Catastrophe

After seeing Cats on Sunday for my birthday, Chance got an e-mail from ticketmaster asking him to write a review of the show. Chance passed it off to me, saying "I think you would have better words for this." And thus, here is my review of Cats, which will be able to be ready shortly on ticketmaster.com.

We came into this show knowing that Cats had no plot and was just a bunch of cats jumping around. However, this production surpassed our low expectations, being even more disjointed and confusing than seemed possible. The group dances had the potential to be visually interesting, but very few of the moves were particularily original and the slightly unsynchronized motions were unsettling. Additionally, the orchestration did not coordinate with the dances or actions performed on stage. The dancers would move wildly before or after a cresendo in the music, thereby reducing any emphasis that could have been created. Being a theater major, I understand the need for metaphorical or exaggerated movements to tell the story, but the actions of the dancers and the dynamics of the music infused more confusion into the storytelling than purpose. Also, the constant movement on stage made it very difficult to figure out which character on stage was singing or should be the focus of the audience's attention.

In regards to the technical aspects, the lighting cues merely served to further diffuse any ephasis in the story. The intelligent lights swooped and changed colors at random, bringing back memories of high school dance shows. Random gobos rotated through, such as a window or a series of stars, and their prescence was not reflected or reinforced by the action at the time. The main spotlights they were using had to throw from the technical booth at the top of the upper balcony. This wouldn't have been a problem except for the fact that the theater was full of diffusion and the beam was very distracting as it flashed on and off. The cooling gel in the spotlight was also too subtle to notice on top of the overpowering intel lights, adding to the confusion as to where our focus should be directed. I was thoroughly unimpressed and somewhat disappointed as to how many queing mistakes were made, including missed bumps at the end of songs.

Finally, Andrew Lloyd Weber is a composer that you either love or hate. His songs go on perpetually with a highly unmemorable melody. Some songs seem to end three or four times in succession, while the first four songs in the first act had no end and merely trailed right into the next. The choral storytelling harkens to opera, where the sung words sound like an unintelligible foreign language. Some of the singers themselves were not very good, demonstrating poor breathing or just a unemotional presentation. The story itself is completely nonsensical, being created from a collection of poems rather than from a story. As a result characters appear, do a bizarre dance with spoons, and then never return. I have no idea what any of the character's names are, what their names mean, or what the relations are between any of them.

If this is your ideal image of musical theater, then this is the show for you.

Favorite Part of the Show: When the green abominable snowman cat sat on the stage for the duration of intermission, staring at the audience.