Cats, based on T.S. Eliot's 1939 poetry collection Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats, won seven Tony Awards including Best Musical in 1983.
The most recent Broadway revival closed in 2019, so there's no production to plan a trip around — touring companies and licensed regional productions are the more realistic way to see it.
The show exists because of a widow's filing cabinet. Andrew Lloyd Webber had set several of T. S. Eliot's 1939 light verses to music as a private exercise; Valerie Eliot, her husband's literary executor, came to hear them at his Sydmonton festival in 1980 and brought unpublished fragments with her, including one about a faded glamour cat named Grizabella. That fragment supplied the only thing the poems lacked — a character with something at stake — and the evening became a show.
Everything else follows from the source. There is almost no spoken dialogue and very little plot: a tribe assembles, individual cats present themselves in turn, and one is chosen. John Napier built the junkyard at roughly three times life scale, with some two and a half thousand oversized props, so that the audience reads the performers as cat-sized without a word of explanation. Gillian Lynne's choreography and Trevor Nunn's direction carry the structure the book does not. 'Memory', the one number everyone knows, has a lyric Nunn assembled from Eliot's poem 'Rhapsody on a Windy Night'.
It opened in London in 1981 and at the Winter Garden Theatre in October 1982, winning seven Tony Awards in 1983 including Best Musical, Best Direction, Best Original Score and — a genuine curiosity — Best Book of a Musical for Eliot, who had died in 1965. Betty Buckley originated Grizabella on Broadway. The production closed in September 2000 after 7,485 performances, the longest Broadway run at the time. A revival played the Neil Simon Theatre from mid-2016 to the end of 2017.
The hostility the show attracts is really hostility to its form. It is a song cycle with a competition attached, not a book musical that forgot to have a plot, and audiences who arrive expecting the latter are correct to be annoyed and wrong about the target.
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Cats is a sung-through musical with music by Andrew Lloyd Webber. It is based on the 1939 poetry collection Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats by T. S. Eliot. The musical tells the story of a tribe of cats called the Jellicles and the night they make the "Jellicle choice" by deciding which cat will ascend to the Heaviside Layer and come back to a new life. As of 2024, Cats remains the fifth-longest-running Broadway show and the eighth-longest-running West End show.
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