Cats -- Feline Failures (productions that tanked), Episode 22 (Cats 8 of 8).

Send us a text

I am writing this on Father’s Day, 2025, and to mark this occasion I will share my greatest parenting victory.  Last spring, during Taylor Swift’s eras Tour my daughter did all the things one does to try to get a ticket.  Tried the presale, pre-registered, looked at the fan resale sites, looked at the predatory reseller sites, put alerts on all her accounts.  But, no dice.  The only tickets that were available were well out of our price range.

And then, 2 days before the last concert in LA, a family friend found tickets we could – barely – afford, and asked if our daughter wanted to join.  Sending the text message announcing that she had tickets made me feel like the parent of the year and, undoubtedly, badly interrupted her AP English class.

And so, with 48 hours to go, my daughter came home, disappeared into her room, and took to her homework like any good AP student would and announced that she needed to make sure that she had memorized every song that was on the set list, plus every song that might be one of the two “surprise” songs that Swift added to each concert performance.  If there was any song, in any format, that Taylor Swift had ever recorded, my daughter was going to make sure that she could sing along with it word for word at the concert.

When she came home, she described the experience as a “fever dream.”

Ms. Swift, if you are out there listening to this podcast, or more likely the lectures I have uploaded to YouTube on advanced linear multiple regression heterogeneity tests, I just want you to know that you made my daughter’s year.

So imagine my surprise when I was researching this episode, asked her what she thought of “beautiful ghosts.”  To my stunned amazement, she had never heard of it.  Ever.  Beautiful ghosts is the original song that Taylor Swift had recorded for the fraught, and failed, CGI animated version of Cats.

How is it possible to make a show with a budget that large, with an all-star cast, including the single most popular entertainer on the face of the planet earth (who can date whoever she wants but should really be cheering for Justin Herbert and the San Diego Chargers) – how can you put together a production with every single bit of mass marketed momentum going for it, and end up with a flop?  That is a more commercial but harder to untangle mystery than most that we’ve dealt with, and we’ll be watching it from the cheap seats in this episode of THM.

Show watching

https://www.broadwayleague.com/research/statistics-broadway-nyc/

Musical artist net worth

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_music_artists_by_net_worth

The success of Andrew Lloyd Webber

https://www.londontheatre.co.uk/theatre-news/news/prepare-for-yet-another-very-andrew-lloyd-webber-summer

 

Support the show