Broadway’s legendary furry musical returns & it’s going to be a catwalk extravaganza
Cats took home the Tony Award for Best Musical. And whether you love it or loathe it, when it first debuted, nobody had ever seen anything like this furry frenzy.
In a move befitting of a nine-lived feline, Cats returns this spring — unlike anything we’ve seen before.A real-life harbinger of the years that would follow it, Cats embodied just about everything about the excesses of the 1980s, from its big sound (music by Andrew Lloyd Webber) to its bigger budget ($4 million) to its even bigger hair (wigs by Paul Huntley).Its plot, adapted from the beloved children’s poems of Nobel Prize-winning poet T.S.
Eliot, was thin, simple, and more than a little absurd. A group of cats with names that sound vaguely like diseases (Mungojerrie, Rumpleteazer, Macavity, etc.) converge in a litter-filled alley to sing their stories about what makes them exceptional.
Ultimately, one is chosen to move on to kitty heaven, a.k .a. the Heaviside Layer. A subplot about a once glamorous — and now very sick — cat struck a chord with queer audiences who may have subconsciously seen it as an allegory for the AIDS crisis, which played out in real time when the musical opened in 1982.
