On Cats (without cats)

and why it matters that there are cats

I never thought I would end up defending Cats. I am no particular fan of Andrew Lloyd Webber's 1981 musical — although, I should confess, I enjoyed the 2019 film far more than I expected. (It remains the most recent new-release I have seen in a cinema.) Like many self-styled musical theater aficionados, I had an instinctive, if uninformed, distaste for it. Cats was camp. Cats was silly. Cats was cringe.

Then I got to know someone who loved it. A friend of mine — not just a fan but a bona fide member of the Cats fandom — spoke so often, and so enthusiastically, about it, that I came to appreciate the show through their eyes: a show that, despite its somewhat nonsensical book (based on a 1939 feline poetry collection by T.S. Eliot, who — fun fact — won a posthumous Tony for it) and its uneven score, works — for those for whom it works — precisely because of its outlandish, manic energy. An enormous, varied chorus of cats, singing and dancing about various jellicle members of their jellicle tribe, as they compete in a jellicle ball, create a dynamic series of characters and relationships — deeply rooted in the choreography and personality of the performers involved — that do not simply supplement but transcend music and words alike. The paucity of Cats-the-show-as-written (limited — another fun fact — by the Eliot estate's refusal to allow additional dialogue to be written) makes Cats-the-experience-of-collective-effervescence possible.

Which is all to say, I was disproportionately excited about Cats: The Jellicle Ball, a new reimagining of the show at PAC NYC that sets the titular ball in the vogue and ballroom scenes of New York’s Black and Latino queer subculture. Historically anarchic, freewheeling, joyful, and transgressive — the ballroom scene seemed a perfect match for a musical that is, fundamentally, more about an interconnected community than about any one of its members; one, moreover, about a community at the margins of urban society, using music and dance and performance as vehicles of transcendent hope (the winner of the Jellicle Ball gets to ascend to the Heaviside Layer — cat heaven — before being reborn).

There's only one problem with Cats: The Jellicle Ball — a problem so significant it not only derailed the show itself, but left me downright pessimistic about the entire future of theater in New York. There are no cats.

This is thoroughly intentional. (“Please note,” reads the initial casting call, “that all characters in this production are human, not literal ‘cats’.”) The cats of Cats are young, queer, ballroom hopefuls (“cats,” the show’s program helpfully reminds us, doubles as a term for queer folks and their allies), anxious to compete in — and triumph at — the Jellicle Ball. Insofar as this helps us take the characters more seriously in their specific historical context — as marginalized, vulnerable people for whom performance may well be the only opportunity to envision, or ascend to, another life (in one telling scene, changed from the traditional staging, Jellicle elder Old Deuteronomy is arrested and taken by the police; in another, Grizabella sings “Memory” in front of a video in memoriam display of real-life ballroom elders) — this device is successful at achieving its end.

Unfortunately, in so doing, it strips Cats not just of its titular cats, but its very Cats-ness — the campiness, the silliness, the cringiness (this is a musical about singing, dancing, cats!) that represent a kind of deranged oulipo-style challenge to director and performers alike: how do we get audiences to care about singing, dancing, cats? (Of all the criticisms I ever thought to level at a queer ballroom reimagining of Cats, I did not anticipate the primary one being “not camp enough”.)

Pierre-Auguste Renoir, The Sleeping Cat (1862)

It’s not just that Cats becomes self-serious and lugubrious when it should be joyful. It’s also that, by making the cats human, we’re also removing a necessary layer of abstraction within the theatrical experience. No matter how skilled the ballroom performers playing Cats’ non-cats are — and some of them are very skilled indeed — we’re fundamentally watching ballroom performers playing themselves, performing in the style in which they might otherwise perform at an actual ballroom — in a more raucous nightclub setting. When those performances are relocated to an elevated stage in a discomfitingly fancy theater, they lose something by sheer virtue of the medium: they become smaller-than-life, rather than larger. (It’s telling that the costumes worn by enthusiastic audience members were, at times, more flamboyant than those worn by performers.)

The story being told demands a layer of intensity, of surreality, capable of translating the feeling, rather than merely the notion, of participating with desperate, joyful fervor in an artistic competition that determines one’s entire life and future. (A layer of intensity and surreality that might, for example, translate if we were watching performers rise to the challenge of voguing brilliantly while also portraying cats — the feline equivalent to Ginger Rogers’ notorious quip that she did everything co-star Fred Astaire did, only backwards in high heels.) Truth onstage, in other words, cannot be a matter of mere literal representation. Indeed, the very best of theater lies so often in the surprise of the non-literal: how the poetic, the metaphorical, the allegorical convey reality, not straightforwardly, but – to paraphrase Emily Dickinson – slant.

What vexed me most about this Cats, ultimately, was what came across to me as artistic cowardice: the idea that Cats could only function successfully as a musical about queer, marginalized people of color if it steered safely clear of camp, of silliness, of cringe; if it took pains to make sure its audience understood, even at the expense of the energy of the show itself, precisely what we were supposed to feel as audience members at every moment.

Nowhere was that more evident than in this Cats’ treatment of the victory of Grizabella: the downtrodden, mangy elderly cat — pathetic and despised by the other cats — who ultimately wins the Jellicle Ball. Grizabella is cast — extremely effectively — as an enfeebled black trans woman, a member of a generation older than that of her blithe and starry-eyed competitors.

She is not glamorous — though we learn she once was. She is not beautiful. But — and this is the closest thing Cats, the musical, has to an emotional core — by God, she can sing. And when she finally sings the full version of “Memory” — a powerhouse here, as elsewhere — it’s enough to stun the other cats, even Old Deuteronomy, into silence and grudging respect. The despised, rejected outcast has an inner force — conveyed not through dance or glamor but music itself — that demands that we recognize her innate dignity: a selfhood that nothing, and certainly not the depredations of the world, can take away from her.

Except that this staging doesn’t want to let Grizabella be ugly too long. Inexplicably, she appears already transformed at the top of the number: starting “Memory” in a sequined silver gown and Old Hollywood waves. She’s so obviously a diva — in command of her self, her look, the audience — that the incongruity of her musical power loses its force. She’s no different than any of the other cats who have come before her. This directorial choice, too, comes across as an effort to play it safe, to make sure that the audience knows that Grizabella has, in fact, been beautiful and glamorous all along, rather than letting that come across in her performance (or even through a mid-number costume change: something successfully done with other characters elsewhere in the show).

This seeming desire to preserve the vanity of individual named characters permeates the show’s staging. Because the set is conceived as a long, narrow runway, there’s only really room for one non-cat to perform at any one time (the ensemble sits and watches, alongside audience members with expensive VIP tickets, at cabaret tables in the front rows). Not only do we not get to see cats being cats, we don't get to see the ensemble interact with each other at all, diminishing the opportunities for the chorus — traditionally the heart of the show — to develop the kinds of relationships and moments of characterization that make Cats beloved by people who love cats.

It may seem ridiculous to complain in so many words about Cats without cats (I never thought I’d have so many opinions about Cats, personally). But, for me at least, Cats: the Jellicle Ball captured, however inadvertently, an artistic diffidence I find all too common in contemporary theater (and the arts more broadly). This diffidence is, I think, twofold. First, and most obviously, is the fear of embracing a text for what it is – difficulties and all – rather than taking the knee-jerk stance of subversion. (It’s telling that many of the show’s most glowing reviews highlight that it’s “Cats for people who don’t like Cats”.)

Recent revivals of the musicals 1776 and Oklahoma have taken this apologetic approach, presenting the texts in question as in need of correction and amendment, helpfully provided by an updated directorial approach. There is certainly room for such an approach, particularly when it comes to presenting canonical or historically important pieces containing elements modern audiences might find distasteful. But at its most extreme, a fundamentally oppositional stance to texts – not as sources of wisdom, or even beauty, or even entertainment, but rather as obsolete errata in automatic need of correction – is a stance that threatens to obviate artistic revival altogether.

If a production is too unwilling to respect its source material – especially in the case of Cats, which is hardly considered on a par with, say, Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, one might fairly ask why bother putting it on at all – especially at the expense of time and funds better spent on new material. Why do we need Cats without cats rather than, say, a new musical adaptation of Paris is Burning, the seminal 1990 documentary of ballroom culture?

But I think this diffidence, too, comes not just from instinctive opposition to “canonical” text, but rather from a profound discomfort with abstraction itself: with the idea that artistic experience operates differently from either exact representation of propositional speech. We convey different things onstage (or in poetry, or in art) than we do in political manifestos or scientific journals; different, too, is the vocabulary – by which I mean not just language but lighting, color, image, and sound – we use to convey them. The non-literal nature of theatre – even theatre that claims to be realist – is part of its power. A crowd scene can convey the pathos of a vital  historical struggle; but so can, say, an empty stage with a single well-chosen light. 

And, sure, maybe I just wanted to see voguing cats. But I do think that one of the wonderful, weird, things about theater is that watching a voguing cat can show you more about a human being than watching a human being can. This Cats has the meaning, but manages to miss the experience.