Cats -- Is Grizabella a prostitute? Episode 21 (Cats 7 of 8).

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An already famous poet is working, for the first time, on something light and fun.  It’s a children’s book of poems about Cats.  All his previous work has basically been about the anxious terror in the modern world, but he is going to do something delightful, for a change.  His Dad likes cats, he likes cats, his friends have kids who like cats.   The book is about cats.

He’s a handful of lines in when he stops himself – he’s writing about a female cat, a fallen star, and he decides not to go on.  This super-educated man realizes that, probably unconsciously, he’s modeling his character study after something that’s been done before, albeit centuries earlier and in another language.  The risk of plagiarism doesn’t stop him, he just realizes that the story is just too sad to put in a book designed to entertain kids.

Those poems and finished and eventually are read on the radio on Christmas day in 1937 to a delighted English audience, and one of the youngsters who hears them is Andrew Lloyd Webber, who will go on to become what can safely be called the most powerful force on broadway.  He turns the poems into a musical, and with the help of TS Eliot’s widow Valerie combines the figure with some other poetry to produce the song “Memory,” which will become absolutely iconic.

TS Eliot pointedly did not sexualize the character.  Critics would write that the ALW production team would go out of its way to say nothing sexual about Grizabella or her past.  And yet, today, those who write about the character the most closely argue convincingly that she is widely understood to be a former prostitute…and she is, just not in any English language version.  

Why is she understood this way when there is no reference prostitution in the text for the musical, and when she doesn’t appear at all in the original book of poetry at all?  Does it matter, and if so, why?  We’ll trace the rumors on this episode of THM…

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