Theatre Royal, June 20, 2025
Until September 6, 2025
This show has had more lives than the proverbial cat. Since first pouncing onto the stage in 1981, it has become one of the longest running musicals on the West End and Broadway.
Performed around the world since, it’s barely taken a catnap. Now those cats with the amber eyes are back in Sydney for the start of a national tour, 40 years after the musical was first staged here.
There’s been little attempt to update this production by the show’s originators – composer Andrew Lloyd Webber, director Trevor Nunn, choreographer Gillian Lynne and designer John Napier.
The musical is based on TS Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, a collection of light-hearted verses the poet wrote for his godchildren.
The show is strong on movement and physicality, from the moment the junkyard cats emerge from the moonlit shadows.
But the plot is thinner than a starving stray. A cat tribe assembles once a year to celebrate and decide who will journey to Heaviside Layer, a kind of moggy heaven.
With minimal plot, character development or conflict, the show is a series of party pieces in which various cat characters get a chance to shine.
Some shine brightly. Todd McKenney was terrific as fatcat Bustopher Jones in a costume redolent of Aunty Jack.
McKenney’s dual role as Gus, the ageing performing cat, provided one of the night’s rare affecting interludes as he recalled his glory days in a moving duet with Lucy Maunder (Jellylorum). This lifted the second act opening after a first act that became bogged down with the overlong Jellicle Ball dance section.
A sexy Rum Tum Tugger (Des Flanagan) rose to his rock star moment. Mark Vincent as Old Deuteronomy brought sonorous gravitas to the role of the tribal elder – no mean feat given he looked like a Womble.
Gabriyel Thomas was a strong presence in the key role of Grizabella, the former glamour puss, now more grizzled than bella, who has been rejected by the tribe. With her rich, powerful voice, Thomas invests with pathos the showstopper Memories.
Jemima (Ella Fitzpatrick) delivered a couple of teasers of the show’s best-known song earlier in the piece, but a lack of vocal strength and brittle tone did not serve well the sweeping melody.
The energetic ensemble worked hard as they danced and pranced on and occasionally off the stage and into the auditorium. Yet much of the choreography and movement feels dated.
Whether it was sound balance or delivery, the lyrics to the ensemble vocal numbers were difficult to determine.
The off-stage orchestra, under musical director Paul White, was well paced and versatile in numbers that ranged across jazz, blues and pop to anthemic and operatic.
Cats was ground-breaking when it premiered, an immersive spectacle that helped usher in an era of mega-musicals.
Since then, the big-budget musicals it helped spawn have become increasingly sophisticated.
There may be nostalgic appeal in revisiting a work that feels rooted in an ’80s era and aesthetic. So thanks for the Memories. But today these frolicking felines feel whiskery.
This review first appeared in The Sydney Morning Herald.
