Cats! Cats!! Cats!!!

Why does “Cats” continue having such a tremendous build-up? The answer is simple: Because it is a tremendous show. I saw “Cats” in London during its initial run. Candidly, it did not impress me as much as the current production which features an Australian cast at the CCP main theater.

Excellent, versatile performers sing and dance as though their lives depended on what they do. The imaginative choreography by Jo Anne Robinson, which combines ballet, acrobatics and modern dance, is executed by the ensemble, the soloists and the pairs with perfect precision and cohesiveness every step of the way. A pas de deux at the beginning of the musical compels and arrests attention for its clean technique, fluidity and grace. Near the end, a female cat calls to mind Odile, the Black Swan, for her excitingly rapid tours and fouettés. Male cats do barrel turns and cart wheels with the greatest of ease.

The lighting and sound effects, the music, the set designs, the weird, outlandish cat costumes and wigs — all these are spectacular, meant to startle — indeed, overwhelm — the audience. The scenes, each more propulsive and riveting than the last, take the viewers from peak to peak. In other words, haute voltage is the dominant characteristic or quality of the production.

T.S. Eliot was a literary genius many of whose works I have read and admired. (I heard his brilliant lecture at Harvard when I was a graduate student there.) But the composer Andrew Lloyd Webber and director Trevor Nunn are themselves geniuses, in their own fashion, for having woven together disparate poems from Eliot’s “Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats” into a relevant, unique plot for the first English musical theater.

In one of his poems, Eliot observes that cats are very much like human beings. Conversely, onstage, human beings move like cats as they slither and slide on all fours, and act as felines do — which is the whole point of “Cats”; the betrayals, treachery, loyalty, trust and friendship being verily experienced by the audience.

The Jellicle cats are a tribe with a leader, Old Deuteronomy (John Ellis), and an assortment of heroes and villains: Macavity (Darren Stack), Rum Tum Tugger (John O’Hara), Mr. Mistoffeeles (Adrian Ricks), among the many, and their female counterparts. Each performer is identified as a cat by his/her tail. A female cat, in a white, furry costume, has her similarly furry tail trailing her through almost the length of the entire stage. A male cat in a flowing, wide gown has his tail attached to it. Whichever way, everyone has a tail except the dancers in the fascinating Oriental episode.

Lea Salonga, as the Glamor Cat Grizabella, has fallen out of favor with the tribe and wants to rejoin it. She sings “Memory” which recalls happier days, and is finally welcomed back. Besides her smooth, skilled acting, she is in full control of a richer, more resonant voice. She sings “Memory” for the first time in a soft, restrained manner, and pulling out all stops for the second rendition, sings with resounding force in a gripping climax.

Lea is clearly an old favorite of the listeners who interrupt her with loud applause as she starts to sing, shouting their admiration as she finishes. Reportedly, “Memory”, the most lyrical — some might say, the only lyrical — song in “Cats”, was composed by one of the Beatles; McCartney, if I remember correctly.

Except for the brief black-outs and the absolute stillness that follows them, Lea’s two exquisite appearances are an enchanting respite to the razzle-dazzle, the electrifying huddling together of the cast, and to the virtually non-stop, astounding movement onstage.

Old Deuteronomy (Ellis) closes the musical, his powerful operatic voice thundering his address to the Jellicle cats atop Heaviside Layer.

“Cats” sets the pulses beating from start to finish. It brims with more spirit, zest and vigor than any Broadway musical I have seen in New York. Some may think “Cats” too much of a good thing but they are surely in the minority as the deafening applause, wild clamor and standing ovation from the full house prove.

The Philippine STAR, headed by president and CEO Miguel Belmonte, is one of the proud sponsors of “Cats”.