Cats (tour)

NOTE: The following review dates from February 2003 and an earlier stop for this ongoing touring production. For current cast details, please see listings or check with the appropriate venue. If you have seen the current cast and would like to share your views please go to the User Reviews section.

After 21 years playing to packed houses in the West End, Andrew Lloyd Webber‘s record-breaking Cats has been spectacularly revived in Plymouth by David Ian for Clear Channel Entertainment, and its nationwide tour is fast selling out.

Directed by former Royal Shakespeare Company artistic director Trevor Nunn, TS Eliot‘s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats springs to life in a triumphant spectacle of colour and sound, movement and song.

The overture is an explosion of sound, under the baton of musical director Stuart Calvert, while David Hersey‘s lighting runs wild throughout the multi-coloured bulb-strewn auditorium and across John Napier‘s larger- than-life junkyard set.

There’s no plot as such – just the ‘Jellicle’ tribe of cats reuniting for their annual ball overseen by the elderly catriarch “Deuteronomy” while the maverick “Macavity” attempts to spoil the fun. The culmination of the ball will be when one cat is be chosen to ascend into the ‘Heaviside Layer’ and collect a further nine lives.

The viewers are invited in, reluctantly at first, but soon the cats, beautifully costumed by Trish McAuley, are leaping in and out of the audience including the auditorium as their territory.

True to Eliot’s original the cats explain their naming and entertain with vignettes showing the lives of several of their number including the theatrical “Gus” (Patrick Clancy) and the energetic cat burglars “Mungojerrie (Tom Dwyer) and Rumpelteazer” (Katy-Jo Howman). Stuart Ramsey makes the most of a gem of a role as cool cat “Rum Tum Tugger” strutting his stuff to the delight of the female Jellicles and the appreciative audience, while Grizabella, the glamour puss played by veteran Chrissie Hammond (who played her for more than two years in the smash hit West End production), forlornly attempts to re-enter the tribe.

The sound system was a little harsh in places and some of the fast lyrics lost but Hammond thrilled with her rendition of the famous “Memory”.

However, as an out-and-out dance show it can’t be faulted. From sinuous feline stalking, to stunning acrobatics with balletic dance and boogie in between, there is something for everyone here. This is a spectacle that few will want to miss.

– Karen Bussell (reviewed at the Theatre Royal, Plymouth)