Cats By the Book

By Mr. Shenzhen

Unless you've been on catnip for the last month, you've probably heard that the show Cats is coming to Shenzhen.

Yay! Yippee! Ho-hummm…

If you're the kind of person that likes that sort of thing, you probably saw this play years ago; after all, it was first staged in 1981. If you're not that kind of person, you probably won't get excited now.

Still, compared to piano-playing protégés and Chinese opera, this is a breath of fresh air on the Shenzhen stage.

But despite the perennial favorite's nine lives, locally it has been covered to death (most notably, thoroughly, and well by Debra Li in the Shenzhen Daily).

So, for this writer to come up with a unique "spin" on this cataclysmic event, he had to dig deep.

Yes, we're going to talk about poetry.

Many know that the play is based on a book of whimsical poems by the usually serious American/British author T. S. Eliot. Composer Andrew Lloyd Webber went beyond the text, however, and incorporated cats from Eliot’s earlier drafts of the book. He then took these characters and built a story that Eliot never knew.

The play set a record at the time for the length of its Broadway run, and gave us the song Memory, which, despite having a pretty good memory, I seem never to be able to get past the first word of: "Meeeeem’ryyyy, da da DEE da da DEE DAAA…"

True fans of the play might like to know that the entire book of poems is online, complete with concordance.

The poems read well (even if they sound somewhat juvenile), and are filled with “witty” (ahem) observations:

• A cat has three names: the everyday name used by his family, his formal name, and a third known only to the cat: “His ineffable effable / Effanineffable / Deep and inscrutable singular Name." ["The Naming of Cats"]
• Some cats create "well-ordered households" ["The Old Gumbie Cat" while others enjoy “a horrible muddle” ["The Rum Tum Tugger"]

And so on.

It's a bit hard to conceive that these creatures are brain-siblings of J. Alfred Prufrock, or share a mental landscape with The Waste Land.

Nevertheless, as it's a virtual certainty that we won't be seeing those poems on the Shenzhen stage soon, let's all bone up on the felines and go see Cats!