Why do people hate Cats — Page 2

It succeeded mostly due to being a non-offensive family show and the production really embraced the kid market (face-painting the little cherubs before the show, letting them go up on the stage and hang out with Old Deuteronomy at intermission, etc.....). They marketed it heavily to families and between that and word-of-mouth it could have run forever.

Also, it was a great show for foreign tourists who weren't totally comfortable with English. The show has the same impact whether you fully grasp what the heck those annoying cats are singing about or not. If you don't, you can still sit back and enjoy the dancing and spectacle.

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I don't think that it's as awful as Phantom of the Opera. I don't think Cats is good though. Why don't I like it? Well, I don't care for the animal itself. However, that's not important. Lloyd Webber's music is bland. They don't gel with the poems. The poems are great, but not as songs, just as poems. The show had no plot. Yes, there have been several plotless musicals like Assassins and Company, but there was no concept. Why were the cats gathering together? Perhaps Lloyd Webber and company wanted the have the audience use their imagination and make up their own plot, but I'd much rather have a plot given to me and make up my own idea of a set. That's the other thing. The production was much too overblown.
It also ran for a great deal of time. It shouldn't have. That also annoys me.
People flocked to it because, as Margo said, it was safe. There wasn't anything crass or bawdy in the show. The freakish looking felines entertained the kiddies through the whole damned thing (even intermission, as Margo said.) You didn't need to have a knowledge of the time or place.
It's a prime example of how flash makes everything look great. Its worked with Lion King. Its worked with Wicked. To a lesser extent, its worked with Pippin.

Updated On: 8/15/06 at 03:52 PM

But, Elliot (a first rate dramatist himself) never intended for them to ever be used in a dramatic context.

This is not true. Elliot himself actually had the idea first to use the poems to construct an "evening". Eliot had drawn up sketches for the purpose of using and incorporating the poems into an event, and I've always been rather impressed as opposed to finding it ludicrous that Webber, Nunn and Lynn were able to construct an evening of musical theatre, after Eliot's death, with the ban that the Eliot estate put on the inclusion of original material. They were therefor forced to create a "plot" using the unpublished poems of Grizabella, Eliot's "Rhapsody on a Windy Night" and fragments based on two phrases:

"Jellicle cats come out tonight, Jellicle cats come one come all. The Jellicle moon is shining bright, Jellicles come to the Jellicle Ball".

and the unpublished idea of Eliot's that a cat would eventually travel "Up, Up, Up past the Russell Hotel. and "Up, Up, Up to the Heaviside Layer".

I just saw Cats for the first time this weekend in a teen theater production, and I enjoyed it, but only for three of its songs and for the creative, talented actors in the cast. It has no story...the only artistic value in it is its half-baked songs but its superb choreography and creative and unique characters.

Updated On: 8/15/06 at 07:44 PM

Speaking as someone who just completed a very successful run of the show, and who's cousin was in the production on Broadway in 1989 - when the show is staged/envisioned with the right amount of heart, it can be an extremely emotional and spiritual journey for both the cast and the audience.

it is so boring