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Cats:    lecture notes by Michael Moor

Music: Andrew Lloyd Webber

lyrics; T.S.Elliot

Director: Trevor Nunn

Set and Costume: John Napier

Choreography: Gillian Lynne

Opened May 1981

Based on Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats by T.S. Eliot

This work is a good example of the blurring division between High Art and Popular Culture.  T.S Eliot is associated with High Art and is a Nobel Prize Winner for Literature (1948)

A very physical, movement and dance based show.

Thematic basis for costume and set

The 'hand' of the Director and Choreographer is clearly evident.

It is hard to pinpoint any single element that makes this show work other than spectacle.... rather it is an  amalgamation of devices, conventions and craftsmanship.

It is unusual in as much as it is a work of poetic literature adapted for the musical theatre.  

It could be seen in the tradition of its Choreographer's Royal Ballet background and training who may well have been influenced by Ashton's 'Tales of Beatrix Potter' for example.  We can see an Englishness at work here and therein lays it's true worth and significance.  This is not a musical that pretends to be an American Musical unlike others with outwardly English settings like for example My Fair Lady  or even Oliver. 

Cats can be seen as representative of an eccentric English national identity .... or rather a romantic version of it. Eliot himself was an Anglophile and died in London. 

Perhaps Cats is validated in part at least by the mystique of this great man of letters, for no one would suggest that Cats is either representative of his literary genius or his literary themes!

Cats in many ways heralds the modern musical as Spectacle with a thin coating of literary respectability!

The other highly influential  aspect of cats is its global appeal and success. It is one of the best examples of the global musical!