The New York theater season is off with a meow, a screech and a yowl as "Cats," a smash-hit musical from London, opens this week. Based on T. S. Eliot's light-verse classic "Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats," with music by Andrew Lloyd Webber and direction by Trevor Nunn, "Cats" is an extravaganza of high-voltage song and dance, performed in a spectacular garbage dump by a no-star troupe of brilliant young Broadway performers, none of them cast in a human role.

The 'Cats' Meow on Broadway

T. S. Eliot's light-verse classic is married to song and dance in the most extravagant musical ever to come to the United States from a foreign shore.

Broadway's noble Winter Garden Theatre has been magically transformed into a cosmic rubbish heap. After all, rubbish heaps are where cats love to play, and these Cats will be around for a long time. So there, jammed and crammed in a giant clutter, is all the debris dear to the feline heart, magnified many times to cat's-eye scale. Rusty pots and pans, empty cereal boxes, gamy mops, amputated bicycle wheels, gangrenous milk cartons, frayed magazines, stained lamp shades, crushed cigarette packs, fractured bottles, dented cans, a dead Die Hard battery, a clobbered car, a gap-toothed comb wadded with dandruff - inside this planetarium of junk the audience sits and marvels at its beauty. Suddenly darkness descends, a thousand cats' eyes blaze and blink, uncanny music from an invisible source whirls in a caturnalia of sound. A ring of lights soars skyward like a UFO. From everywhere feline shapes emerge, bounding, padding, gliding beneath a cloud-streaked moon. The music swells, and there they are-the company of "Cats," singing exultantly in their utopia of trash, beginning the most extravagant musical ever to hit Broadway from a foreign shore.

A foreign musical-and from blimpy old England at that-on Broadway? Yes, and welcome, too. "Cats" is the biggest London stage hit of the modem era, and only catastrophe or catatonia will bar an even greater success here. Audiences at the preview per-formances prior to opening night this week were clearly taking the word out that "Cats" is the "Nicholas Nickleby" of this season, and $60 cheaper than "Nickleby" at a mere $40 a ticket. "Cats" is budgeted at about the same $4 million-plus as "Nickleby"; it's a regulation two and a half hours long instead of "Nickleby's" marathon eight and a half, but it's a theatrical event of the same order, propelled by the brilliant "Nickleby" duo, director Trevor Nunn and designer John Napier, with music by Andrew Lloyd Webber ("Evita," "Jesus Christ Superstar") and words by the late T. S. Eliot, based on his light-verse classic, "Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats."

Through the shifts of literary fashion, Eliot holds his place at the pinnacle of 20th-century English-language poets (along with Yeats), the author of its most revolutionary poem, "The Waste Land," and rivaled only by Joyce as the century's most influential literary figure. Eliot would savor the irony that his biggest popular success is the posthumous triumph of his slightest work, the "Practical Cats." But the brilliance of "Cats" is that it keeps and augments the popular appeal of a children's book while transmuting it into something bigger and more resonant. If there ever was a show for that mysterious entity, the "whole family," this is it. First and foremost, "Cats" is a show, filled with theatrical magic, brilliant costumes, marvelous machinery, all-out energy, beautiful tunes, a singing-dancing cast that seems transported by the sheer joy of performing. But behind the wallop of "Cats," other things are going on that open up different dimensions.

Nunn, Lloyd Webber and their colleagues have turned a revue into a ritual. The cosmic dump becomes a benign wasteland of civilization in which these "practical cats, dramatical cats, pragmatical cats, fenatical cats... romantical cats, pedantical cats, critical cats, parasitical cats... political cats, hypocritical cats... cynical cats, rabbinical cats" (an Eliotic variation by writer Richard Stilgoe) all strut their stuff, revealing characters very much like the human beings who are never seen - except for signs of annoyance like a gargantuan shoe that comes flying into their midst at a particularly noisy moment. Supervising this nocturnal rite from his peak high on a cast-off tire is Old Deuteronomy (Ken Page), Eliot's ancient sleepy vicarage cat. Dressed in prophetic robes Old D becomes the deity figure who will choose one cat, after the night's festivities, for redemption.

This is the kind of thing that gives "Cats" guts as well as flair and allows it to embody the meanings that suavely skate behind Eliot's whimsical rhythm. As an admirer of Edward Lear, Eliot knew the sense and sorrow that lie behind the donnish double talk; Lear's Jumblies and Yonghy-Bonghy-Bos are echoed by Eliot's Jellicles and Griddlebones. Such shenanigans at times flirt dangerously with the arch and the cute, but the sharply intelligent staging of Nunn, joined to the ingenious music of Lloyd Webber and the outrageously fanciful costumes of John Napier, skirt most of these pitfalls with feline aplomb.

Associate director and choreographer Gillian Lynne does a heroic job of keeping things uninviting on a nonstop pulse of dance, a pulse that explodes into the feverish 13-minute Jellicle Ball, in which the entire company switches and swirls from ballet to jazz, from gymnastics to boogie. This number reminds you that the heroic figures of Broadway musicals for the last few years have not been stars but the multitalented chorus kids who are the muscle and spirit of shows like "A Chorus Line" and "Dancin'." It's exciting to watch a performer like Rene Ceballos in her bronze leotard, her tapered legs moving with jackhammer speed, or white-clad Cynthia Onrubia, who ripples and undulates like a sphinx in heat.

As the contrary Rum Tom Tugger, Terrence V. Mann is a cataleptic Mick Jagger rocking his silver mane and rolling his rhinestone belt. White-spatted Bustopher Jones, the Cat About Town, is Eliot mocking himself as a man of many London clubs; Stephen Hanan plays him as a spoon-sceptered gourmand who'll chomp on anything including his own tail. Hanan also plays Gus, the Theatre Cat, a tattered, palsied old ham who was once a star and who relives one of his triumphs as the swashbuckling Growltiger in a lavishly staged flashback complete with fold-out ship, rippling river, a couple of sampans and a dancing platoon of piratical Siamese. Knockout dancer Timothy Scott turns Mr Mistoffelees, the Original Conjuring Cat, into a whirling dervish that suggests he's swallowed the spinning Black Swan from "Swan Lake." Reed Jones plays Skimbleshanks, the Railway Cat, in a chugging, buffing number during which a locomotive is assembled out of hunks of junk. Kenneth Ard materializes as the invisible arch criminal Macavity, the Mystery Cat, in a jazzy number that evokes Sam Spade (oops! mustn't say "spayed" around a cat, sung sizzlingly by Wendy Edmead and Donna King as two brindled cuties.

What makes "Cats" greater than the sumof these engaging parts is the touch of the divine comedy detected by Trevor Nunn. Valerie Eliot, the poet's widow, had given Andrew Lloyd Webber some unpublished material by her husband, including an eight-line fragment about Grizabella, the Glamour Cat, that Eliot had thought was too sad for the book. Grizabella becomes the catalytic force that supplies the darker, more human dimension behind the whimsy. When Betty Buckley as Grizabella comes on in her frayed frills and furbelows, with her ravaged-beauty face, the fun stops and the other cats recoil: Grizabella represents something they'd rather not think about.

She is the fallen woman, and in one of the show's few alterations of Eliot's text Trevor Nunn has related this streetwalking cat to the streetwalker in Eliot's 1917 poem "Rhapsody on a Windy Night," with its haunting image of the prostitute "in the light of the door/Which opens on her like a grin ... /And you see the comer of her eye/ Twists like a crooked pin." This smart connection results in Nunn's lyric for "Memory," a heartbreaking lamentation that is the most beautiful theater song in years, sung with chilling emotion by Buckley.

Nunn has had the intelligence and guts to put the thirst for transcendence into "Cats," because he knows it's in everything that Eliot wrote. So Grizabella isn't just the fallen pussycat, she's the fallen spirit, and the climax of "Cats" is her redemptive rise to heaven on Old Deuteronomy's tire, which soars high over the stage in billows of celestial smoke, while the cats sing a hosanna to another Eliot fragment, "Up up up past the Russell Hotel/Up up up to the Heaviside Layer." The brilliance of Nunn's achievement is to create this exalted climax without ripping the gossamer weave of fancy. In a way he, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Gillian Lynne and John Napier have created the theatrical parallel to Steven Spielberg's film "E.T.," a sharply intelligent popular entertainment that resonates at many levels all the way down to the heart.

Not that everything works in "Cats." The second act opens with Old Deuteronomy chanting "The Moments of Happiness," which comes from "The Dry Salvages" from Eliot's last masterpiece, "Four Quartets." The alert Nunn has spotted the connection between Eliot's use here of the word "ineffable" (to indicate the inexpressible nature of ultimate experience) and the same word used with commic effect in "The Naming of Cats." Again it's clever and brave of Nunn to make the connection, but this time pretentiousness sloshes over the stage, and the music, otherwise so effective in matching the jounce and jingle of the "Practical Cats," muddles the verbal music of Eliot's higher poetry, which is ... well, ineffable.

Once, listening to Robert Donat's recording of "Practical Cats" with background music, Eliot said: "I like the idea that they are read against the musical background and not themselves set to the music." But it's fun to think that he would hae appreciated Andrew Lloyd Webber's superb job of musicalizing his cats. Valerie Eliot thinks that the poet would have loved the show. At Harvard he was a great devotee of the local music halls, and it's not fanciful to think the jazz rhythms of innovating works like "Sweeney Agonistes" came from the style of vaudeville and college theatricals. "When he was writing 'Sweeney'," says Mrs. Eliot, "he stayed up all night beating a drum to get the rhythm right." She has seen "Cats" at least 10 times and will attend the opening in New York. When she was first approached by Lloyd Webber about turning "Practical Cats" into a musical, "I couldn't see how it could be done." But then "he described what he was going to do and I saw immediately he was absolutely on the wavelength. My main concern was the he stick to the text and of course he did. I think the teamwork on the production is marvelous and that it is a brilliant job."

Andrew Lloyd Webber had known "Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats" since he was a child. "I loved the poems and I thought they lent themselves to being set to music," he says. He started working on the music in 1977 and by 1980 he had enough to perform them at his own Sydmonton Festival. He invited Valerie Eliot and she brought with her some unpublished material of her husband's, including the all-important Grizabella fragment. Lloyd Webber decided to phone Trevor Nunn; one thing led to another "and we plowed into rehearsals with really an act of faith. I mean, we did not know what we really had when we started."

Now they know; "Cats" opened in May 1981 and has been sold out ever since. Lloyd Webber and Nunn don't want the New York version to be "a clone of London"; about a third of the show has been altered, and Lloyd Webber was writing new music right through the previews. An important change is the expansion of the orchestra from 16 to 25 pieces, under the direction of Broadway veteran Stanley Lebowsky, who, from his concealed podium, is watched by the cast on TV monitors placed strategically around the remodeled theater. 

Trevor Nunn recalls being dubious about the project at first. But, he adds, it was a few months after his triumph with "Nicholas Nickleby," and "when your confidence is up, you think you can walk on water." So he accepted, insisting only that John Napier be the designer. "I told John that everything had to be thought of in a cat scale. We had to create an environment where, in a sense, the audience was there on cat sufferance." Nunn was convinced that the show had to be "overwhelmingly danced"; he and Gillian Lynne collaborated on the structure of all the numbers. "She has a teeming and inventive mind," says Nunn, "but what you must focus on is this: on day one of rehearsals what we had was 15 poems set to music and five weeks later we had a show with characters, relationships and stories running from beginning to end. Those things don't get there by osmosis. They get there because a director is working them out and making them happen. Perhaps one day there will be a credit for all musicals that says 'stablest by so-and-so'."

The theater was certainly not the main text of the 42-year-old Nunn's early life. The son of a "poor but not destitute" furniture craftsman, he won a scholarship to Cambridge, where he met such future stars as Ian McKellen and Derek Jacobi and John Cleese, later of Monty Python fame. At 24 Nunn was made an associate director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, and when Peter Hall left the RSC to take over the National Theatre he suggested that Nunn replace him as RSC director.

John Napier, 38, had even poorer origins than his friend Nunn. His father was a roofer, and John spent the first six months of his life in a cardboard box under the stairs during the Nazi blitz of London. A congenital thanker in school, he was spotted as a potential artist by one of his teachers, who got him into art college in London. After eight years of training, "I had moved into what seemed to me to be the incredibly precious world of theater design," he says. "Almost all the teachers thought there was no hope for me, but most of the directors thought my work was fascinating even if a bit wacky. My designs are not pretty and they're always offbeat. If it involves concrete and barbed wire, give me a call. I like to break out of the proscenium arch-it's a strain that goes through all of my work."

At the Winter Garden he's broken through the arch and everything else, turning the entire theater into a cat cosmos at a cost in the millions. In creating the costumes and makeup, he's tried to keep the spirit of Eliot's cats while allowing dancers freedom of movement. It wasn't easy to work out. Even the whiz-bang whirler Timothy Scott couldn't do the leaps and spins of Mr. Mistoffelees in a costume that lights up and needed 12 pounds of batteries. Napier solved the problem neatly - the lights are now on a tunic that Scott deftly removes before starting his dazzling whirligig.

Gillian Lynne appreciates performers like Scott. "The original cast in London is extraordinary," she says, "but we didn't find as many as you have here who are trained across the board-who could do ballet, tap and modem dance and also were good singers. 'Cats' is really England's first dance musical. Since Noel Coward there has been a terrible gap in English musical theater. And England has no history of jazz as the Americans do. The American dance musical is unique-it comes from your mixture of races, your feeling for jazz and something in the air we just don't have in England." Lynne seems to have that something, as her childhood nickname of "Wrigglebottom" indicates. By the time she was six her mother was sure she had Saint Vitus' dance and took her to a doctor, who wisely suggested she be sent to dancing school.

She wound up as a principal ballerina with the Royal Ballet. But on a trip to New York she saw "South Pacific" and from then on classical ballet wasn't enough. Eventually she became friends with Dudley Moore, who educated her in jazz and wrote the score for a jazz ballet she choreographed, "Collage," which was a huge success at the Edinburgh Festival in 1963. Producer David Merrick saw it and told Lynne, "I'll have you on Broadway in a year." He did: soon she was doing the choreography for "The Roar of the Greasepaint, the Smell of the Crowd," followed by "Pickwick" and "How Now, Dow Jones." She's directed straight plays and opera, has done choreography for the Muppets and an ice ballet for John Curry. At 53 Lynne is as slim, elegant and graceful as ... a cat. To cast the show Lyme estimates she auditioned 12,000 people. "I've never seen such talent and so much of it," she marvels.

The cast of "Cats" makes an appealing cross section of the gifted, trained, dedicated nonstars who are the heart and soul of the American musical theater. The youngest, 18-year-old Christine Langner, is as bubbly as the mischievous Rumpelteaser she plays. Now a freshman at New York University, Christine started dancing at seven. At her first audition Trevor Nunn asked about her experience. "My mind went blank," says Christine. "I couldn't think of a single show I was in." But she answered an open call as number 900 and made the show.

Timothy Scott is a veteran at 27; he's been in "Dancin"' in Los Angeles, "A Chorus Line" on Broadway and in London, in the movie "Annie" and in countless TV commercials. "I knew when I was five years old I wanted to be a dancer," he says, "but I never took dancing lessons until I was in high school for fear of what people would think. "Cats" is the hardest and happiest work he's ever done. "It's fun playing an animal," he says. "When you put the makeup on you feel you can be as wild as you want to be."

Kentucky-born Terrence V. Mann, the hard-rocking Rum Turn Tugger, has spent $6,000 in voice coaching to get rid of his Southern accent. At the North Carolina School of Arts he learned mime, clowning, juggling, acrobatics, jazz dancing and classical acting. The juggling got him into "Barnum," and during one audition for "Cats" Nunn asked him if he had walked the wire. "I told him I did," says Mann, "and that it worked much better if you fell off because then the audience was so with you when you got back on to do it again." Mann describes how Trevor Nunn had the cast crawl around during rehearsals improvising catlike movements. "We also talked about cartoon cats like Sylvester and Tom and Jerry," says Mann, "the kind of movements that were caricatures of real cats."

Plump, pretty Anna McNeely, who plays the Old Gumbie Cat, recalls those sessions. "Trevor had us stand in a circle with eyes closed and imagine that a huge explosion had scattered us all over the hall. Then, still with our eyes closed, we had to feel and hear and smell and touch our way back to the same circle we started with. We were learning to use our other senses like a cat does." McNeely, who started out as a high school teacher, adds that 'Cats' is a show we'll never be able to put on automatic pilot. It's too dangerous. There's too much opportunity for someone to get hurt - everyone has to be alert all the time."

None more so than Betty Buckley, who has to ride two different machines for her climactic ascent to the Heaviside Layer. "I love the theater," says Buckley, "but I'm not ready to give my life for it." One of the veterans of the cast at 35, she's had considerable success as a singer and actress, although she's probably most familiar as the stepmother in the TV series "Eight Is Enough." There's some irony to Buckley's playing Grizabella, the hooker cat. "My father is from South Dakota," she says, "and he thought people in show business were prostitutes." Buckley worked as a reporter in Ft. Worth before running off to New York, where she got the part of Thomas Jefferson's wife in "1776." "The people on this show are the most talented I've ever seen," she says. "I crack up sometimes when I watch them dance and dance and sweat and sweat, and then I think about the money and how everybody is here because they love musical theater and the opportunity to work with this kind of genius."

The original genius behind "Cats" remains, of course, T. S. Eliot. Not the least of the show's virtues is that it evokes, with unexpected sensitivity the drama of a career that changed our perception of art and of the world. Betty Buckley, moving like a hurt ghost across the stage, trying pathetically to join in the other cats' dancing is the perfect embodiment of Eliot's perennial obsession with " some infinitely gentle/Infinitely suffering thing." "Cats" is lots of fun, but it also echoes something of a great poet's vision of loss and mortality. V. S. Pritchett once conjured up Eliot "with black bowler and umbrella, ushering us to our seats in hell." Old Possum would have enjoyed the spectacle of his Grizabella escaping hell, rising to heaven amid a stageful of happy cats and a theaterful of happy people.

by Jack Kroll, with Constance Guthrie