A LEGEND REBORN
On a sweltering opening night under the trees, what more can you ask than fresh life and passion flung into a famous show which had become, frankly, a bit of an eye-roll? And suddenly to find that it’s a 19-year-old understudy playing the crucial leading-lady role and doing the big (and often hackneyed) number Memories with such intensity, soaring purity and breaking emotion that a reputation is made while you watch. It was a terrific night for Taziva-Faye Katsande, and us. And we got a great deal else from director-choreographer Drew McOnie’s vigorous, eerily beautiful revival.
I last saw CATS at the end of it’s 21-year London run, still with the Gillian Lynne choreography and Nunn’s determination to have the cats roaming the stalls. It felt, somehow, wincingly tired despite the familiar scatter of memorable numbers: hard to believe that it won an Oscar and a Tony and kicked off the global-British-musical phenomenon. Some songs were good, but who cared any more? Then came the creepy horror of the 2019 film with its illjudged digital abuse of a human cast: wittily, the composer himself took to claiming “Cats movie” to airline officials as the explanation of why he needed an emotional support puppy.
But Drew McOnie, dancer-choreographer as well as director, was in Cats years ago and loves it. So he decided, as leader of the Open Air Theatre, to make it anew. His passion shows, and pays off. I have loved the TS Eliot Practical Cats poems since nursery (and was intrigued at the way fragments of the Four Quartets and Preludes got snuck in alongside their whimsy) . But the sketchy plot about cats choosing who gets reborn wasn’t ever much to my taste. I wasn’t all that optimistic, but McOnie has done something properly beautiful.
It really is: sung-through, danced-through with frenetic energy and sharp physical wit, under and on a Sami Fendall curving set around a great moving moon, with fabulous costumes (non-furry but inventively catsuited, free and fine and varied as street-cats themselves) . Any old weariness is gone. The first half feels almost like a meditation, a choreo-poem as McOnie puts it; the vast Jellicle-cat ensemble (not furry, but in ingeniously beautiful stretch catsuits of pronounced indiviual charater) surge around exuberant. They are gangs and loners, feral and wild, striding, leaping, bending, hissing, moving in eerie unity for a moment then suddenly ragged individuals on the prowl. It’s mesmerizing. Gradually characters emerge: Jaydon Vijn a rocking tomcat Rum Tum Tugger spitting rebellion in leather and fringes, Charlotte Riby a Gumbie Cat of dignity, Elliott Broadfoot in spats and white gloves a broad smug grandee Bustopher Jones; Katsande’s Grizabella’s lonely, silvery figure drifting through the chaos. Macavity cartwheels crazily, celebrating depravity and battered Old Deuteronomy gives a gentler moment, rising to a moving chorale in the smoke as the wise ancient stoops and blesses.
It works because it’s not just jolly pop-rock dance: McOnie masters the emotional depths of choreography, understands the expressions melancholy and hopeful that a body can show, and as cats so eloquently do but we not often enough after infancy. At three points in the show there is a moment when the whole huge cast lean upon one another in a long row, suddenly saying something about human community which took my breath away.
I felt for a while that the first half was lacking in big dramatic moments – it really isn’t much of a plot – but the second, 50-minute part was breathtaking, rich in character and story. Gary Wilmot in massive patchwork robe is wonderful as Gus the Theatre Cat, reminiscing about past glories and the way they don’t train kittens any more, perfectly delivering the Eliot wit ( I really do want the part taken over for a night by Ian McKellen. Or him to do it as a solo). The saga of Growltiger and the Siamese pirates sees proper sails appear, and junk-sail banners, and a grand fight: it’s directed with pin-sharp wit and detail. Skimbleshanks has a proper train, Jet Yau’s Mistoffelees is a street-dance phenomenon, and Macavity sets a ring of fire round the stage.
But again, one of those sudden movingly beautiful moments of a long , leaning line of unity: cats, telling us much we need to know about being human. Lovely.
openairtheatre.com. to 19 September
but a fifth one for choreography….
theatreCat 