by Nathaniel R
Betty Buckley in her Tony-winning role as "Grizabella, the glamour cat"By now you've heard the comic news (oh no wait, they're serious!) that "Cats" is being turned into a movie. The news took me so off guard that I was silent for five days. Cats got my tongue. (I'm sorry). The Andrew Lloyd Webber megahit from the 1980s was based on T.S. Elliott poems and as such it has no real story to speak of. It's basically a very successful song cycle (albeit with only one famous song "Memory") elevated by utter nonrealism in the form of humans pretending to be cats in campy makeup, tights, and acrobatic dancing. It's so hard to imagine as a movie that they made the potential of the making of one into a running joke in the play turned movie Six Degrees of Separation (1993).
Grizabella the glamour cat is the marquee role but, in fact, it's a "featured" role since it's truly an ensemble show...
She was played by theatrical legends like Betty Buckley, Elaine Page, and Judi Dench in the 1980s but new producers have moved away from theatrical divas and toward reality competition singers with big pipes...
Both recent revivals in the UK and US went with reality show competition singers (Leona Lewis and Nicole Scherzinger) as Grizabella and they're repeating that move for the movie version via Jennifer Hudson. This will be JHud's second opportunity to take the key role in a big stage hit and immortalize its most famous song in movie form. You may remember what happened last time she did that... though it's hard to imagine Cats as a movie being taken seriously enough to win Oscars.
Judi Dench as Grizabella
This probably sounds like I do not like Cats which is not really true. I have nostalgic affection for it. I had the record and t-shirt as a kid and it was the first show I ever saw on Broadway as a typical tourist long before I moved here. But it would take real creative chutzpah and genius imagination to adapt it sufficiently to cinema to make it work at all.
The musical will also star Taylor Swift (role unknown), James Corden (role unknown), and Sir Ian McKellen as "Old Deuteronomy" and more stars yet to be announced. If they're already casting we assume they're filming in late 2018 or early 2019 so perhaps the movie comes out in 2020.
Apologies if this has been discussed to death, but...
— Mark Blankenship (@IAmBlankenship) July 25, 2018
In the film version of "Six Degrees of Separation," Ian McKellen plays a character who is ensorcelled by the idea of being in a film version of "Cats."
And now Ian McKellen will be in the film version of "Cats."
Tom Hooper (Les Miz, The King's Speech) will direct because for some reason Hollywood only lets three men direct movie musicals: Tom Hooper, Rob Marshall, and Bill Condon even though none of them have proven to be consistently good at it. We're still a long way from finding a modern movie director as talented with the form as Vincente Minnelli, Bob Fosse, Stanley Donen, or Busby Berkeley, ... and it's like Hollywood isn't even trying to find him or her.