Jellicle Cast

In 1962, Lillian Hellman said Broadway was a bore. In the last five years, ballet has been in a slump—infused too much with choreographers that come from modern dance. And yet from 1982 to 2000, CATS was the longest running Broadway show.

Hellman’s complaint was the modern playwrights, more concerned with commercial viability than art, too afraid to produce a flop. Of course CATS dropped back to an established writer, T. S. Eliot, and his poetry of the 1930’s, conjoined with the contemporary popularity of composer, Andrew Lloyd Webber.

I saw CATS in Chicago, then later from a catwalk in a smaller town. We weren’t very well dressed when I saw it in Chicago—we had on everything we owned, but I’m from the south in the January wind off Lake Michigan. We’d been walking around Chicago, beautiful Chicago, crisp, blue sky, shrieking wind that must have blown the trash elsewhere, clean streets with snow parked on the curbs, and us skating the sidewalks slick with ice. My ears were still ringing with frostbite.

Second time I saw CATS I dressed all in black, showed up at a stage door at a designated time. The door slid open and I crept in, climbed a ladder, and stealthfully walked out on a lighting rail over the audience. If you moved too much, the lights shook, and you could see that on stage. I had to be very still. Those catwalks are sturdy, built to hold the heavy ellipsoidals and freshnels, but they’re not designed for people to walk around on them during a show. I didn’t pay five hundred dollars for my seat, and I wasn’t wearing formal attire, but the sound swelled up into the ceiling, and I swear I had the best seat in the house.

I have two cats, or rather, they have me. One is every color God could think of, splotched in a Picasso pattern. The other believes she is the queen of Siam, but has the ring-tail of a tabby.

I’ve always thought of CATS as a celebration of non-menstruation. There is absolutely no bloating or cramping evident in this fine display of skinniness backed by exquisite muscle tone. The splendors of exercise and diet must render those dancers not about to have kittens. “They had to get real stretchy people,” my kid says. Yes, real stretchy people. And the costumes are amazing. Precision tailoring to accentuate the human form while wearing a cat suit—brilliant. I mean cats do have that sensuality, well, mine don’t, but the flirting, the stretching, the flexibility—even my dear little cats have that in common with their rogue cousins, and with the tremendous performers of CATS, who make cat life look so easy, while they make human dance so beautiful.