Like most of the internet, I hadn’t heard about the Cats movie until the backlash began. Unlike most of the internet, I kind of love the trailer for this film. As you probably know, it’s based on the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical that debuted in London’s West End 1981 and, yes, there’s a lot of weird shit going on.
Can we all just agree the whiskers are supposed to be there? Much of the criticism of the Cats trailer seems to concern the humans-dressed-as-cats—specifically, their digital fur. And while I’d love to get into the complexities of convincing fur textures , my visual effects artist boyfriend is at work. So I’ll stick to the point: The look is dramatic and ridiculous and thoroughly consistent with the musical—and that’s exactly why it works.
An audience can make or break a show, so it only sucks if you want it to suck Stage productions are about shared moments between audiences and performers—there’s an intangible energy exchange that makes every live performance unique. Performers feed off this energy; a good audience has the power to improve a show, while a bad audience can sink it. To see a film production capture this magic of the stage as accurately as Cats—at least, based on this first trailer—isn’t just exciting.
Not to sound dramatic, but the future of musical theatre depends on this But it would be a damn shame to let such a promising adaptation get away so easily. Musical theatre nerds are a limited group: limited by privilege, because neither attending nor performing in musical theatre comes cheap; limited by societal norms, because until Moulin Rouge came along, musical theatre was widely considered uncool; and limited by an elitism that prizes certain shows over others.