Stupid Guest Tricks

Cats was my first professional gig, during my first year of college. I worked the final 200 performances of the Toronto production. It was seeing that production that convinced me that this was the career path for me. After that many performances you do get sick of it! But you just tune it out and do your job. That's how I survived over 7 years of Phantom Of The Opera!

Having worked on most of the big musicals of the past 24 years, that show was one of the most fun. It was a great bunch of people, and we were witnessing the rebirth of the musical theatre industry.

Cats spawned a renaissance fir commercial musical theatre, introducing it to an entire demographic who had never considered going to a show. And in doing so alienated a lot of the traditional audience, who didn't care for the mega musical, and its ticket prices. Cats paved the way for the big budget shows like Phantom, Les Miz, Lion King, and so on. When there are a number of mega musicals running, the smaller regional theatre companies see increased sales, as it raises the profile of live theatre as a whole.

PatchOBlack wrote:Second, Cats does, in fact, have a plot and story.

I never said it didn't. I said it had a skeletal shoehorned in plot. It clearly exists, but it doesn't really have a depth of storytelling and character development that's going to captivate someone who only cares about the plot.

8^)

PatchOBlack wrote:First, just because something is not to your tastes does not automatically make it bad.

I've gotta disagree. Liver and Brussels sprouts are horrible.

Mayonnaise wrote:it had a skeletal shoehorned in plot

This is evidenced by the fact that it doesn't really matter what order the segments happen in, the story doesn't change.

Also, I can handle minimal plot(one of my favorite games of all time is like this) but the plot of Cats has very little to do with most of it, you get some at the beginning and some at the end, the stuff in between doesn't matter at all and has nothing to do with what's going on.

Lasolimu wrote:This is evidenced by the fact that it doesn't really matter what order the segments happen in, the story doesn't change.

Also, I can handle minimal plot(one of my favorite games of all time is like this) but the plot of Cats has very little to do with most of it, you get some at the beginning and some at the end, the stuff in between doesn't matter at all and has nothing to do with what's going on.

Strangely, this also holds true to "Jacques Brell Is Alive And Well And Living In Paris". And "Brell" is considered a pivotal piece of modern musical theatre, in that it set poetry to music and performed it on a set of sorts, with no story or plot line. It seems the pacing is intended to give the 4 singers recovery time after their big numbers, and with no theme other than depressed, sometimes heartbroken young man and his trials.

"Brell", the musical, was not near the commercial success that Cats was. Go figure!

Which is why I suggested that the play is best taken without emphasis on the plot, because when you don't get hung up on the plot as a focus then you're freed up to experience the expressiveness of the individual scenes.

Although I'd beg to differ that there are no important parts in the middle. Grizzabella's scenes: all of them drive the plot, and can't be put in a different order. The other scenes can be shuffled around them at nausium (aside from the kidnapping of Deuteronomy) but Grizzabella's personal journey doesn't work in any order other than the order it's in.

"Moments of Happiness," in particular, must occur where it does.

8^)

PatchOBlack wrote:...Cats does, in fact, have a plot and story. However, it is very light on exposition, with nearly no lines spoken that are not part of a song. ...

Disney's On the Record was much the same, for anyone here who missed seeing it. On the whole, it is just a revue of Disney songs (lots of Disney songs!) with no spoken dialogue, and the one setting is a stylized recording studio. But the songs are ordered and acted by the four principals to tell an over-arching boy meets girl story, with some recognizable subplots as well.

A few examples: It becomes clear that the older guy and girl have a history together -- when he sings "When Somebody Loved Me" about her. The younger girl (played by Ashley Brown, who went on to star in Mary Poppins) is seen as falling for the younger guy -- "So This Is Love" -- but then the older girl tries to lure him away, interrupting with "I can show you the world..." from "A Whole New World."

Along the way, there are some great performance pieces that don't advance the plot but are just fun -- like the medley of nonsense songs (which hilariously weaves together "Higitus Figitus," "Bibbidi Bobbidi Boo," "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious" and others), or the subtitled performance of "Be Our Guest" in languages from around the world.

The 2-CD soundtrack is still one of our family's favorites -- I highly recommend it even if you never saw the show.

I just have to say that this is the most awesome thread divergedness I've ever witnessed. Completely loving the analysis of modern theater productions.

Delsdad, you a gypsy?

CBeilby wrote:

LadySiren wrote:

Hallelujah brother!