Getting ready for Cats

July is an exciting month for theater fans, because the Broadway musical Cats is going to have a limited run at the Cultural Center of the Philippines. It will star our very own Lea Salonga and an international cast that, according to press releases, will mostly come from Australia and the United Kingdom.

I don’t have a ticket yet, but I’m in the market for it. I just haven’t decided if I should splurge or save, as prices range from P7,000 to P1,000. What I know is that I missed watching Miss Saigon here, and I don’t want to miss another Broadway production!

I remember watching the movie version of Cats when I was a child. I didn’t understand most of it—I wasn’t into musicals just yet, and I kept waiting for them to be cute and funny, like, you know, Garfield. That didn’t happen; they just sang and danced like it was the 1980s again.

But my first encounter with the production, really, was through the song Memory, which was one of the songs my little electronic piano played.

   Midnight. Not a sound from the pavement.

    Has the moon lost her memory?

    She is smiling alone.

    In the lamplight

    the withered leaves collect at my feet

    And the wind begins to moan.

    Memory. All alone in the moonlight

    I can smile at the old days,

    I was beautiful then.

    I remember the time I knew what happiness was,

    Let the memory live again.

I didn’t think it made sense, but the words and the music made me feel lonely and hopeful at the same time. And knowing the story behind it now doesn’t change how I have felt about this song since I was a little girl playing it on my little battery-operated piano.

Come to think of it, this is probably why Cats set records for its theater runs (21 years for the London production and 18 years for the Broadway production).

I learned a little too late into my theater-watching adventures that the proper way to watch a production, according to one of my graduate school professors, is to read up on it first. My personal preference is still to be surprised, as in the movies, but I decided to do a little advance work on Cats this time.

Surprisingly, I was still surprised. I had no idea Cats was based on a poetry collection of one of my favorite poets, T.S. Eliot, called Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats. In fact, many of the lyrics are based on his poems. No wonder the haunting feel of “Memory.”

The plot is simple. A tribe of cats gather once a year to choose a member of the tribe to be reincarnated. The many cats are from all walks of life, to represent different sectors of the society.

One cat, Grizabella, is a has-been who wants to be the chosen one. She used to be beautiful, and now she’s old and shabby. The other cats don’t like her; in fact, they make fun of her. How she gets to be the chosen one is, I believed, the weight of “Memory.”

Tickets are for sale now, through Ticket World. The run has been extended until August 15. Meow.

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