Cats: To Be Honest, The Stage Musical Was Kitty Litter Too

By Thom Ernst

Rating: C

Recently at a dinner party, my host, successful in Toronto’s theatrical scene, spoke of having finally seen Cats on stage. She emphasized that she had free tickets as if attending the play needed qualifying. She then buried her face in her hands as if shamed by her own admission of having seen such tripe.

Cats… it’s a dog alright.

 “It was horrible,” she decried, “no plot, no story, terrible music. Just awful.”

I had seen Cats, decades ago when my (then) roommate played a lead character in Toronto’s first stage production of the play.  

“But I like the music,” I said, fumbling through an attempt to defend, once again, musical theatre. My efforts earned me looks of disbelief and pity. 

In the awkward silence that followed, her husband chimes in with, “Cats is considered the prototype for all that’s wrong with musical theatre.” 

And with that a chorus of approval that amounted to Hear! Hear! rippled through the dinner party. I was a movie person in a theatre crowd.

My hope was that once Tom Hooper’s movie version of Cats was released, the tables of discussion will turn. But even with that, I knew the battle would not be easily won. Cats has already been the target of taunts and ridicule on social media, and all it took to get the caterwauling started was for someone to drop a ‘first-look’ footage onto YouTube. 

People reacted strongly to the live-action images of actors mincing around like cats. Some expressed being creeped out by seeing Dame Judi Dench, Idris Elba, and Taylor Swift prowling about with CGI manipulated cat ears, tails and whiskers like participants at a cat-fetish convention. One online critic went so far as to say that the trailer for Cats was more frightening than the trailer for IT: The Second Chapter. 

I didn’t see that in the trailer, but others did. And they weren’t alone. Snide dismissals of the yet-to-be-seen film had been mounting not just on YouTube and Twitter, but in movie line-ups, during talk show monologues and among colleagues, even as we were finding our seats moments before the first screening. 

And yet, despite whatever negative prelude or grumblings that came before, there was in the theatre a feeling of excitement and anticipation as we took our seats. We were either in for one of the year’s biggest failures or biggest surprises.  

How odd to discover then, that Cats, as directed by Hooper from Andrew Lloyd Webber’s popular musical, is not the failure I fear it could have been (although it’s close) but neither is it the success I had hoped it would be. Cats is not good enough for me to write, “It’s the cat’s pajamas!” and neither is it bad enough to write, “Curiosity killed the Cats.”  In retrospect, seeing those words in print, that’s probably fortunate—the world can do with fewer cat puns.  (Although I guarantee these very same puns are going to pop-up somewhere).  But cat puns aside, Hooper’s film is as much of a challenge for viewers to watch as it must have been for Hooper to direct.

Part of the problem—and I adhere to my dinner host’s critique of the play—is that there isn’t much of a story here. Hooper does his best to squeeze out a plot from the source material as Andrew Lloyd Webber strived to find a story in T.S. Eliot’s collection of poems, Old Possum’s Books of Practical Cats. Hooper adds a few expository lines explaining how on one magical night, cats vie to be chosen to ascend to the Heaviside Layer. I’m not sure what a Heaviside Layer is, but I gather it’s like heaven for cats. 

Another thing Hooper does to make things somewhat more dramatic is to turn Macavity (Elba) from the dark criminally motivated character he was on stage to being outright villainous on film. But even with these added threads of comprehension, it’s hard to argue that there is not much here to urge anyone to stay to see how it all turns out. One can leave and enter at any point and not feel as if they have missed a thing. 

Not all the sequences that I remember fondly from the stage work on the film: Rebel Wilson’s turns in a crude rather than comic performance as Jennyanydots, and Hooper turns her one big number - featuring dancing mice and cockroaches - into a slapstick nightmare. Disappointing too is Danny Collins and Naoimh Morgan’s routine as Mungojerrie and Rumpleteazer, a bit so overly staged that none of the song's inherent charm can survive the massive set and props that Hooper crams onto the screen.  

But not all is lost. James Corden suitably entertains as Bustopher Jones, and Swift as Bombalurina croons a sultry tale about the master criminal, Macavity, whilst riding a crescent moon. But it’s Steven McRae tap-dancing railway cat, Skimbleshanks who provides the film’s one legitimate showstopper. 

Sadly, despite the film’s gallant efforts, I am forced to join the ranks of the naysayers. In the end, I did find that the CGI effects were as creepy as they are impressive, and there were more failed numbers than there were successful ones.

But just as there is no such thing as a film universally acclaimed—case in point, The Irishman, Marriage Story, and Jojo Rabbit are all films subject to as much criticism as they are praise—there is no such thing as a film universally despised.  Cats is a disappointment, but there enough high points that the film is bound to find some cat-lovers willing to embrace it.

Cats. Directed by Tom Hooper. Adapted by Tom Hooper and Lee Hall from Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical. Starring Taylor Swift, Idris Elba and Dame Judi Dench. Opens wide December 20.