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Now and Forever |
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Two years later, Mackintosh set a precedent that was to have profound historical consequences: supported by money from the Arts Council, he mounted a better-than-average revival of "My Fair Lady" at the Leicester Haymarket. The time-honored gap between the profit-oriented commercial theater, and the design and directing skills more sharply prevalent in the subsidized sector, was closing. One of the talents in the subisidized sector Mackintosh had noted was Trevor Nunn, artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company since 1968. Nunn had been on a hot streak since his "Nicholas Nickleby," co-directed with John Caird, had taken London and New York by storm in 1979-80. Meanwhile, Lloyd Webber had written a song cycle based on Eliot's book of poems and showcased it at his country house, Sydmonton, where he hosts an annual festival for friends, producers, and neighbors. T. S. Eliot's widow Valerie came to see the performance in 1980, liked the songs, and gave Andrew a cache of relevant unfinished fragments, unpublished poems and letters, including one in which Eliot pondered the possibility of ending the OLD POSSUM'S collection with a poem about dance. The idea of a musical was born. |
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Trevor Nunn had seen Lloyd Webber's "Evita" in 1978, liked it, and was anxious to work with the composer. Cameron Mackintosh got the two talents together, eventually hiring Nunn to direct the new show. Nunn felt anxiety over the apparent lack of narrative, a conception Cameron Mackintosh challenged. Under pressure, Nunn envisaged a delightful small show set in a genteel, clubland world populated by English literary figures, with potted palms, dinner jackets, two pianos, and the cats poems supplying a social critique. Absolutely not, said Cameron and Andrew. They were thinking full-scale musical, full orchestra, and lots of dance, with Gillian Lynne choreographing. Nunn still demurred, saying that there had to be an idea for a story line. He then read a poem Eliot had not included in OLD POSSUM'S, about a man in the Princess Louise pub who meets another man and talks to him about types of cats. Here was the genesis for the song "Jellicle Cats." There followed the proposition that there should be no humans at all, that everything physical should be cat-scaled and that, in Nunn's rough scheme, the audience should be attending a ritual of the Jellicle tribe -- the Jellicles being the street cats of this area -- and that Old Deuteronomy should be their leader. The key to it all was a lost fragment of Eliot's work, "Grizabella the Glamour Cat." This comprised just eight heart-breaking lines -- the poet deemed them too upsetting for children to read and had pulled them from the published text at the last minute -- about a cat who became so aged and marked by the years as to be unrecognizable. |
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When the show moved to the drastically altered and heavily gutted Winter Garden theater in New York, in October 1982, it opened to a new Broadway ticket top-price of $45 and an all-time record advance of ten million dollars. This was the start of a transatlantic tie-in between the Shubert organization, the leading Broadway producers, Lloyd Webber, and Mackintosh that would keep Broadway afloat for the next decade. The songs in "Cats" always command close attention even if they don't always feed into the narrative drive. That's part of the charm, and the deal. When the show opened on Broadway, Lloyd Webber achieved a new record of having three shows running simultaneously in London and in New York. He had arrived in the Big Apple, big time. |
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