SKOKIE, Ill.—“Everybody in the West End of London thought we were completely and utterly crazy,” said Andrew Lloyd Webber, the composer of “Cats,” in a December 2014 interview with British newspaper The Telegraph. Even the famous English director Trevor Howard said that a show “based on a children’s poem about pussycats could be the most ridiculed mounts in theater history.”
Indeed, the theatrical community had reason to be concerned when “Cats” opened in London in 1981. Would anyone come to watch this show? It had barely any plot. In it, actors dressed as cats slinked and slid around a stage singing songs with lyrics taken from “Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats” (1939) by 20th-century poet T. S. Eliot (1888–1965).
