0ne's opinion of anything in the theater, apart from a revue, say, or a vaudeville program shouldn't result from having kept a balance sheet, yet that was the way I found myself watching Cats. There was this quality or element I liked and that one I didn't; this virtue, that flaw. I laughed at times and- was pleased, nodded in approbation, tapped my foot to some elegant and persuasive number. But at other times I shook my head, cast my eyes down, experienced prickles of irritation, and occasionally something stronger. So be it. Checking my columns I decide that Cats gives more than it takes away, that it succeeds in being charming despite its self-imposed handicaps.

To be charming (rather than illuminating or imaginatively deep) is what's intended by Andrew Lloyd Webber, the composer who came up with the idea for the project, and Trevor Nunn, the director. I don't presume to know what T.S. Eliot wanted from his fine and witty Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats, on which the play is based, but I suspect it wasn't a sentimental "story line" such as has been halfheartedly imposed here. Anyway, both Lloyd Webber (who wrote the music for Jesus Christ Superstar and Evita) and Nunn (the artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, and: co-creator of Nicholas Nickleby) are best when they stick closest to the original and worst when they stray too far into Broadway flash, glitter and pathos.

For a set that curves round into the mezzanine and rises high up toward the boxes, designer John Napier has created a junkyard crammed with all sorts of oversized debris: automobile tires, food cartons, empty liquor bottles, a broken tennis racket, records and a record player, shoes and boots, etc. Here, the "cats" live. One's immediate impression is that the actors are having a hard time getting around the cluttered environment and are sometimes lost to us among the detail. But After a while we, and they, grow accustomed to the space.

The cat costumes they wear are varied, often funny and mostly successful. Even more impressive are those they put on when playing nonfeline characters - some scarifying cockroaches, for example, or a group of delicious crumple-faced Pekinese. The lighting is excessive, blinking bulbs strung all over the place and plenty of strobes, and the numerous special effects are clever and silly by turns.

Extending these inconsistencies, the dances (choreographed by Gillian Lynne) are for the most part routine jazz and au courant quasi-ballet movements, but they are performed with spectacular energy. The music by Lloyd Webber is generally uninspired, except for two or three numbers that rise into something vigorous and memorable. The songs that spring from Eliot's verses are good enough; the chief, obnoxious addition to Eliot is an inspirational ballad called "Memory" which is entirely out of keeping with the spirit of Old Possum and whose function is to advance and culminate the weak narrative - something designed, I suppose to "pull the thing together."

It wasn't necessary. The "thing" is the poems, which constitute a narrative in themselves - a tale of the imagination, both childlike and sophisticated (it takes the greatest sophistication for an adult to see like a child), dwelling on a segment of the animal world and "humanizing" it without condescension and without loss of fertile' strangeness. As long as these verses are sung, danced and "enacted" with trust in their intrinsic appeal their capacity to give intellectual pleasure and auditory satisfaction, Cats is a superior work.

I reread, Eliot's book before setting out for the theater and was once again delighted by those anthropomorphic stanzas in which various qualities of felineness are treated with a solemnity that's only partly mocking and in which certain heroic or notorious individual cats are invented and then memorialized. (The nearest thing to Old Possum in Eliot's work is to be found in some of the Sweeney poems.) My favorites include "The Song of the Jellicles," "Old Deuteronomy," "Mr. Mistoffelees" and "Macavity: The Mystery Cat," I was happy to see that these were among the best items in the show.

The chief responsibility for both liveliness of Cats and its dumb spots and excrescences would seem to lie with Trevor Nunn. Always a flamboyant director (his Julius Caesar at the Aldwych some years ago was a masterpiece of ill-conceived hurly-burly), he throws in everything he can think of here, including tricks and postures from Nickleby (actors sitting around looking on between their own scenes; objects being created on stage) in an effort, one imagines, to jazz up the show for its American audience. From all accounts, Cats was simpler and more modest in London. That it manages to survive its "improvements" here is testimony some inner vitality.