Theater was on life support.
Then the big British imports started to arrive.
Save this article to read it later.
Find this story in your accountsSaved for Latersection.
Andrew Lloyd Webber hates technical rehearsals.
Hes been known to get so frustrated that hell announce, Im pulling my score!
Sometimes he jumps into the orchestra pit, gathers up the sheet music and storms out of the theater.
moment will come during tech.
EliotsOld Possums Book of Practical Cats.
Its take-home tune, Memory, is the most lucrative song ever to come out of the musical theater.
The latest incarnation of the juggernaut is Tom Hoopers movie.
But snipping and snickering are nothing new forCats.
Theater critics and other elites have long disdained it.
(Roy Cohns synopsis: Cats!
But love it or loathe it, theres no denying the profound impactCatshas had on the entertainment business.
In London, where it opened in 1981, it lifted the West End out of a crippling recession.
Lloyd Webber began work onCatsat an uncertain moment in his career.
So Lloyd Webber was looking for a lyricist.
He solved the problem by finding a dead one.
As it turned out, Eliot often wrote his poems while listening to popular tunes of the day.
(He wont say what it was.)
But I had to keep myself from thinking that way, Lloyd Webber once told me.
He was also looking for a producer after a falling out with Robert Stigwood, the producer ofSuperstarandEvita.
The producer of the SWET ceremony was Mackintosh.
Lloyd Webber had never heard of him, but word quickly reached him that Mackintosh was out for revenge.
The London theater world lapped up news of the feud.
Lloyd Webber made peace by inviting Mackintosh to lunch at the Savile Club.
Eliots widow, Valerie, who had once been his secretary, fiercely protected his work.
Mackintosh suggested director Trevor Nunn, the head of the Royal Shakespeare Company.
Lloyd Webber met with Valerie Eliot at her apartment in Kensington.
He was nervous, but she was gracious.
Eliot had, in fact, turned down an offer from Walt Disney to adaptOld Possumsinto an animated feature.
Lloyd Webber, whoseSuperstarwas a sexy rock musical, didnt want fluffy balls of fur either.
The cats he had in mind would be highly sexual.
(One of them was Sarah Brightman.)
Oh yes, she said.
Her husband would have loved it.
Lloyd Webber set a few of Eliots poems to music and debuted them at his Sydmonton Festival in 1980.
(Sydmonton is Lloyd Webbers vast estate outside of London.
She suggested he take a look at one about Grizabella the Glamour Cat, which T.S.
Eliot thought was too depressing for children.
They made another decision: Eliminate the dogs.
Mackintosh approached a friend whod invested in all of his previous shows (most of them flops).
Cameron, I love you, the friend said.
But Im not investing in this one.
It will never work.
England is a nation of dog lovers.
Lloyd Webber auditioned his songs for potential investors, but there werent many takers.
These cats are gloom, doom, and disaster, one person said.
Leave them alone, boys.
A major expense was John Napiers set.
Reading EliotsThe Wasteland, Napier devised a rubbish dump where everything was scaled to the size of the cats.
Resembling the spaceship inClose Encounters of the Third Kind, it was the most expensive item in the budget.
Napiers cats werent cuddly.
They were streetwise, funky, and punkish, he told the BBC.
As the scope of Napiers production grew, it was clear that no ordinary theater could housePracticalCats.
Lloyd Webber, Nunn, and Mackintosh scoured London for an appropriate space.
Lloyd Webber found it while he was the subject of the television showThis Is Your Life.
The program was taped in the New London Theater.
And then he remembered that it had been built with a giant turntable on the stage.
He asked the house manager if the turntable still worked.
After the taping, the house manager went to a control board and punched some buttons.
But there was a catch.
That was too risky.
Lloyd Webber decided to go all in.
He didnt have that kind of cash, he later wrote in his memoir, so he mortgaged Sydmonton.
Which is another reason people thought we were stark raving mad, Lloyd Webber once told me.
At the time, we didnt do dance musicals.
Those came from New York, most notably Michael BennettsA Chorus Line.
Nunn mentioned the show to his friend Judi Dench.
Oh, Id love to be a cat, she said.
But she wasnt a dancer.
There was one cat, however, that didnt dance Grizabella, central to the shows slender plot.
The eyes were set against a black background.
Below them was the title:Practical Cats.
But the two words threw off the balance.
Nunn crossed out practical.
The show was now called, simply,Cats.
As rehearsals got underway, Nunn realized something was missing an 11 oclock number for Grizabella.
What we need, he told Lloyd Webber, was the equivalent of a Dont Cry for Me Argentina.
As it happened, Lloyd Webber had one in his trunk of discarded songs.
Lloyd Webber didnt get very far with the idea, but he did compose a haunting Puccini-esque tune.
It was so evocative of Puccini that Lloyd Webber worried it might bebyPuccini.
He played it for his father, an accomplished musician and a Puccini expert.
Does this sound like anything?
It sounds like $1 million, his father said.
Youve done a very clever pastiche, but its not by Puccini.
Lloyd Webber played the tune for Nunn and the cast.
Remember the date, Nunn said.
Weve heard a piece of music thats going to go to number one.
Nunn said hed give a shot to cobble together a lyric.
His friend Gary Moore, a heavy-metal guitar player, recorded it.
She thought it was gorgeous.
The next day she got a call from Lloyd Webber.
Disaster had struck his show.
Judi Dench had torn her Achilles tendon and would be sidelined for at last a month, probably longer.
Previews were to begin in a week.
Were in trouble, Lloyd Webber said.
He asked if shed consider playing the part of Grizabella.
She only has one song, he said.
It wouldnt be the song I heard on the radio last night by any chance, would it?
The lyrics still werent jelling.
The final dress rehearsals were, by all accounts, disasters.
And the show still wasnt fully capitalized.
Mackintosh offered Paige a chance to invest.
No way, she said.
After one particularly catastrophic rehearsal Mackintosh and Lloyd Webber went in search of a bar that was still open.
They decided to cut their losses and exit the show.
They told him the news.
Lloyd Webber and Mackintosh could not bear to sit through the first public performance ofCatsin the spring of 1981.
As Lloyd Webber wrote, How long that overture seemed!
Cameron and I clutched each other as the final big cat theme thundered out and waited for the debacle.
Instead there was a massive round of applause.
Catsplayed that first preview with no money in the till.
But as word of mouth spread through London, ticket sales spiked.
T-shirts with theCatslogo had been made for the cast and crew.
There were plenty left.
Why not set up a little stall in the lobby and sell them?
It was extraordinary, Pye-Jeary said.
People were just throwing money at me.
Lloyd Webbers wife looked at them and saw pound signs in their eyes.
(The only T-shirt that outsoldCatsin the 1980s was the Hard Rock Cafes.)
Paige was still struggling with the cobbled-together lyric of Memory.
The audience response was good, but not over-the-top.
Nunn thought Rices lyrics were too depressing.
Fine, said Rice.
If you dont like them, dont use them.
Nunn came up with a lyric that he thought might work.
The night Paige sang it she stopped the show.
(Since then, Memory has added considerably to Nunns bank account.
Rice and Black get nothing.
And thats why they call him Clever Trevor.)
By the time the mixed reviews came out,Catswas a sensation.
They found the show baffling, but the next day their grandson asked if he could see it again.
If the young ones like it, Jacobs told his wife, There must be something to it.
Every producer and theater owner in New York wanted a piece ofCatson Broadway.
The Shuberts allowed them their little adventures and then steered them to the Shubert-owned Winter Garden on Broadway.
There was no way the Shuberts were going to letCatsplay in a theater they didnt control.
But Mackintosh, Lloyd Webber, and Nunn were not powerless.
This show had better work, Jacobs said one day as he was going through the numbers.
Were laying out a lot of money here.
The cost of producingCatsin New York was (minus the renovation) $4.5 million.
It was the most expensive musical in the history of Broadway.
And yet the public snapped them up.
The Shuberts wanted to raise prices even though Polands show was making $4,000 a week.
You will destroy Off Broadway with your greed, Poland said.
Jacobs showed Poland the accounting statement for the first week of previews ofCatsat the Winter Garden.
The operating profit was $186,000 (nearly $600,000 today).
No show had ever made that much money in a single week.
Predictably, the reviews were mixed.
And the winner for Best Book of a Musical is … Stone stood up.
I should have known, Stone told me many years later.
I saw Valerie Eliot at the theater.
The Shuberts would never have flown her over if they didnt thinkCatswould win.
Catsarrived on Broadway just as the American musical was beginning to lose some of its best talent.
Jerome Robbins, director and choreographer ofWest Side StoryandGypsy, had decamped to the New York City Ballet.
Gower Champion died the day before the opening of42nd Streetin 1980.
Princes next three shows were flops.
Michael Bennett, the creator ofA Chorus LineandDreamgirls, died of AIDS on July 2, 1987.
In 1986, Mackintosh producedLes Miserables.
Mackintosh capped off the era of the big British musical withMiss Saigonin 1991.
He began probing me about the theater business, Lloyd Webber said.
Eisner was astounded to learn how much moneyCatsandPhantomwere making.
Even the backlash against Lloyd Webber and Mackintoshs reign changed the musical theater.
His name was Jonathan Larson, and he responded by writingRent.
Eliots line, And when you reach the scene of crime Macavitys not there!
