Cats musical review, Regent’s Park: Purrrfectly exquisite nonsense
Cats review and star rating: ★★★★
The unnervingly bad 2019 movie did nothing to dispel the creeping sense that perhaps Cats is a little too strange.
We were willing to suspend our disbelief for all sorts of nonsense in the 1990s, including this, a musical with loose at best narrative direction that spends 80 per cent of its run time introducing felines that live in a London alleyway. But if Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Starlight Express, in which grown adults play toy trains, can come back successfully, then can Cats?
There’s not a dustbin in sight in director and choreographer Drew McOnie’s sexed up, high-octane production that stirs and transfixes.
Cats musical: strange, abstract wisdom
As they do on the sofa, the animals flop atop one another, hiss and flex, McOnie’s out-of-this-world choreography creating startling images of the animals in a pack.
It’s looser and more naturalistic than the pirouetting gang in the film, and thank goodness for that. The ensemble were presumably told “act like Cats!” rather than “do some ballet as a Cat!” and that was a great instruction indeed. After all, they are delicate, ingenious animals, and as you would with your own pet, you end up glued to watching these intuitive creatures prowl across Sami Fendall’s pleasingly minimalistic moon-shaped set.
The pack is gearing up to attend The Jellicle Ball, an annual event run by statesperson-like Old Deuteronomy, the cat who will choose one animal to be elevated from being a stray and reborn into a higher life. The animals share life stories through song and dance; there is charismatic, Harry Styled-coded Rum Tum Tugger (fantastic from Jaydon Vijn); bad guy Macavity, cheeky duo Mungojerrie and Rumpleteazer and old outcast Grizabella, who ditched the pack to go alone but returns for the chance at a new life. They’re each as fabulously enchanting to watch as the last.
Two moons above the Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre
It is understudy Taziva-Faye Katsande who performs the principal role of Grizabella on press night, who brings a naiveness to the vulnerable older cat. Her performance of the famous track Memory is superb, though she is too young to convey the wisdom and nostalgia that defines Grizabella (totally not her fault, it’s a strange casting choice). It’s a similar issue with Old Duteronomy; Melanie La Barrie is 51 but in the original poems, by T S Eliot, the character is much older. I’m not sure Cats is supposed to feel thoroughly youthful, though this one does.
Though under two moons (there’s one at the top of the stage, a gorgeous set piece provoking glances up at the actual sky), this Cats still carries the strange, abstract wisdom of Eliot’s writing.
The Cats musical is playing at the Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre until 19 September