Light in the Face of CATSastrophe

So.  I guess we can thank T.S. Eliot for one of Broadway’s most well-known musicals.  As one might guess, the vibe of Cats is just a bit lighter than that of The Waste Land, but still, I thought it was worth a mention, so I’m just going to mention some facts I wanted to share.

Cats is based on T.S. Eliot’s 1939 collection of poems (wow, this guy really lived through some stuff…World War I and now World War II) about “feline psychology and sociology,” Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats.  The musical is about a group of cats, The Jellicles, and “the Jellicle choice.”  Of course, Cats has won a bunch of awards, being the fourth-longest running show on Broadway.

T.S. Eliot’s collection of poems was originally going to be about dogs.  But then Eliot decided that “dogs don’t seem to lend themselves to verse quite so well, collectively, as cats.”  Oh, well, who am I to question T.S. Eliot?
T.S. Eliot is “regarded as its primary lyricist” because a lot of songs in Cats are just lines from Eliot’s poems.  Therefore, Eliot was posthumously given the Tony Award for Best Book of a Musical in 1983.  He also got a Tony Award for the Best Original Score, along (of course) with Andrew Lloyd Webber.

Um…Grumpy Cat was temporarily in the 2014  revival on West End.  Hmmm.

Another strange fact: it used up a LOT of yak hair (for the wigs).

Here’s a quote from one website I read, pertaining to Dante (whom Eliot also references in The Date Land): “T. S. Eliot's greatest literary role model was Dante, and many of his major works strive to emulate Dante's Divine Comedy[…] The Waste Land and Prufrock dwell in Hell and Purgatory, but […] Cats presents an ascension to Paradise, here referred to rather cleverly as the "Heavyside Layer" (a pun upon a scientific term that appeared in Eliot's Family Reunion).  But anyone who knows their Dante knows that you can't climb to Heaven without first stepping through Hell, and the second act of Cats provides not only a descent but an entire tableau of a civilization in ruin -- a Waste Land of cats -- after Macavity kidnaps Old Deuteronomy and short-circuits the electrical power in the alley, casting the stage into darkness.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cats_(musical)#Synopsis
http://mentalfloss.com/article/84660/11-memorable-facts-about-cats
http://www.oversixty.co.nz/entertainment/music/2016/12/7-facts-about-the-musical-cats/#
http://www.litkicks.com/EliotCats