LOL Cats!

Cats was one of Broadway's longest standing musical productions, having debuted there in 1982 and running until September of 2000, although it lives on around the country in a Broadway Across America tour (now at the Paramount through this weekend) and, no doubt, on community stages far and wide.

The script is taken from T.S. Eliot's Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats, except for a handful of lines in "Jellicle Songs for Jellicle Cats" and the entirety of the mid-production torch song "Memory." Seattlest headed out last night for the BAA production's opening night at the Paramount, to catch the show for the first time ever. It was a jarring experience, to say the least.

We'll focus on the good parts first. There's no doubt this touring company is fantastic. Adam Steiner's Rum Tum Tugger was easily the most impressive, entertaining part of the show. Anastasia Lange (Grizabella) belted the hell out of "Memory" to the point that her big, grand diva moment made us jump in our seats, she hit that note so hard and fast. The dance solos from Mistofeles (Jonathan Mercer) and Macavity (Drew Roelofs) were fabulous crowd-pleasers.

But really? By intermission, we were brainstorming with our friend about what they could have done to update the score and keep it interesting for a 2009 audience. The best we could come up with was making Kelly Clarkson's "My Life Would Suck Without You" a recurring song in the play, and having all the characters talk in LOLspeak. ("I can has legwarmers?") As is, Cats struck us not unlike its torch song-belting Grizabella. Once upon a time, it was beautiful and groundbreaking, memorable and haunting, surprising or even shocking. Now it feels out of touch and out of time. As Gus the Theater Cat says, "the theater is not what it was." That's not to say what Cats was, was a bad thing. It broke ground and blurred the lines between street cool and theater chic. The lighting and musical effects were probably (we wouldn't really know, since we were five years old) cutting edge at the time. But now, holding it up to something like Spring Awakening or The Heights (or, hell, even Rent, which is now more than a decade old) only shows exactly how much the theater has progressed in the last nearly 30 years.

So we're glad we can check Cats off our List of Plays to See Before We Die, but we can't say we were entirely moved. Perhaps, like Grizabella, it should be placed on a spaceship and sent to the Jellicle moon, or whatever the heck that was about. We'll go back to reading T.S. Eliot in print.

Apr. 15-19 // The Paramount // Tickets start at $20