Cats
Performing live March 3, 2011 at Fisher Auditorium, IUP Campus, Indiana PA.
The longest running, most popular, North American Touring Production in history! There’s no better way to introduce your family to the wonders of live theatre than with the magic, the mystery, the memory of Cats. What began as a musical about cats after Andrew Lloyd Webber picked up a book of poems in an airport bookshop has become one of the longest running shows in Broadway’s history. Winner of seven Tony Awards, including Best Musical, Cats features 20 of Webber’s timeless melodies.
Show Bio
Before Cats had its 1981 West End premiere, it was viewed with immense skepticism: here was composer Andrew Lloyd Webber working solo, setting a series of children’s poems about kitty cats written decades earlier by the revered T. S. Eliot for a bookless show staged by an esteemed Shakespearean director, Trevor Nunn. Yet producer Cameron Mackintosh believed in the show, and its opulent effects and dancing felines enchanted what are euphemistically called “children of all ages.” Broadway producers sat up and took notice: here was a show that required no stars and had a West End cachet, a pre-sold market, and a known hit composer.
Setting a pattern that would redefine Broadway in the 1980s, Cats was jet-propelled to New York, with $6.2 million advance sales. Despite begrudging reviews, few could ignore the spectacle provided by designer John Napier’s fantastical Brobdingnagian trash dump (wittily suggested to him by the title of Eliot’s “The Waste Land”) or the whirling cat dervishes of Gillian Lynne’s acrobatic choreography, all capped off by the Spielbergesque levitation of Grizabella to the Heavyside Layer via an enormous used tire.
Cats mewed all the way to the bank; as of its final performance on September 10, 2000, it had grossed $380 million on Broadway (and nearly $3 billion worldwide). It even provided audiences with a hit show tune, “Memory” which became a global hit, recorded in more than a dozen languages. The British import is the longest-running show in Broadway history and it revolutionized the very concept of the musical form around the world.