The setting of "Cats," at the Winter Garden, is a city dump of superlatively squalid disorder, and it is there that the assortment of singing and dancing cats who make up the entire cast of this peculiar musical forgather by night to boast of their exploits,' to contemplate old age and death, and, in one lucky instance, to be translated into cat heaven, where cats await without impatience rebirth into one or another of the nine lives to which, by common cat calculation, they are said to be entitled. The peculiarity of the musical lies in how little actually takes place during the course of quite a long evening; instead of a proper book, we have a setting to music, by Andrew Lloyd Webber, of a number of poems about cats by T. S. Eliot, most of which Eliot published just over forty years ago, in a droll little volume entitled "Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats." (Scholars may be able to tell me why Eliot chose to call himself Old Possum when he was neither old at the time nor especially possumlike in appearance- "raccoon" would have been more like it - and what the adjective "practical" may have meant to him in such a context; save as killers of mice, cats are surely among the least practical of creatures.) Mr. Webber jauntily manifests his mastery of many modes of music-making as he moves from scene to scene, which is to say from poem to poem; the titles of these I am reluctant to mention, lest they make the Anglican and Royalist Eliot sound too schoolmasterishly quaint for our robust American taste. His cats have names like Bustopher Jones and Rumpelteazer and Old Deuteronomy, but the names prove to be more bearable in song than they look in print and the cats themselves are far from being sissies; they have led hard lies and each of them might well say, paraphrasing Whitman, "I was the cat, I suffer'd, I was there."

In writing light verse, Eliot was looking back to Lear and Carrol, but there is less deliberate nonsense in him than in his distinguished predecessors; a certain note of Eliotesque angst emerges from time to time, not unwelcomely. Trevor Nun, the brilliant director of "Cats," has found in Old Possum hints of the author of the "Four Quartets;" Nunn has also written the lyrics for the most memorable song in the show, which is called "Memory" and was suggested in Eliot's "Rhapsody on a Windy Night." A lovely and touching song, "Memory" is sure to become a classic; so, perhaps, is a song about Gus, the theatre cat who claims to have acted with Irving and Tree, and who "used to know seventy speeches by heart." I had never expected to encounter pathos in cats, whether in real life or in art, but Eliot-Webber-Nunn have mitigated to some extent and for the time being my hitherto harsh view of the species.

Judged as a spectacle instead of simply as a musical, "Cats" is a triumph, and for this, much of the credit must go to John Napier, who designed both the setting and the costumes. What a gorgeous dump he has created for Eliot's invincible army of cats to prowl upon and howl upon, and behind what splendidly brindled and whiskery pelts he has concealed his actors and actresses! Scarcely less important than the setting, which occupies not only the stage of the Winter Garden, but much of the auditorium as well, is the strenuously acrobatic choreography directed by Gillian Lynne. Miss Lynne has caused the young American cast to enter with seeming ease into what is essentially an English production; they perform with that combination of grace and energy which is indispensable to the musical form. The cast is too big to be individually named; letting a few stand for many, I single out for praise Stephen Hanan, as Gus; Betty Buckley, as Grizabella: and Ken Page, as Old Deuteronomy. Let me also praise the designer of the lighting, David Hersey, and the conductor of the orchestra Stanley Lebowsky. "Cats" is reputed to have, the largest advance sale of any musical in history - something over six million dollars. Old Possum was a devotee of musical theatre; he would have rejoiced to see his cats in glory on Broadway.