Cats. Not the animal, the show. Cats: The Musical. You seen it? If not I would check immediately for a pulse. Because everyone’s seen it. Its essential. Part of growing up. You reach puberty, you masturbate a lot, you go to your first football match, you go on your first date, you probably still masturbate a lot, you have your first ‘relationship’, you start your first job, have sex with your first animal (only applicable in certain countries… ok, in most countries other than England) and you go and see Cats. Its on everywhere; London, New York…er… London… whatever. And its brilliant. Everyone tells you just how brilliant it really is, that show. Wow, all dressed as cats and singing, dancing, really REALLY catlike in all their mannerisms and movements, brilliant.

I fucking hated it. Ahhh the wonderful poetry of TS Eliot, brought to LIFE, like, really to total life, in cat form, by actors singing songs. Well, singing a song over and over again. Moonlight. Midnight. Both. Together, apart. TOUCHCHCHCH MEEEEEEE(oww). Andrew Lloyd Weber. In his early, unhyphenated days. Absolute bollocks, from start to finish. But more boring.

When the girls were young I felt duty-bound to take them to see it. Its a right of passage. Unfortunately, the back passage, as I remembered it. But maybe I was wrong? Perhaps I’d just had a bad day? Had a black cat run in front of me before the show? Maybe everyone else had been right all along and it IS and always has been the best thing to happen since Spurs winning the double in 1961. Maybe I saw it on a bad night for the cast? Their Kitty-Kat was off or something? A dog in the audience??

Everyone deserves a second chance. So back we shlepped to Drury Lane and I endured it again. It was more slick than I remembered it from 17 years previous. They hadn’t bothered to add another song, but really it is a very good song, how many do you need? McCafferty was still a stupid man wearing a cat suit. Everyone else was just a different stupid person wearing a different cat suit. And they stood around licking their ‘paws’ and wiping their little cat-like faces and I could have punched them all.

So they took the show off. What a loss to London. To the world.

But now they’ve brought it back. Well, there’s a new generation around who need to suffer it and try to work out what all the fuss is about. Ahhhhh, but the poetry, we’ll tell them, sniggering behind our hands, and the movements; so cat-like. We won’t use the word ‘bullshit’, nor ‘garbage’, nor ‘the poetry of TS Eliot’, even ‘the ability to lick your own testicles’. We’ll just take them because that’s what parents do; repeat the sins that were done unto them.

Except this time it stars Nicole Scherzinger. Who has ‘previous’, from being a Pussycat Doll. Ha, ha, haaaa…
So now the ultimate dilemma: to endure Lloyd-Webber’s bollox (not literally, you understand…) for the third and possibly fatal time, or to miss Nicole S in a leotard stretching her gorgeousness all over the stage for 2 hours. Hmmm…

Meooowww

A xxxx