Poems T. S. Eliot wrote for his godchildren became a megamusical
In the 1930s T. S. Eliot wrote playful poems about cats for his godchildren. Decades later Andrew Lloyd Webber set them to music, investors balked at the premise, and Cats went on to gross US$3.5 billion worldwide by 2012 while inventing the blockbuster megamusical.
Eliot published the verses in 1939 as Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats. Their bouncing rhythms had tempted composers before, without much success. Musicologist John Snelson argues the poems read almost like pop lyrics, full of catchphrases, steady beats and outrageous rhymes. Lloyd Webber started setting them in 1977, and a first performance of the songs, still just a cycle without a story, came in 1980. After that, Cameron Mackintosh hired director Trevor Nunn and choreographer Gillian Lynne to build a full show.
What they made has almost no conventional plot. A tribe called the Jellicles meets at its yearly ball to choose one member to send up to the Heaviside Layer, a feline heaven, for a fresh life. Most of the evening introduces the candidates in song and dance, a mix that scholars William Everett and Paul Laird describe as part revue, part concept musical. Nearly all the lyrics are Eliot's own, lightly altered, with extra lines taken from his unpublished poems. The big exception is Memory, the show's most famous song, which Nunn wrote by drawing on Eliot's Rhapsody on a Windy Night.
Cats opened to warm reviews at the New London Theatre in 1981 and to a more mixed reception at Broadway's Winter Garden in 1982, winning Best Musical at both the Olivier and Tony Awards. London kept it running for 21 years and 8,949 performances, Broadway for 18 years and 7,485, making it the longest-running musical in both districts for years. A Hamburg production played over 6,100 shows, and a purpose-built theatre in Japan has staged it more than 10,000 times since 1983.
Its influence divides opinion. Cats established a global market for musicals and pushed the industry towards big-budget spectacles aimed at families and tourists, changing how shows look, use technology and are marketed. A direct-to-video film appeared in 1998 and a feature film in 2019.
Source: Cats (musical)
