Jellicle Joy
Thursday, 6 June 2024 08:15
It’s 43 years since Cats the musical opened in the New London Theatre in Covent Garden. That’s 304 in cat years. It was a huge success, running uninterrupted for 21 years staging almost 9,000 performances. And in case anyone had missed it, it was revived twice. It transferred to Broadway in 1982 to slightly modified rapture, but still ran for 18 years, with one revival. It has been an enormous success, grossing US$3.5 billion worldwide by 2012.
It’s been translated into many languages, and is still being performed allover the world. Belvedere has friends in ailurophile Japan, and reports that there the show has taken on a whole new life of its own. The first production in 1983 was set in a purpose built theatre in Tokyo and it is still running , although has probably departed from the original concept by some several tail lengths.
Who’d have thought it , eh?
It all began in 1977, when Andrew Lloyd Webber set to music some of T. S Eliot’s cat poems. Eliot had written the poems in the 1930s for his godchildren and they were published in Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats in 1939. He called himself Old Possum to reassure people that it they were not in for a feline version of the The Waste Land (‘I will show your fear in a handful of cat litter’). The poems are about individual weird cats with even weirder names.
Lloyd Webber’s eventual full blown musical, which opened in 1981, added a commensurately weird storyline, not in the original. A tribe of cats (The Jellicles) meet in the city one special night to make the ritual Jellicle Choice, deciding which of them will ascend to he Heaviside Layer and return to Earth renewed.
To which one can only say Do what, guv?
To be fair they did get the Heaviside bit from another of Eliot’s works, The Family Reunion, published in the same year as Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats. It is mentioned in terms of redemption, so I am told.
The Heaviside layer is a real thing. Belvedere points out that it should really be called the Kennelly-Heaviside Layer as it was discovered by two people, Oliver Heaviside and Arthur Kennelly, quite independently in 1902, but Arthur published first. This is true, but is difficult to fit into a song.lyric. It’s modern name is the E Layer, but that lacks any showbiz razz, and anyway sounds like it is composed of artificial additives.
What is it anyway?
According to Belvedere, it’s what makes long distance telecomms possible. It’s a reflective ionised layer in the upper atmosphere between 80 and 145 km above the planet’s surface. It bounces any radio signals we send back down to Earth, Otherwise we would be just broadcasting into the void.
Don’t say it.
While I have a strong grasp on the idea of radio waves bouncing around, I am finding it hard to know why cats would want to go up there. But then I have not seen the show (I would like to set this bit in tiny type to indicate shame, but don’t know how to) and neither has Belvedere.
The original show was staged by Cameron Mackintosh, directed by Trevor Nunn of Royal Shakespeare Company fame, and choreographed by Gillian Lynne RSC and Royal Opera House ). You could not get a classier act. It won a Laurence Olivier award, seven Tonys, and probably more.
A film of the show was made in 2019, directed by Tom ‘Les Miserables’ Hooper. You’d bet the farm on it being a smash. However, despite featuring kilowatt stars (Idris Elba,Dame Dame Judi Dench, Taylor Swift, Sir Ian McKellan), it bombed spectacularly, making a loss $71 million, one of the biggest box office disasters of all times.
I suppose that is a kind of glory.