
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