They tell us Cats played on Broadway for 18 years, but they never tell us why. People were really into leg warmers back then? There was nothing on TV except T. J. Hooker? The concept known as “story” had not yet been invented? It’s baffling.
Cats took far too long to make its way to the big screen, and today it feels like a splashy re-launch of the hottest Atari video game of 1982. Taylor Swift, James Corden, Idris Elba, Rebel Wilson, et al each takes a turn doing a gaudy production number in feline guise, with almost nothing to connect one number to the next except the thinnest filament of a story, which is the promise that somebody will be tapped to ascend to the “Heaviside layer” (strange name for heaven), and receive a new life. The lyrics come to us from the Anglo-Catholic T. S. Eliot, who seems to be mocking his own faith here. Maybe the show is meant to be kindergarten Christianity, but it comes across as the liturgy of Liberace.
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