'Cats' shook Broadway out of its financial doldrums and put it on the road to becoming the multibillion-dollar global entertainment engine it is today. MichaelRiedelNY writes
The 1982 cast. Photo-Illustration: Vulture and Photo by Getty Andrew Lloyd Webber hates technical rehearsals. The slow pace, the stopping and starting as stagehands and designers fiddle with sound and lighting cues, and the inevitable breakdown of the set “redefine watching paint dry,” he writes in his charming memoir, Unmasked.
He was also looking for a producer after a falling out with Robert Stigwood, the producer of Superstar and Evita. The man he found, Cameron Mackintosh, would go on to become the most successful producer of his generation. But before Mackintosh could work with Lloyd Webber, he first had to get over the fact that he wanted to kill him.
Lloyd Webber met with Valerie Eliot at her apartment in Kensington. He was nervous, but she was gracious. She was adamant about one thing: Under no circumstances were her husband’s cats to be turned into cute and cuddly kittens. Eliot had, in fact, turned down an offer from Walt Disney to adapt Old Possum’s into an animated feature. Lloyd Webber, whose Superstar was a sexy rock musical, didn’t want fluffy balls of fur either. The cats he had in mind would be highly sexual.
A major expense was John Napier’s set. He had designed the sets and costumes for Peter Shaffer’s Equus, creating stylized horse heads out of leather and cane covered in metal foil. Reading Eliot’s The Wasteland, Napier devised a rubbish dump where everything was scaled to the size of the cats. There were over-scale cans of Heinz Baked Beans, a big sneaker, a discarded washing machine, and the enormous trunk of a broken-down car.
With Gillian Lynne developing cat choreography, Practical Cats was going to be something new for the West End — a dance show. “Which is another reason people thought we were stark raving mad,” Lloyd Webber once told me. “At the time, we didn’t do dance musicals.” Those came from New York, most notably Michael Bennett’s A Chorus Line.
The final dress rehearsals were, by all accounts, disasters. The lighting wasn’t finished, Napier was still fiddling with the costumes, a few dancers were nursing injuries, Paige was struggling with “Memory,” numbers seemed to go on forever. And the show still wasn’t fully capitalized. Mackintosh offered Paige a chance to invest. No way, she said.
Paige was still struggling with the cobbled-together lyric of “Memory.” The audience response was good, but not over-the-top. Nunn thought Rice’s lyrics were too depressing. Fine, said Rice. If you don’t like them, don’t use them. Nunn came up with a lyric that he thought might work. The night Paige sang it she stopped the show.
The cost of producing Cats in New York was $4.5 million. It was the most expensive musical in the history of Broadway. The Shuberts priced the top tickets at $45 — absurdly low by the standard of today’s $400 Moulin Rouge tickets, but obscenely high in 1982. And yet the public snapped them up. Albert Poland, a young producer, visited Jacobs one afternoon to discuss ticket pricing on an Off Broadway show he was producing with the Shuberts called Little Shop of Horrors.
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