On the stage now, something cylindrical in shape and lighted all over its underside begins rising from the floor like the spaceship in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, to what purpose David, clever analyst that he is, cannot immediately discern. The assembled cats — for David realizes at once that he must begin thinking of these crawling, creeping, back-arching, furry, fake-tailed humans as cats if the show is to have any credibility at all — begin singing an introductory number titled “The Naming of Cats,” which seems taken entirely from the Eliot poem of the same title, but which is an ill-conceived notion since the names spilling from the stage in full choral unison are cutesy-poo names like Mungojerrie and Skimbleshanks and Jennyanydots and Bombalurina, names no cat-lover in the universe would ever foist upon any self-respecting feline. The cat he and Helen had owned was named simply Sheba, an honorable name harking back to King Solomon’s time, ultimately killed by a Doberman appropriately named Max, the Nazi bastard.
All of these preposterous cat names seemed okay, if undeniably cute, on the printed page. But here, being belted by twenty-four, twenty-five people in cat makeup and cat costumes, they are virtually incomprehensible, followed as they are by a number titled “The Invitation to the Jellicle Ball,” which repeats the word jellicle over and over again, to the utter mystification of anyone unfamiliar with Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, a rather cutesy-poo title in itself, Eliot should have stuck to Prufrock.
It does not take long for David to realize that this is a show essentially without a book. This is a show, in fact, that merely sets these fundamentally second-rate Eliot poems to music, with no attempt to tie them together into any dramatic semblance of beginning, middle and end. At its basic worst, this is a show about people trying to look like cats and behave like cats. Accept that silly premise or go home. David cannot accept that anyone on this stage — well, maybe the female cat in the white costume — moves like any cat he has ever known. He cannot go home, however, because Stanley seems inordinately and childishly engrossed, tapping him lightly on the arm each time a chorus girl in sleek leotard and tights slinks across the stage.
The girl in the white costume seems to be performing in a world of her own. She seems to believe she really is a cat. There are many choreographed cat moves in the show, actions that the cast performs simultaneously in response to music cues, but David feels certain the little personal bits of cat motions were improvised by the individual members of the cast during rehearsal and have now become mannerisms indigenous to performances set in concrete. The girl in white, however...
He squints through the program during a well-lighted song-and-dance number that spills some illumination to where he is sitting, trying to identify her in the jumble of cats with names that are non-names, all of them leaping about the stage, often hissing, sometimes baring fake claws. He cannot for the life of him determine which character the girl in white is portraying.
But she continues to hold his interest.
She seems truly in a world apart, obviously having owned a cat at one time, or perhaps having devoted hours to the study of cat behavior, now translated to subtle dance poses, or perhaps indeed having been a cat in some previous life long ago, perhaps even Sheba the cat, although Sheba was a great big fat tabby, all gray and black with a fluffy white tummy, and not this slender pristine white cat who really seems to be one.
She is dressed entirely in white, white leotard and tights with snippets of fake white fur fastened in tatters to the shoulders and bosom of the costume. A white fur hat covers her hair, hiding it completely, fastening under her chin, topping the costume and capping her head, little peaked ears poking up out of it. The makeup on her face is a chalky white, highlighted with black liner that emphasizes cat eyebrows and a cat nose and cat whiskers.
She is wearing low, flat-heeled shoes undoubtedly rubberized to grip what appears to be a polymered stage floor across which she and the other cats frequently body-slide as if on ice. Over the tights and partially flopping onto the dancing shoes are leg warmers a shade darker than the stark white of the costume, more a pearly gray by contrast. She wears on her arms, from her wrists virtually to her elbows, coverings of the same type, what appear to be long knitted wristlets or the upper parts of graying white dinner gloves. Real gloves, cut off at the fingers and thumbs, grayer than the wristlets, lend her hands, or rather her paws, a grubby alley-cat look, in contrast to her otherwise sleek appearance. A narrow belt around her waist holds a long tail of the same grayish color as the leg warmers.
She is every inch a cat.
Moreover, she seems to be a cat who is only intermittently caught up in the inanity of this plodding musical, going about her own catlike business, licking her paws, or snapping her tail, or cocking her head to watch this or that bit of action, or swatting at an invisible insect, or rolling over on her back, only to sit upright an instant later when some further piece of business or song erupts nearby, sometimes startled by what she sees, sometimes merely bemused by the fact that she is here at all.
Since she is the only white cat on a stage full of varicolored cats often indistinguishable one from the other, it is easy to follow her every movement. She seems to have captured Stanley’s attention as well; he lightly taps David’s arm in the “Jellicle Ball” scene near the end of the first act, alerting David to her form as she is lifted over the head of a male dancer, her long legs gracefully dangling. When the grizzled cat — of course named Grizabella — sings “Memory,” the show’s one and only memorable song, the white cat is lying on her side stage left, utterly still, as rapt as the audience, completely absorbed in lyrics that truly evoke the emotions of Eliot’s real poetry. For the first time since the show began, David takes his eyes off the white cat, and finds himself moved beyond comprehension when the aging glamour cat sings of her lost, irretrievable youth.
While Stanley goes outside to enjoy an intermission smoke, David leafs through the program, trying to zero in on the name of the dancer playing the white cat. There is no White Cat, as such, listed anywhere. He tries to imagine whether Eliot would have named this cat Jellylorum or Rumpleteazer or Demeter or... wait a minute. Here are four cats, two male, two female, listed simply as “The Cats Chorus,” but he has no idea whether the white cat is one of them. He looks up their bios in the Who’s Who In The Cast section of his Playbill, but finds no clues there, either. He seems to remember, but perhaps he’s wrong, that one of the cats singing right up front and center in the Ball-Invitation number at the top of the show was the white cat... wasn’t she? He checks back to the listing of scenes, and finds three cats credited by name for that particular song, two of them male cats respectively called Munkustrap and Mistoffelees — boy oh boy — and the third a female cat named Victoria. Victoria? How’d such a sensible name sneak in here? He looks across the page to see who is playing this oddly named creature. The line reads:
Victoria................... Kathryn Duggan
He looks at the name again.
Kathryn Duggan.
Hey! My name is Kate!
Kate.
Duggan. Rhymes with huggin’.
But no. It can’t be.
But yes, right there, Kathryn Duggan.
Well, wait a minute. He flips forward again to the biographical listings of the cast. A loudspeakered voice announces that the curtain will be going up in three minutes. The cast is listed alphabetically. He hastily reads: