My So-CATS Life
I'm listening to The Rocky Horror Picture Show soundtrack as I type this.
The Rocky Horror Picture Show is one of my favorite movie musicals of all time. It is the perfect cocktail of punk, drag, mid-century nostalgia and rock 'n' roll.
I type this because I have feelings about CATS, the musical film extravaganza garbage-fire-of-horror. I listen to The Rocky Horror Picture Show to remind myself it's not the genre's fault.
I had an aunt once. A Cool Aunt Who Lives in NYC and Does Television News. She would come up to Rochester on visits, and when it was appropriate, give us cool gifts. I remember receiving the album CATS, probably in 1982, right after it opened in NYC. I remember Aunt Ellen telling me, this is the new thing. This is going to be huge.
And so, I spent hours on the family room couch with the double-album cover in my lap, studying its glossy blackness and the few, far-away pictures of the show it featured. I stared with wonder at the lycra bodysuits and makeup and patches of fur. Every cat-singer-dancer-superstar was slightly different, a patch of rust or white here, a striped paw there. Just like real cats! the little me clocked, with wonder. And yet, they were so much more than cats. They didn't give a fuck. They were drag. They writhed around and gyrated like feline elvises. The organ banged majestically, and the trash heap set hovered darkly in the smoke machine haze. It was rock 'n' roll.
You know why I loved CATS? Because it was 1982 and I was 8 and it was punk and drag and kinky and furry and cokey. IT WAS SO COKEY. That shit was strictly accomplished through cocaine, I'm sure of it. Of course I didn't know any of this when I was 8. At 8, I just knew it was the next big thing, and so, its stupid-ass songs wormed their ways into my brain cells, and lodged there permanently. I still remember far too many of those lyrics and melodies.
And for years, they have lain dormant, as my tastes matured and I discovered better rock musicals and frankly, I realized that CATS is not that good. Andrew Lloyd Weber (with whom I share a birthday: us and William Shatner thank you so much, and yes, astrologists, we have just the sign you think we have) learned something in this musical about How You Should At Least Have A Plot, and he did so moving forward. His next two musicals, Starlight Express and Phantom of The Opera were the soundtrack of my childhood. Great stories, great music. Hackey, dumb lyrics? Yes, sure. But I was a kid. I thought it was all fucking great.
But CATS, unlike ALW's latter oeuvre, has never had a plot, just like what it's based on, the one not-miserable-and-Jew-hating thing T.S. Eliot ever wrote, Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats. Keep in mind that "Old Possum" is a character from the Br'er Rabbit series authored by white supremacist Joel Chandler Harris. Reflect on how much more okay it used to be to be an asshole.
But as twee and whimsical and goofy Eliot's poems are, I'm not sure ALW ever got tighter with lyrics. Say what you will about that twee childish garbage. That shit was lyrically tight. Thanks, T.S.
I bring this all up to say that, while CATS found me at an impressionable time, it is true that ALW is damn catchy, and many of the lyrics are good, and the design was pretty cool in 1982. No, I no longer count myself a particular fan of this mediocre musical, I'm just saying, I get the phenomenon.
Now, did the movie get any of that? No, the movie did not get any of that. Poor Tom Hooper thought he could Les Mis it up with CATS, and he was dead, dead wrong. Les Mis had a sweetass plot courtesy of another crazy old asshole Victor Hugo. I liked the movie; I thought Hooper nailed it. It was sweeping and intimate and everyone was great except Russell Crowe.
The thing is, though, CATS is no Les Mis. The songs aren't as good and the rhythm of the show (because it has no plot) is so uneven and awkward that even my 8-year-old obsessed self lost the thread somewhere on Side 3 and rarely ever made it to "Skimbleshanks The Railway Cat" let alone "The Ad-Dressing Of Cats".
When making the movie CATS, they knew they needed to do something weird—they knew this was a weird-ass musical and that something truly weird had to be done to bring it to the big screen. They were 1000% right about that. But they just made the wrong weird choice.
They made a lot of bad, weird choices, as everyone has attested to. Inconsistent sizes, inconsistent inclusion of sex organs (boobs ok, balls not) footwear/clothes, sexuality that felt uncomfortable and inexplicable, Jennifer Hudson's entire performance—overwrought with some meaning that the original character definitely didn't have and none of us wanted—not to mention facial mucus. The CGI, the CGI, the CGI.
And so, lots of people who weren't 8 when CATS came out, who never stroked its glossy album cover and peered at the slight bulge in Rum Tum Tugger's lycra bodysuit, will NEVER understand why the musical was a colossal hit for decades and has made almost 4 billion dollars. And that feels like a missed opportunity.
Here's what I think we the viewers could've handled, what could've at least made us understand. If they had given us a draggy, punk, 100-minute hallucination rock music video, with weird camera effects and flashes and sexy people in actual MAKEUP AND COSTUMES—draggy queer people punking out and having that same defiant relationship to the camera that those singer-dancer-superstars had to disbelieving crowds in London in 1981. Or like Jesus Christ Superstar—that's another coked-out musical that made a great movie because they did loads of cocaine and got 'er done. Another one of those. That's what would've been the appropriate choice.
What they did to CATS was wrong. It was creepy and wrong and too sanitized and kid-friendly. It forgot where it came from. But I remember. I remember how cool it felt to look at those performers, and to think of them as very punk and very cool, very the future.
Still, since seeing the movie, I can't get those songs out of my head. They've been there for decades, asleep. And now, they play like shards of my childhood, skipping and restarting, over and over, and it's embarrassing but true that STILL that overture makes me shiver with antici—pation.
Like it or not, I guess I've always been jellicle.
The Rocky Horror Picture Show is one of my favorite movie musicals of all time. It is the perfect cocktail of punk, drag, mid-century nostalgia and rock 'n' roll.
I type this because I have feelings about CATS, the musical film extravaganza garbage-fire-of-horror. I listen to The Rocky Horror Picture Show to remind myself it's not the genre's fault.
I had an aunt once. A Cool Aunt Who Lives in NYC and Does Television News. She would come up to Rochester on visits, and when it was appropriate, give us cool gifts. I remember receiving the album CATS, probably in 1982, right after it opened in NYC. I remember Aunt Ellen telling me, this is the new thing. This is going to be huge.
And so, I spent hours on the family room couch with the double-album cover in my lap, studying its glossy blackness and the few, far-away pictures of the show it featured. I stared with wonder at the lycra bodysuits and makeup and patches of fur. Every cat-singer-dancer-superstar was slightly different, a patch of rust or white here, a striped paw there. Just like real cats! the little me clocked, with wonder. And yet, they were so much more than cats. They didn't give a fuck. They were drag. They writhed around and gyrated like feline elvises. The organ banged majestically, and the trash heap set hovered darkly in the smoke machine haze. It was rock 'n' roll.
You know why I loved CATS? Because it was 1982 and I was 8 and it was punk and drag and kinky and furry and cokey. IT WAS SO COKEY. That shit was strictly accomplished through cocaine, I'm sure of it. Of course I didn't know any of this when I was 8. At 8, I just knew it was the next big thing, and so, its stupid-ass songs wormed their ways into my brain cells, and lodged there permanently. I still remember far too many of those lyrics and melodies.
And for years, they have lain dormant, as my tastes matured and I discovered better rock musicals and frankly, I realized that CATS is not that good. Andrew Lloyd Weber (with whom I share a birthday: us and William Shatner thank you so much, and yes, astrologists, we have just the sign you think we have) learned something in this musical about How You Should At Least Have A Plot, and he did so moving forward. His next two musicals, Starlight Express and Phantom of The Opera were the soundtrack of my childhood. Great stories, great music. Hackey, dumb lyrics? Yes, sure. But I was a kid. I thought it was all fucking great.
But CATS, unlike ALW's latter oeuvre, has never had a plot, just like what it's based on, the one not-miserable-and-Jew-hating thing T.S. Eliot ever wrote, Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats. Keep in mind that "Old Possum" is a character from the Br'er Rabbit series authored by white supremacist Joel Chandler Harris. Reflect on how much more okay it used to be to be an asshole.
But as twee and whimsical and goofy Eliot's poems are, I'm not sure ALW ever got tighter with lyrics. Say what you will about that twee childish garbage. That shit was lyrically tight. Thanks, T.S.
I bring this all up to say that, while CATS found me at an impressionable time, it is true that ALW is damn catchy, and many of the lyrics are good, and the design was pretty cool in 1982. No, I no longer count myself a particular fan of this mediocre musical, I'm just saying, I get the phenomenon.
Now, did the movie get any of that? No, the movie did not get any of that. Poor Tom Hooper thought he could Les Mis it up with CATS, and he was dead, dead wrong. Les Mis had a sweetass plot courtesy of another crazy old asshole Victor Hugo. I liked the movie; I thought Hooper nailed it. It was sweeping and intimate and everyone was great except Russell Crowe.
The thing is, though, CATS is no Les Mis. The songs aren't as good and the rhythm of the show (because it has no plot) is so uneven and awkward that even my 8-year-old obsessed self lost the thread somewhere on Side 3 and rarely ever made it to "Skimbleshanks The Railway Cat" let alone "The Ad-Dressing Of Cats".
When making the movie CATS, they knew they needed to do something weird—they knew this was a weird-ass musical and that something truly weird had to be done to bring it to the big screen. They were 1000% right about that. But they just made the wrong weird choice.
They made a lot of bad, weird choices, as everyone has attested to. Inconsistent sizes, inconsistent inclusion of sex organs (boobs ok, balls not) footwear/clothes, sexuality that felt uncomfortable and inexplicable, Jennifer Hudson's entire performance—overwrought with some meaning that the original character definitely didn't have and none of us wanted—not to mention facial mucus. The CGI, the CGI, the CGI.
And so, lots of people who weren't 8 when CATS came out, who never stroked its glossy album cover and peered at the slight bulge in Rum Tum Tugger's lycra bodysuit, will NEVER understand why the musical was a colossal hit for decades and has made almost 4 billion dollars. And that feels like a missed opportunity.
Here's what I think we the viewers could've handled, what could've at least made us understand. If they had given us a draggy, punk, 100-minute hallucination rock music video, with weird camera effects and flashes and sexy people in actual MAKEUP AND COSTUMES—draggy queer people punking out and having that same defiant relationship to the camera that those singer-dancer-superstars had to disbelieving crowds in London in 1981. Or like Jesus Christ Superstar—that's another coked-out musical that made a great movie because they did loads of cocaine and got 'er done. Another one of those. That's what would've been the appropriate choice.
What they did to CATS was wrong. It was creepy and wrong and too sanitized and kid-friendly. It forgot where it came from. But I remember. I remember how cool it felt to look at those performers, and to think of them as very punk and very cool, very the future.
Still, since seeing the movie, I can't get those songs out of my head. They've been there for decades, asleep. And now, they play like shards of my childhood, skipping and restarting, over and over, and it's embarrassing but true that STILL that overture makes me shiver with antici—pation.
Like it or not, I guess I've always been jellicle.
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