The world famous logo of the musical, Cats

The weekend of August 7th, to celebrate both my birthday and our anniversary, my husband and I went to the Tuachahan ampitheater in St. George, Utah, which is 4 hours away from where we live.  My parents met us there, and I and Matthew had front row tickets to see the musical, Cats, which I hadn’t seen since I was 13 or so, and Matthew had never seen live before.  He’d just seen the DVD we own.

For those who don’t know, it’s based upon T.S.Eliot’s book of poetry, Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, a book of poetry about, well, cats.  Eliot had written the poems for his grandchildren, and Andrew Lloyd Webber wrote music for most of the poems in the book.  The show, as a result, has a fairly loose plot.

I was thrilled and bouncing around in my seat to the familiar music.  I had to actually think about not singing along.  The group we saw was wonderful, with great dancing that had spot on synchronization, and plenty of enthusaism.  the costumes were perfect with wonderful painting of the leotards, the sparkling costume of the gumbie cat and the rum-tum-tugger.  The only one I found a little odd was one woman playing a purpleish cat, which was totally weird.

house left of "Cats" stage and yes, my husband was bad and took pictures of the set while we were there

house right on "Cats" stage

The set was very interesting, with graffiti such as “dogz drool” and the famous cat eye logo for the show painted everywhere.  There was one part that was shaped like a train’s steam engine, which was, I correctly assumed, for Skimbleshanks song, since he was a train’s cat.  The cast could turn it around, and it was painted just like an engine.  They even had a broken down looking “Russel Hotel” sign, which made me chuckle when I saw it.  It’s used in a line in the “Up to the Heavyside Layer” song.

There was one 11-13 year old playing a kitten, who just stole the show.  They made large, pilates type bouncing balls into balls of yarn for the kitten to play with, which the kitten did with relish.  She even did a small solo, which was given great applause.  My favorite, Grizabella, was wonderful, even though it was an understudy, and not the Tony award winner who was supposed to be playing the role.  Gus and Deutoronomy were both excellent as well, with great voices and the actors were good at acting old.  Gus even had a large corkscrew for a cane.  Victoria, the pure white cat, was beautiful, and the dancer was as awesome as that role required, since she’s the principle female dancer.  They kept in character as well, even when the show wasn’t going on.  One of the lady cats walked by my husband during intermission and sniffed at the frozen lemonade he was eating.  My husband was also spotlighted at the beginning of the show.  At the end of the first song are several lines, going “There’s a man over there/with a look of surprise,/ as much as to say, ‘Well now how about that?’”  He hammed it up and tried to look surprised, but we couldn’t help laughing and smiling.

There’s only one thing keeping this from being a 5.  It had rained earlier in the day, and then shortly after intermission, in the middle of “Macavity,” it started to sprinkle, along with thunder and lightning.  The cats went off the stage in the middle of “Mr. Mistoffelees,” mewing as they went, and an announcer said that the show was canceled due to the weather.  Shortly after that, it really started pouring down hard.  I didn’t get to see Grizabella do the finale of “Memory,” which is my favorite song, and I didn’t get to see her ascend to the “Heavyside Lair.”  I left very disappointed.  I wished I could have seen the end of the show.  We were offered tickets to come back another day to see it, but I can’t afford to drive another 4 hours back to do that.  This was a one shot deal.  All said and done, though, what I did see was a lot of fun.

4/5