\n<\/p>\n
AMNA NAWAZ: Well, one of the biggest hits on Broadway right now is a new version of “Cats,” the legendary musical based on T.S.<\/p>\n
Eliot’s poetry about a tribe of felines called Jellicles.<\/p>\n
It’s an imaginary name, now reimagined in “Cats: The Jellicle Ball,” and critical acclaim has followed.<\/p>\n
The musical received nine Tony Award nominations and won three.<\/p>\n
Senior arts correspondent Jeffrey Brown took in the show talked to composer Andrew Lloyd Webber, who created it and so much more, for our arts and culture series, Canvas.<\/p>\n
JEFFREY BROWN: The high energy spectacle is certainly still there.<\/p>\n
And the songs get their moments.<\/p>\n
The words and characters are still based on a cycle of poems originally written for children by renowned poet T.S.<\/p>\n
Eliot.<\/p>\n
But in some important ways, this is a new “Cats.”<\/p>\n
And the man who wrote the music and started it all back in the late 1970s, Andrew Lloyd Webber, sees something very exciting.<\/p>\n
ANDREW LLOYD WEBBER, Composer: I can see a “Cats” that is not just reimagined, which it is.<\/p>\n
It’s not just a revival, but for some reason, I think it gets closer to the heart of Eliot’s writing than any version of it that I have seen before, any other.<\/p>\n
JEFFREY BROWN: “Cats: The Jellicle Ball” gets there in an unexpected way.<\/p>\n
No more cats in a London junkyard.<\/p>\n
Instead, directors Zhailon Levingston and Bill Rauch have set the action in New York’s queer ballroom scene, where contestants in and out of drag and never far from a history of oppression and ostracization sing and dance, competing and flaunting their styles and personalities, celebrating their culture.<\/p>\n
ANDREW LLOYD WEBBER: It sort of feels organically right.<\/p>\n
JEFFREY BROWN: Because it reaches into these kind of differences in humanity.<\/p>\n
ANDREW LLOYD WEBBER: I think it does.<\/p>\n
I think it touches on something which is — it’s very hard to define, but it’s very rare when it happens, and I do think that this production has done that.<\/p>\n
JEFFREY BROWN: Now 78, Lloyd Webber knows something of making theater magic.<\/p>\n
In the late 1960s and early 70s, working with lyricist Tim Rice, he composed the music for “Jesus Christ Superstar” and “Evita.”<\/p>\n
But as he told me outside the theater where “The Jellicle Ball” is playing, when he first dreamed up the idea of a kind of musical review featuring singing cats, he was met with derision.<\/p>\n
ANDREW LLOYD WEBBER: Suddenly, your back is to the wall and everybody says, this is the most disastrous idea.<\/p>\n
Nobody should ever be doing this.<\/p>\n
JEFFREY BROWN: Is that what people were saying to you at the beginning?<\/p>\n
ANDREW LLOYD WEBBER: Yes.<\/p>\n
I mean, it opened with some of the investment missing, and I had to get a second mortgage on my house to pay for the production costs.<\/p>\n
JEFFREY BROWN: Suffice it to say he was able to pay off his mortgage.<\/p>\n
“Cats” was a cultural phenomenon, beloved, parodied, running on Broadway for nearly 18 years, a record later surpassed by another Lloyd Webber megahit, “Phantom of the Opera,” which opened on Broadway in 1988 and ran a remarkable 35 years.<\/p>\n
Across the street from the theater at Broadway’s Sardi’s Restaurant, we talked about the art and craft of musical theater, including advice from famed director Hal Prince.<\/p>\n
Do you work thinking about the entire show from the beginning, or are you thinking about individual songs?<\/p>\n
ANDREW LLOYD WEBBER: You have to think of the entire show.<\/p>\n
I have learned the hard way that a great story is what you need.<\/p>\n
If the story has for some reason not been quite right, then no amount of music, no matter how good, will really, really make it a great evening or even save a show.<\/p>\n
Sometimes, a very good story can carry a not-so-good score, but I have never found it the other way around.<\/p>\n
JEFFREY BROWN: Does the same thing apply to individual songs?<\/p>\n
I mean, do you know you have got a great song or is it only great within the context of hearing it within the production?<\/p>\n
ANDREW LLOYD WEBBER: Well, I would go so fast to say some of the greatest songs ever written for musical theater, we wouldn’t know if they had been in shows that hadn’t worked.<\/p>\n
It comes back to the fact that so many factors in musicals, if — I always remember that one of the things that Hal Prince said to me when I was very young.<\/p>\n
He wrote to me when I’d had a big flop musical in London to sing, I’d keep some of those tunes for something else, but he said: “You can’t listen to a musical if you can’t look at it.”<\/p>\n
And, by that, he meant that the production designer’s got to be right.<\/p>\n
Every aspect has got to be right for a show to really click.<\/p>\n
JEFFREY BROWN: Knighted and later bestowed with a life peerage — he’s Lord Lloyd Webber — he wrote an anthem, “Make a Joyful Noise,” for the 2023 coronation of King Charles and has composed more than 20 musicals in all.<\/p>\n
He’s seen plenty of misses among the hits, taken his share of critical punches and kept working.<\/p>\n
What about when there have been failures?<\/p>\n
How have you dealt with it?<\/p>\n
What about when there has been critical negative?<\/p>\n
ANDREW LLOYD WEBBER: Well, you move on.<\/p>\n
You move on.<\/p>\n
And you also know that if the thing’s actually any good, it’ll resurface again in some way.<\/p>\n
Or if it’s not, or if the story’s not quite right, then it probably won’t.<\/p>\n
JEFFREY BROWN: In fact, he’s lately seeing something of a renaissance of earlier works presented by a new generation of directors, including a new version of “Sunset Boulevard,” originally on Broadway in the ’90s, and now “Cats: The Jellicle Ball.”<\/p>\n
ANDREW LLOYD WEBBER: A lot of things have come together at the same time.<\/p>\n
JEFFREY BROWN: But does that surprise you that this is happening?<\/p>\n
ANDREW LLOYD WEBBER: I always feel that the shows, if they’re any good, would stand the test of time.<\/p>\n
I think for me, now, all these years later, seeing it as “The Jellicle Ball,” it’s incredibly moving now, because they are real people as cats.<\/p>\n
And the fact that, for example, 19 of them had never been on Broadway before, all these things, somehow there’s a kind of raw quality, which is cats are street things, aren’t they?<\/p>\n
JEFFREY BROWN: So are you surprised all these years later at how many times you — it all has come together for you?<\/p>\n
ANDREW LLOYD WEBBER: Well, I’m very lucky.<\/p>\n
I mean, I have… JEFFREY BROWN: Is that how it feels, lucky?<\/p>\n
ANDREW LLOYD WEBBER: I do feel that, because I feel that you’re very lucky in life if you know what you want to do.<\/p>\n
You’re incredibly lucky if you succeed in doing what you want to do and you can make a living out of it.<\/p>\n
But if you can have the kind of career that I have had doing the one thing that I really enjoy, I mean, in a way, I can’t do anything other than say I’m the luckiest man alive.<\/p>\n
JEFFREY BROWN: Hardly slowing down, he has several new projects in the works.<\/p>\n
In addition, a highly acclaimed new production of “Evita” comes to Broadway next year.<\/p>\n
As for “Cats” and its more than nine lives, “The Jellicle Ball” has been extended at least into next January.<\/p>\n
For the “PBS News Hour,” I’m Jeffrey Brown on Broadway.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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