Cats is one of the most famous and longest running Broadway musicals. It was written by Andrew Lloyd Webber based on the 1939 poetry collection by T. S. Elliot.
So let’s find out some trivia and facts about the famous musical!
- Cats is a sung-through musical composed by Andrew Lloyd Webber
- Based on the 1939 poetry collection Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats by T. S. Eliot
- It tells the story of a tribe of cats called the Jellicles and the night they make the “Jellicle choice”
- Deciding which cat will ascend to the Heaviside Layer and come back to a new life
- The musical includes the well-known song “Memory” as sung by Grizabella
- As of 2019, Cats remains the fourth-longest-running Broadway show
- It is the sixth-longest-running West End show
- Lloyd Webber began setting Eliot’s poems to music in 1977
- The compositions were first presented as a song cycle in 1980
- Producer Cameron Mackintosh then recruited director Trevor Nunn and choreographer Gillian Lynne to turn the songs into a complete musical
- Cats opened to positive reviews at the New London Theatre in the West End in 1981
- Then to mixed reviews at the Winter Garden Theatre on Broadway in 1982
- It won numerous awards
- Including Best Musical at both the Laurence Olivier and Tony Awards
- Despite its unusual premise that deterred investors initially
- The musical turned out to be an unprecedented commercial success
- With a worldwide gross of US$3.5 billion by 2012
- The London production ran for 21 years and 8,949 performances
- While the Broadway production ran for 18 years and 7,485 performances
- Making Cats the longest-running musical in both theatre districts for a number of years
- Cats has since been revived in the West End twice and on Broadway once
- It has also been translated into multiple languages and performed around the world many times
- Long-running foreign productions include a 15-year run at the Operettenhaus in Hamburg that played over 6,100 performances
- As well as an ongoing run in a purpose-built theatre in Japan that has played over 10,000 performances since it opened in 1983
- Cats started the megamusical phenomenon
- Establishing musical theatre as a global industry and directing its focus to big-budget blockbusters
- As well as family- and tourist-friendly shows
- The musical’s profound but polarising influence also reshaped the aesthetic, technology, and marketing of the medium
- Cats was adapted into a direct-to-video film in 1998
- And a feature film adaptation by Tom Hooper set to follow in 2019
- Lloyd Webber began composing the songs in late 1977 as a songwriting exercise
- Partly because Eliot’s book had been a childhood favourite
- And partly to see if he could write music to predetermined lyrics
- The compositions were performed privately for friends but Lloyd Webber had no further intentions for them at the time
- After his song cycle Tell Me on a Sunday was televised by the BBC in early 1980, Lloyd Webber began to consider using his musicalization of Eliot’s poems in the same vein for a televised concert anthology
- He approached producer Cameron Mackintosh to explore possible avenues for the songs
- Practical Cats, as the show was then called, was first presented as a song cycle at the 1980 summer Sydmonton Festival
- The concert was performed by Gemma Craven, Gary Bond and Paul Nicholas
- Eliot’s widow and literary executor, Valerie, was in attendance and brought along various unpublished cat-themed poems by Eliot
- One of these was “Grizabella the Glamour Cat” which, although rejected from Eliot’s book for being “too sad for children”, gave Lloyd Webber the idea for a full-blown musical
- Lloyd Webber thus decided to turn Practical Cats into a musical, co-produced by Mackintosh and the Really Useful Group’s Brian Brolly
- The development of Cats was also plagued by financial troubles
- Mackintosh struggled to raise the £450,000 (US$1.16 million) needed to stage the musical in the West End as major investors were sceptical of the show’s premise and refused to back it
- Lloyd Webber personally underwrote the musical and took out a second mortgage on his house for the down payment of the theatre
- He later recalled that if Cats had been a commercial failure, it would have left him in financial ruin
- The remaining capital was eventually financed by small investments procured from 220 individuals through newspaper advertisements
- After the musical became a massive hit, the rate of return for these investors was estimated to have exceeded 3,500%
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