‘Cats’ is a weird, wacky, wild mess

Posted on January 3, 2020

By MARK VIOLA

Anyone who knows me knows I’m a cat person. I also quite enjoy musicals and theatre. So, it may surprise you that I’ve never seen “Cats” performed live on stage.

But, for better or worse, I can now say I’ve seen “Cats,” the film adaptation directed by Tom Hooper (“Les Misérables”).

Simply put, this movie was ill-conceived from the start. I’m not sure how Hooper and his crew thought it was all going to work, but sadly, it does not.

Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical, perhaps the most recognized Broadway show of all time, tells the story of a tribe of Jellicle cats who meet once a year so one can be chosen to ascend to the Heaviside Layer and come back to a new life.

On stage, the various characters consist of actors in cat costumes. In the film, however, we get computer-generated cat-human hybrid creatures that simply look weird, if not completely off-putting.

Although Hooper makes a number of changes to the story and shortens it to fit in a relatively lean (by musical standards) 110-minute runtime, he leaves in the ballet dancing and other musical eccentricities that simply make an odd affair on screen even odder.

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