Hi, everyone. And welcome back to one of your favorite segments, Sound of Musicals, 欢迎回来【曲外之音】. Hi, Oliver.
Hello.
So which musical are we going to talk about today?
Well, I'll ask you a question to give you a hint. Are you a cat person or a dog person?
I know exactly what you're talking about, unless they've recently made a musical called dogs. I think we're talking about Cats.
Yes, we are. Today it's all about the cats, although a dog musical I would watch. So, yeah.
So are you a dog person then?
I tend to be a dog person, yes, but I've got nothing against cats. I do like cats as well.
I'm definitely a cat person and I actually have a cat, a ginger cat.
Oh. Very nice.
All right, so let's talk about cats. I'm pretty sure a lot of our audience they are familiar with cats.
Yeah, it's quite a well-known musical. It's been around for a long time now, it opened in 1981, in London. So it's a good 40 something years old. It's been on Broadway, the West End, it was in London for 21 years and in New York for 18 years. So it's got a long history to it. It's actually based on poetry. The songs in the musical are based on poetry by T.S. Eliot, a famous poet.
That's why it's so sort of fragmented.
Yeah.
It's not like one of those things with a clear storyline. It's not a storybook, it's just pieces of like verses.
That's it, exactly. The music, it takes his poems and the composers and Andrew Lloyd Webber who created the music and for the show, he put the poems to music as kind of an experiment he wanted to see if he could do it.
And then his friends said, now you could make a concert of this and so he did, and then that changed again into the musical 'Cats'. It's got a strange history to it.
I mean, you are right. It sounds more like a concert, sounds like a collection of songs rather than a very well sort of piece together storyline.
It has, yes. It makes the next part of our show today a little bit difficult for me.
But it's more like a collection of songs in a collection of almost life stories from some of the characters which it pushed together to make a show or a concert, as you say.
Collection of poems or a collection of short stories. It's like a collection of bio like little bio pieces for each cats.
It is, yeah. I think Elliot, if I'm remembering my research correctly, he wrote it for his young god children as just funny poems about different cats. The book is called 'Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats', if you want to find the poems yourself.
It was a children's book about cats and the different types of cats and the different things cats do. He made it a little bit funny and a little bit childish in some ways for the kids reading it.
All in all, it just sounds sort of like experimental musical.
It definitely feels like that to me, when I listen to it and watch it. It's got very nice combination of musical and ballet though, Cats stands out a little bit because it uses ballet in many many places.
Yeah, the dance bit, the whole choreograph, choreography is amazing. I do like the choreography.
It is, if you listen to the music, you don't get half the experience is actually seeing the show.
When you just listen to the songs on their own, it does feel very strange. But being there and seeing it, oh, it's an experience you have to be there for.
Exactly. Okay, so I'm gonna give you the impossible task of walking us through the storyline or the lack of it, the none storyline.
It's not so impossible task so much as just a very short one there is. So the whole show is around a gang or a tribe of cats called the Jellicle cats.
Why are they called the Jellicle cats?
Yeah, Jellicle comes from T.S. Eliot, the poet who created the poems. He corrupted the phrase 'Dear little cats' and turned it into 'Jellicle cats'.
Wow, I never knew that. So dear little cats读快了, 就是 dear little, dear little cats, Jellicle cats.
Jellicle cats, yeah.
I always thought it was a cat breed and I literally checked and there were no cat breed called Jellicle.
I thought it was as well. I had no idea what Jellicle was until I was preparing for this show, and he also did another one called Pollicle dogs.
Poor little dogs?
Poor little dogs. Pollicle dogs. Yeah.
OKay, I can see the wordplay. So Jellicle cats, so this whole bunch of cats, they are Jellicle cats, right?
They are. It's kind of like a tribe. All the different cats are part of this gang or this tribe with a, but I think maybe two exceptions there are two which are a little bit out of it.
But they’re meeting the night of the show for the Jellicle ball, which is an event they have every year, so once a night... once a year event where the cats will choose who gets to go to the Heaviside layer. And when they get to the Heaviside layer, they can start a new life. It's like a rebirth for the cat.
It's like cat's heaven, isn't it?
It is, yeah. The Heaviside layer is, again, Elliot corrupting these words, heaven, heavi, heaven side layer, so. And again it's the idea that the cats have nine lives.
I guess they can reborn.
So when they finish one of them, they go to the Heaviside layer and they start the next one.
I see, so they have to choose one cat to go to the Heaviside layer.
That's it. Just one cat gets to go every year and starts the new life. And that's why the show is a little bit unusual, because there's not really a story, to actually say the story is really difficult, because it has so little, what we get instead is a series of cats introducing themselves through music, singing and dance. And they have fantastic names. I just... some of these names... there is Jennyanydots, who is...
Jennyanydots?
Jennyanydots who...
Let me guess it's like a cat with some spots on her.
Exactly. She's described as looking a bit like a leopard with leopard spots, yeah..
Jennyanydots.
Haha. Jennyanydots. There is Rum Tum Tugger.
Do you know Rum Tum Tugger is the rock star cats and then they are saying that it's kind of like, I don't know, referring to Mick Jagger?
Mick Jagger, kind of, yeah. It's kind of the same. If you give him this, he will want that. If you put him outside he wants to come in. If he's inside he wants to go out. He's the rebel.
Is that rebellious rock spirit?
He is. And then you've got all sorts of good names, Bustopher Jones, Mungojerrie, Rumpleteazer, Macavity who is the villain of the show.
A villain cat.
Although he doesn't do much villain in throughout the show, to be honest. He's kind of a little bit later on.
But all of these cats they have introductions, they sing a song, they introduce themselves. And most of them are quite upbeat. They've lived good lives, they're quite happy.
They're mischievous.
Yeah. Definitely, they are mischievous. Mungojerrie, Rumpleteazer that their song is definitely, they are the cats who climb onto the table and slowly knock that glass of water onto the floor. It's though they are those cats. Is your cat like that?
Yeah. My cat would look me in the eyes and do that.
Your cat is Mungojerrie. Oh, my...
Yeah. But there is one cat which stands out as being different and that is Grizabella.
Is the one that sings memory.
Yes, it's the one that everyone kind of when they think of cats because her song is the most famous song in the show and outside of the show too.
Yeah.
So she's an old cat and she's really old. She's described as having like sand in her fur and her face, eyes are like drooping and scarred and she's really old, and she's not had an easy life.
The rest of the tribe is actually scared and almost disgusted by her a little bit. She used to be a beautiful cat. She used to be able to dance and do all these nice things. But now when she tries it...
I mean Grizabella sounds very elegant, the name.
Yeah, it does. Grizabella is a very elegant name. When she tries to do these things now, she just can't do it. But she can remember and that's where the song memories is introduced.
Yeah. That is a very sad song.
It is very sad, but it is lovely. I like that song a lot.
Yeah.
But honestly, that is Act one, that is the first half of the show described. It's just these cats introducing themselves.
In Act two, we see a few more cats like Gus who used to be an actor, and then Macavity the villain appears for, ah, I mean, I know I'm exaggerating, but he's on stage, he's there for about 5 minutes before he's gone again. He doesn't really do much for a villain of the show.
Yeah. They were trying for some plot, but there was no plot. Actually I saw a social media posting says there is no storyline or there are no plots to Cats and that's kind of the point.
Yeah, seems like it was intentionally done. It wasn't they just made a show and forgot to do it. They didn't want to add this big storyline to the show which makes me wonder why Macavity was in it. Aside from having a good song because his song is quite cool.
I do wonder why he's here. And he thought of, he's talked about as the napoleon of crime, which is kind of a nod to Sherlock Holmes as Moriarty, the villain in Sherlock Holmes, who was also called the napoleon of crime.
It might just be a typecasting. Oliver.
It could be in fairness, it could be, I don't think there's much to it.
Yeah. But I also remember there's a magician cat called Mr. Mistoffelees which is obviously reference to Mephistopheles from the story or from Faustus.
Yeah. From Faustus. Yeah. So there's a few word plays and things like that in the names as we've seen. Mistoffelees is the magic cat, so it has that connection.
Yeah.
But at the end, all the cats, the Jellicle cats, they decide to choose Grizabella, the cat which they were scared of and almost disgusted by through a few of the other cats kind of convincing them that she deserves this. She is chosen and then she rises up off the stage in a very almost religious way. She kind of rises up towards the Heaviside layer of heaven, cat heaven and is...
I guess reborn.
Yeah. That's where...Yes, the reborn we don't see it, but that's where the show ends. But for the cats, that's where she gets reborn. Yeah.
I see, I see, yeah. Thank you for doing this impossible task of giving us the storyline of a none story. I think we're gonna wrap up here. There are so many characters.
In the second episode of Cats, we are going to listen to some of these famous musical numbers, so that you can perhaps get a little bit more into these characters. Also we're gonna try to explore some of the themes which are not very obvious in this musical.
Yeah. Just like with the lack of a story, the themes becomes a little difficult, but there are some we can talk about.
All right. Thank you, Oliver for coming to the show. We'll see you next time.
Thank you very much. I'll see you next time.
