Trivia / Cats

The stage musical

• Acting for Two:
  • This is standard practice in all productions, although which cats the actors double for tend to vary (Bustopher Jones and Old Deuteronomy are almost always the same actor). In all productions with "Growltiger's Last Stand", Asparagus and Jellyorum double as Growltiger and Griddlebone, except for in the video production, where the late Sir John Mills was too ill to perform the necessary choreography.
  • Plato is also often double cast for Macavity as well as Alonzo or Admetus being double cast as The Rumpus Cat.
  • In some productions, the same actor portrays Bustopher Jones, The Rumpus Cat, and Asparagus (who goes on to play Growltiger).
• Awesome, Dear Boy: Elaine Paige played Grizabella in the original West End run because she wanted to sing "Memory". She had heard the commercial version on the radio and had been intending to ask Andrew Lloyd Webber for permission to record a version of her own when the phone rang - and she was asked if she would replace the injured Judi Dench.
• Cut Song:
  • Depending on the production, either "The Awefull Battle of The Pekes and the Pollicles" or "Growltiger's Last Stand" is left out. The 1998 production, for example, cut the latter song out, but a few productions do put in both.
  • Most recent tours cut out "The Pekes and the Pollicles", but strangely enough, there is still usually an entry in the cast list for the Great Rumpus Cat.
  • For amateur productions, especially youth productions, it's more common to cut "Growltiger's Last Stand" than "The Awefull Battle of the Pekes and the Pollicles" due to the Siamese cats in the former traditionally being depicted as offensive stereotypes.
  • Additionally, most productions cut a verse out of "Mungojerrie and Rumpelteazer", though there's not really a consistency on which verse.
  • Much of Mistoffelees' dance solo from his title song was cut in the video production.
  • There was a bit called "The Ballad of Billy McCaw", that was supposed to be Growltiger & Griddlebone's "last duet", and took place in the middle of "Growltiger's Last Stand". The bit was replaced by the "In Una Tepida Notte".
• Dark Horse Casting: This worked in the original run's favor. As there were no notable stars in the cast, it allowed the musical to run much longer without any major changes.
• Fandom Life Cycle: Stage 6a. The fandom predominantly existed in the 1980s and 1990s and the musical became a pop-culture fixture, but then it went off Broadway. There are signs of a Stage X due to the Broadway revival and film adaptation.
• Filmed Stage Production: A staging at the Adelphi Theatre in London was filmed and released on video in 1997. It eventually aired on public television as well, so parts of the show were cut to fit the runtime of a television broadcast.
• Irony as She Is Cast: During Victoria's ballet number, she is supposed to tremble a bit and look nervous, because Victoria is a young cat at her first Jellicle Ball. However, casting calls for Victoria require women who are exceptional at ballet.
• Non-Singing Voice: In the video version, Veerle Casteleyn as Jemima was dubbed by Helen Massey because the producers were worried her Flemish accent wouldn't be understandable in her solos, while Geoffrey Garratt as Skimbleshanks was dubbed by David Arneill in order to give him a Scottish accent. Of course, given the nature of the show, they pretty much have no voice.
• The Other Marty: Happened in both the original London and Broadway productions:
  • In London, Judi Dench was to play both Jennyanydots and Grizabella, During rehearsals, Dench suffered a hamstring injury which prevented her from playing Jennyanydots. At a later rehearsal she compounded it by falling off the stage, so she couldn't play Grizabella either. At that point, Elaine Paige stepped in. Dench made up for it by playing Old Deuteronomy in the 2019 film.
  • In New York, Don Correia was cast as Skimbleshanks. He left almost immediately, so Willie Rosario, who was understudying the role, took over. Rosario was badly injured during rehearsals, so his understudy, Reed Jones, replaced him and opened the show. Things ended well for Rosario: after recovering, he was given the role in the first national tour.
  • Nicole Scherzinger pulled out of the 2016 Broadway Revival last-minute and subsequently got replaced by Leona Lewis.
• Promoted Fanboy: Andrew Lloyd Webber's passion for adapting Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats into a musical was out of his own nostalgia for having it be read to him as a child.
• Role Reprise: For the video version:
  • Elaine Paige and Susan Jane Tanner reprise their roles from the original London production as Grizabella and Jellylorum, respectively.
  • Ken Page reprised his role as Old Deuteronomy from the 1982 Broadway run.
• Sleeper Hit: This was essentially an underdog passion project that Andrew Lloyd Weber had to take out a second mortgage on his house to fund - and in fact few people in the musical theatre community would touch it. Despite lukewarm critical reviews and noted Broadway veteran Elaine Stritch walking out of the show in disgust, it turned into a massive hit.
• What Could Have Been:
  • "Memory" was a late addition to the soundtrack, as it isn't based on any of the TS Elliot poems in the book. Andrew Lloyd Weber had composed the melody years before but took inspiration from an unpublished poem that didn't make the book for being too sad. Then of course it ends up as the musical's most emotional song.
  • There were plans for an Animated Adaptation in the 90s by Amblimation, Steven Spielberg's short-lived animation arm of his production studio. He drafted plans for it to be set during the Blitz of World War II, using an art style inspired by German expressionism. It got stuck in the script stage when the writers couldn't figure out how to make the episodic nature of the show work for film. Amblimation ended up closing after their only three films flopped and with the script not having made any more progress, the project quietly dissolved.
• Written-In Infirmity: Averted; Sir John Mills, who played Gus in the video version, was nearly blind during filming, but his condition was in no ways hinted at in the film, though it is relatively obvious if you know the signs.
• Viral Marketing: The overall unbelievable success of the Musical was attributed to a lot of things, gaining initial traction due to the sheer over-the-top costume design to the fact the simple story and flashy colors made it very popular to foreign tourists who didn't speak English very well. With that bit of momentum, the show ended up enjoying a viral explosion as critics and news sources couldn't believe a Musical about cat people could be so popular, thus galvanizing interest in the show.

The 2019 film

• Ability over Appearance: Despite being considered too young to play Grizabella, Jennifer Hudson's performance of "Memory" was named as one of the redeeming things about the film.
• Actor-Inspired Element: Old Deutoronomy was given a Gender Flip just so Judi Dench could play it.
• All-Star Cast:
  • The 2019 film, with the exception of newcomer Francesca Hayward as Victoria, is chockful of big names, including acting heavyweights Judi Dench, James Corden, Ian McKellen, Rebel Wilson and Idris Elba, as well as notable musicians Jason Derulo, Jennifer Hudson and Taylor Swift.
  • The Japanese dub, one of the few foreign translations with an official dub, is not a slouch in this department either, as features a mix of either professional voice actors, theater and/or movie actors, actors that worked in musicals and, and a mix of all the above; the cast includes Kōichi Yamadera (Macavity), Mamoru Miyano (Mungojerrie), Miyuki Sawashiro (Rumpleteazer), Kazuhiro Yamaji (Growltiger), Akira Takarada (Gus),^note better known for many non-Japanese viewers for playing Hideo Ogata in the original 1954 Godzilla film, Win Morisaki (Mr. Mistoffelees)^note Non-Japanese viewers can recognize him as Daito/Toshiro Yoshiaki from Ready Player One., Romi Park (Cassandra) and many others.
• Blooper: The film has several instances of things that were missed during editing, such as Judi Dench's wedding ring being visible at one point, and several cats seen wearing sneakers during the Jellicle Ball. Reportedly, a hastily re-edited version fixing the errors was rush-released to theaters in an attempt to fend off some of the film's negative publicity.
• Box Office Bomb: It cost $95 million to produce and $196 million in total including advertising, but it only managed to gross $73 million worldwide. Between being an internet punching bag from the moment the first trailer dropped, the horrid reviews, being too creepy and too sexualized for the family crowd, having to patch the film after it was out to fix some unfinished effects, and coming out on the exact same day as Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, Universal lost $113 million on the film.
• Breakaway Pop Hit: The Movie Bonus Song "Beautiful Ghosts" has done much better than the film itself, even getting a Golden Globe Award nomination (the only positive award nomination the film got on the mainstream circuit).
• Christmas Rushed: The film was rushed for its Christmas release. This is evident in several incomplete visual effects, such as Judi Dench's human hand and wedding ring being visible in one shot. Tom Hooper later admitted that he and his crew didn't have enough time to properly finish the film before its release date, and that it was only finished at 8 AM on the day before the premiere. The studio later reissued the film as an Updated Re-release that fixed several of these issues, an unprecedented move for a film so soon after its initial release.
• Creator Backlash:
  • While James Corden admitted he hasn't seen the final cut, he's heard that it's terrible. Predictably enough, he's mocked it on his late night show. Corden and Rebel Wilson would later mock the film when presenting that year's Academy Award for Best Visual Effects, doing so in cat costumes and saying they knew from personal experience the importance of visual effects to a film's success (the bit itself received a polarizing reception, especially from the VFX community who felt that their hard work was being trivialized, and even more so since one of the effects studios involved shut down just days before the film's release). When Wilson presented the BAFTA for Best Director, she jokingly noted that the film was snubbed. Later, Corden and Wilson willingly accepted the Golden Raspberry Awards for Worst Supporting Actor and Worst Supporting Actress, respectively.
  • Downplayed by Taylor Swift, who said that she enjoyed making the film and had no regrets about appearing in the end product (especially seeing how she got to co-write a song with Andrew Lloyd Webber himself), but later described it as "weird-ass" and also subtly poked fun at some aspects of its production.
  • Universal quietly removed the film from its For Your Consideration campaigning site.
  • As for Andrew Lloyd Weber, he took the film so badly that in order to get his mind off of it he adopted a Havanese puppy. As some have put it, you know you've failed when your movie about cats is so bad the original writer adopts a dog.
• Creator Couple: In the Japanese dub, Kazuhiro Yamaji (Growltiger) and Romi Park (Cassandra) are married in Real Life. It should be noted, however, they both tied the knot a few weeks after the Japanese release of the film.
• Cut Song: "The Awefull Battle of the Pekes and the Pollicles" didn't make it into the film version. "Growltiger's Last Stand" has also been cut down to one verse, though this is justified since the context of the song is now completely different.
• Dark Horse Casting: Francesca Hayward (Victoria) is primarily known as the principal dancer in the Royal Ballet rather than as a singer or actress. She had made her film debut only three months before this film was released in Romeo & Juliet: Beyond Words, a movie done entirely in ballet.
• Dear Negative Reader:
  • Jason Derulo (Rum Tum Tugger) was quite vocal about his feelings towards critics giving the film negative reviews, calling it "one of the greatest pieces of art ever made," and declared that the only people who should be allowed to give opinions on movies are filmmakers themselves. Unfortunately for him, his prediction that a massive audience turnout would vindicate it did not come true.
  • When James Corden and Rebel Wilson poked fun at the quality of the effects while presenting that year's Academy Award for Best Visual Effects, the Visual Effects Society wrote an angry letter to them in reply, telling them that they had no right to mock the effort that the movie's visual effects team had put into the end product. At first this got a polarizing reaction, with some feeling that Corden and Wilson had taken a cheap shot, and others pointing out that this probably wasn't the best hill for the visual effects team to die on given that they turned in a cut with incomplete effects. With subsequent revelations of the problems caused by director Tom Hooper's ignorance of how the visual effects process works, however, many have more firmly sided with the effects team (though in fairness, it's unclear if Corden and/or Wilson had any way of knowing this).
• Disowned Adaptation: Andrew Lloyd Webber himself later called the film "ridiculous", calling out Tom Hooper for not wanting anyone involved in the making of the original show involved. He was so upset by the film that he actually bought himself a therapy dog.
• DVD Commentary: The director's commentary by Tom Hooper that only adds to the weirdness.
• Executive Meddling: After the nuclear reaction online to the first trailer, Universal cut funding for the film and quietly cancelled their Oscar campaign for it. This left the VFX team with four months to complete the entire rest of the film by Christmas, with Tom Hooper demanding changes right up to the eleventh hour.
• Fake Brit: Jennifer Hudson, Taylor Swift and Jason Derulo are Americans adopting some...questionable accents. Several other cast members are also non-Brits.^note Robbie Fairchild (Munkustrap), Mette Towley (Cassandra) and Eric Underwood (Admetus) are American; Rebel Wilson and Steven McRae are Australian, Naoimh Morgan (Rumpleteazer) is Irish.
• Follow the Leader: It's been theorised that Universal took note of the runaway success of The Greatest Showman and hoped to recapture that. Additionally Tom Hooper's Les Misérables (2012) and its numerous Academy Award nominations was a deciding factor.
• Hostility on the Set: At least one anonymous VFX artist has said that the relationship between Tom Hooper and the VFX team was less than amicable. In addition to the crew having a ninety hour work week, forcing many of them to sleep at the studio in between shifts, Hooper's limited knowledge on how CGI and animation worked made it difficult for him to judge their work objectively (among his frequent demands was footage of real cats performing the actions the actors would in the movie), not helped by his apparent condescending attitude when he couldn't get the artists to understand what he wanted from them. The same artist referred to Hooper as "demeaning":
  When you go into a conference room, you're not allowed to speak. And he talks to you like you're garbage.
• International Coproduction: A USA-UK-Canada-Australia-China-Japan co-production. It was coproduced by Universal (US), Amblin Entertainment (US), Working Title (UK), Perfect World Pictures (China), Toho (Japan), and Dentsu (Japan).
• Magnum Opus Dissonance: Universal were apparently planning for a big Academy Awards push for the movie — likely due to the combination of Tom Hooper having previously directed the Best Picture-winning The King's Speech, and several other film musicals having enjoyed big success at the Oscars in the 2000s and 2010s — but quickly abandoned it after the movie was released to an extremely toxic reception and box-office failure. Movie-goers and critics alike were quick to point out that literally any other movie that Universal released in 2019 would likely have had a better chance of winning Best Picture. It did end up winning awards, though... Golden Raspberry Awards, that is, with the film being nominated for nine Razzies and winning six; Worst Picture, Worst Director (making Tom Hooper the third person in history to win both Best and Worst Director), Worst Screenplay, Worst Supporting Actor (James Corden), Worst Supporting Actress (Rebel Wilson), and Worst Screen Combo ("Any Two Half-Feline/Half-Human Hairballs"). ^* It also received additional nominees in the last two categories it won, for Judi Dench (who didn't seem to mind), and "Jason Derulo & His CGI-Neutered "Bulge"" respectively, and Francesca Hayward was also nominated for Worst Actress but lost to Hilary Duff for The Haunting of Sharon Tate.
• No Dub for You: Due to being a musical, most countries didn't dub this film, even those where dubbing is mandatory by law. The few exceptions are Japan (partly due to the Japanese love for the musical genre and the original Cats in particular), Italy and Spain. Brazil and Spanish-speaking Latin America has a dub for the spoken parts only.
• Reality Subtext: Ballerina Francesca Hayward, one of the only performers in the movie who's not known for singing or acting, plays a Naïve Newcomer.
• Saved from Development Hell: Steven Spielberg planned an Animated Adaptation in The '90s. It would have been Amblimation's fourth feature (parent company Amblin Entertainment, which still owned the adaptation rights, gets a production credit). Some concept art of that version was released shortly after this film was announced.
• Troubled Production: The film became one of the most infamous films of 2019, and its "digital fur technology" became a punching bag across social media from the moment the first trailer dropped, mainly due to a turbulent production and rushed effects.
  • Rather than use Motion Capture, as is standard, CGI artists had to manually rotoscope the actors in post, as Tom Hooper felt that motion capture suits would interfere with the actors' performances. Hooper's insistance on realism (similar to his success on Les Misérables (2012)) led to a number of difficulties, especially given the surreal and over-the-top nature of the original theater production. Hooper also wanted the actors to use footage of actual cats performing as reference.
  • Like Les Mis before it, audio for the musical numbers was done by capturing live audio from the set along with the performance, sometimes with the songs rewritten just prior to shooting. This meant that — since there was no click track, piano or orchestra to guide the actors, and Hooper encouraged them to be loose with their performances — the phrasing and timing drifted, especially given the strains of live performance and the melding of what could be wildly different takes. This, in turn, put the orchestra in the difficult position of trying to play along with uneven melodies, rather than being the lead for the singers to follow.^note One notable exception to this is Skimbleshanks' number, which uses very precise 13/8 time to simulate a steam train; note that Steven McRae always uses rubato within the tempo and beat, because he's both using a click track and tapping his feet to the rhythm.
  • Hooper had never directed a film that relied heavily on effects like Cats, and apparently had little understanding of how animation worked: Hooper was reportedly "demeaning" during meetings with the VFX staff, forbidding them from speaking and berating them for showing work-in-progress shots that weren't fully rendered, not realizing that they were not reflective of the final product.
  • It took the crew six months just to complete two minutes of footage for the trailer, but they were left with a mere four months to finish the rest of the movie, which clocked in at nearly two hours. This resulted in ninety hour work weeks where the animators were forced to sleep in their offices just to make the deadline. Near the end of production, a section of the VFX team were given the task of hastily editing out the visible CGI cat anuses on all of the characters, resulting in the fabled "butthole cut".
  • Between Hooper demanding changes up to the 11th hour and Universal rushing the film out for an Oscar push, it had the bad luck of being finished just 24 hours before its premiere, and it hit theaters with several effects unfinished, most notoriously a few shots of Judi Dench's real hand. This resulted in it being the first film to ever have a newly completed version released after it had already been in theaters, which was unfavorably compared to a video game getting a day one patch. The final film was critically mauled, won six Razzie awards, and lost over $100 million for Universal.
• Underage Casting: Grizabella is often portrayed by an older actress and is depicted as either middle-aged or elderly. Jennifer Hudson was 37 while filming.
• What Could Have Been
  • Anne Hathaway, Rihanna, and Hugh Jackman were offered unspecified roles, which they turned down.
  • Rob Brydon revealed on an episode of Would I Lie to You? that he auditioned for Growltiger.
  • The cats were originally supposed to have visible anuses as part of the actors' CGI costumes. The decision to remove them came so late in the production that an entire section of the VFX team were tasked with finding every shot that included a visible cat anus and reanimating it with Barbie Doll Anatomy. The most notable leftover of this is during "The Old Gumble Cat" as the film comically focuses a lot of attention on Jennyanydots' rear during the song.
  • At one point, the movie was actually going to be animated, but was turned into a live action film in hopes of getting more awards at the Oscars.
• Word of Gay: Judi Dench has suggested that her character Old Deuteronony (who is male in both the musical and source material) is transgender.
• Writing by the Seat of Your Pants: Taylor Swift and Andrew Lloyd Webber fussed with the new song "Beautiful Ghosts" right up until the day of shooting, and since Tom Hooper insisted on capturing live audio from the set rather than recording in a studio, it was their only chance to get it down. If Francesca Hayward sounds uncertain while singing, it's because she'd only learned the song that morning.
• Written by Cast Member: Taylor Swift worked with Andrew Lloyd Webber to create a new song ("Beautiful Ghosts") for the movie, with Swift writing the lyrics and Lloyd Webber writing the music.
• Written-In Infirmity: Judi Dench was suffering from macular degeneration by the time she did the film, enough that her previous role in Murder on the Orient Express (2017) had her sitting down most of the time. As such, in this film one can see Robert Fairchild (Munkustrap) or other members of the ensemble guiding her whenever she had to walk.^note Oddly enough, this was also the case with John Mills as Gus in the 1998 production.

---