Cats -- Sex and spectacle; what makes the musical work! Episode 18 (Cats 4 of 8)

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Episode #4

The year is 1982.  The liberatory vibe of the 1960s is long gone…Ronald Reagan is president, and it’s a bad time to be an air traffic controller, or a union member, or an Iranian hostage, or, maybe most tragically, if you’re gay.  But there remain progressive voices, and one of those is the Village Voice, still an open champion of the avante garde in the world.  If you have a new, edgy, and experimental piece of theater, the Village Voice should be your core audience.

But Michael Feingold, the theater critic for the Voice, does not like the genre-busting production he just watched, and he’s dripping acid off his pen to try to come up with something more demeaning than his previous paragraph, and by and large it’s working.  Jessica Sternfeld recounts his prose: “Feingold tidily listed each disastrous element and how it contributed to a show clearly doomed to failure…the poetry itself, Feingold began, struggled painfully and unsuccessfully…the music is such inane, characterless drivel that only a generation of stoned clones and TV drones could have summed it up…the music doesn’t sound composed.  It doodles randomly from chord to chord, never developing a theme or structure…Feingold did not further elaborate his problems with the music, but moved to the third horror, [the] choreography, which looked borrowed and represented all too directly the choreographer’s undistinguished career.”

“Cats,” wrote Feingold, “is a dog.”  And with a special crescendo: “To sit through it is to realize that something has been peeing on your pants leg.  For two hours.”  And for the finale: “It ought to be retitled 101 uses for a dead musical, a reference to the popular book 101 uses for a dead cat.”  

As we know, that view of Feingold would not be widely shared, and the musical would resonate with all those marginalized groups that the Village Voice would otherwise represent.  In fact, it would become the longest-running, most lucrative, and probably most popular musical of all time.  We’ll figure out what Feingold missed, with urine-busting scotch guard on our pants, in this episode of THM.

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