21-JUL-18 We Beseech Thee

[DiveMilw]

I thought the kitties wanted to visit with me this morning but they really just wanted to be let outside. Here we have Marcus, Cosmo, and Duffner.

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[scenicdesign71]

So cute!   

Speaking of cats, it seems the unthinkable is happening:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/20/movies/cats-james-corden-taylor-swift.html

(Casting aside, the movie itself is apparently old news -- director Tom Hooper has been attached for the past two years -- but I hadn't heard, or else perhaps had blocked it from my mind in stunned refusal-to-believe).

And speaking of John Guare (in last Monday's daily thread): having tempted fate with his running joke, in Six Degrees of Separation, about the self-evident absurdity of Cats ever leaping to the big screen, I suppose it was only a matter of time.

Well, "only" -- almost thirty years.  (...since Guare first dared the world to imagine such a calamity, that is; it's been closer to forty since Sir Andrew's gesamtkatzwerk first graced the London stage.  Just for random comparative purposes, imagine if Oklahoma! hadn't made it to celluloid until sometime around the beginning of Reagan's first Presidential term.  Starring who, Tom Wopat and Susan Dey?  With Shirley Jones as Aunt Eller?  Maybe Didi Cohn as Ado Annie, and Jeff "Kenickie" Conaway as Will Parker... okay, I'll stop).

While Six Degrees was never exactly a culture-wide blockbuster on the scale of, say, Cats itself, Guare's Pulitzer- and Tony-nominated play was widely hailed among the very creative classes who would have been in a position to absorb its casually-blistering scorn for this most classic of Ideas So Awful That Only Hollywood Would Entertain Them.  This, moreover, at a time when such contempt might still have registered as a flat-out dealbreaker rather than an irresistible challenge.  (When Guare's fantasy-figure of the ostensible film's director -- a doubly- or triply-metafictionalized version of Sidney Poitier, no less -- monologues about how "in going through all the reasons why you couldn't make a movie of Cats, (I) suddenly saw how you could make a movie of Cats," we're invited to both laugh and shudder.  There's something loopily compelling about "Poitier"'s humane and eloquent pitch, yet Guare leaves us with not a shred of doubt as to the utter improbability -- indeed, the inadvisability -- of any human being ever paying money to see such a film).

So it's just possible that we have him to thank, in some small part, for having been spared this long.

[scenicdesign71]

December 20, 2019, burn your calendars.

Mark.  Mark your calendars.  Did I say burn?  ha. 

[DiveMilw]

December 20, 2019, burn your calendars.

Mark.  Mark your calendars.  Did I say burn?  ha.

While I'm glad a new generation will have the chance to discover Cats I'm not personally excited by the prospect of a movie.  Maybe I'll end up seeing it.  Who knows what tomorrow will bring?   

[Gordonb]

I'm amazed to realise that it is 37 years (half a lifetime and more ago) since I saw "Cats" at the New London Theatre on the first Saturday after its official opening. There was a huge buzz about the show and I suppose it was, at that time, something new and very special. I never went back, never listen to the recording and have zero interest in the film and I have to wonder who the intended audience is?

It's also amazing to think that it's coming up for 33 years (and that is half a lifetime ago for me) since I saw "Les Miserables" in opening week at the Barbican Centre. That moved and excited me a lot, and I did go back many years later but sadly I only sort of enjoyed it.

Memories eh?

[scenicdesign71]

I should admit, for all my ALW-bashing, that I was smitten by Cats when I was 11.

By then, weirdly enough, I had already had designs on a future career in scenography for several years; so my interest in the show had a lot to do with its spectacular physical production, photographs of which I pored over eagerly in the old Theatre Crafts magazine before finally getting a chance to see the second (I think?) U.S. national tour a year or two later.

But I won't downplay the appeal of a score that sounded, to my eleven-year-old ears, somehow modern and mysterious and excitingly theatrical.

Still: I was baffled, even then, by the immediate elevation of "Memory" -- at best, a resoundingly mediocre song with a briefly-interesting bridge and one or two nicely atmospheric images lifted from Eliot -- to the status of "instant classic".

[KathyB]

I know I've confessed this before, but I've always liked the score to Cats. When I saw a touring production, after years of being familiar with the score, I admit that I was a little bored because I wasn't really expecting so much of a dance show. (Although, when I think about it, what else could they do with the material?) 

[DiveMilw]

I know I've confessed this before, but I've always liked the score to Cats. When I saw a touring production, after years of being familiar with the score, I admit that I was a little bored because I wasn't really expecting so much of a dance show. (Although, when I think about it, what else could they do with the material?)

Well, they could have made it more like the Puppy Bowl.  A stage full of cats and kittens with the music playing in the background.  And you could pay extra to get seats on stage where you can cuddle with the performers! Such a missed opportunity.