Midnight. Not a sound from the pavement. Suddenly an explosion of music and lights reveals a larger-than-life junkyard. Probing car lights tear across the darkened landscape of bottles and boxes, briefly catching the darting image of a running cat. Tonight is the one special night each year when the tribe of Jellicle Cats reunites to celebrate who they are.

Model of Civic’s CATS set designed and built by Peter Rossing

OLD DEUTERONOMY
The kind and just leader of the Jellicle tribe. Described as being wise and is respected and beloved by most Jellicles. While they are “old and tottery” and “must go slow”, they’re fairly lively and dance along with a variety of songs performed for them. As the head of the tribe, they are responsible for making the Jellicle Choice, choosing which cat will ascend to the Heaviside Layer.

GRIZABELLA
Once a glamorous star among the Jellicles, she now lives in the gutter, exiled and disgraced. A central plot of the musical revolves around her plight and ultimate forgiveness by the tribe. She is characterized by her regret, rejection, and loneliness. She dreams of the days when she was young, beautiful and adored. She does not show up anywhere in Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats. In fact, her character comes from a different unpublished piece by T.S. Eliot called, “Grizabella, the Glamour Cat.”

MUNKUSTRAP
He is the leader and protector of the tribe in the absence of Old Deuteronomy. He fulfills the narrator role, breaking the fourth wall to explain the plot to the audience and introducing a few of the featured characters. He is responsible and brave, with a commanding presence, but is also friendly when not alarmed by a perceived threat. He loves and enjoys the company of his tribe, who in turn hold him in high regard.

VICTORIA
She is a young cat, the eldest of the four female kittens. She is one of the kinder and more accepting cats and is well-liked by the rest of the tribe. Her movements are graceful, elegant, and timid. In “The Invitation to the Jellicle Ball”, she dances a slow, lyrical solo that symbolizes her coming of age. Her name was likely inspired by Queen Victoria who is mentioned a few times in Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats.

BOMBALURINA
She doesn’t lack self-confidence and sensuality. She is especially close to Demeter and the two are rarely apart. She’s very direct about her feelings toward the other cats. She is extremely flirtatious and seems to love being the center of attention. Although Bombalurina can come across as somewhat superficial, she has a protective side shown towards Demeter, who rarely leaves her side, and the female kittens, who in turn seem to look up to her.

DEMETER
She is a very anxious and easily startled cat, constantly fearful that Macavity is around. She’s one of the few cats sympathetic to Grizabella right from the start. She attempts to welcome the older cat, but cannot bring herself to fully accept Grizabella. She usually runs to Bombalurina in uncomfortable situations, such as when Grizabella or Macavity are nearby.

MACAVITY
The Mysterious Cat. He is a malevolent criminal mastermind whose wicked deeds strike fear in the Jellicles. A past relationship with Demeter has left her in a constant state of paranoia and fear. He possesses various magic powers, including the ability to appear and disappear such that he is never found at the scene of the crime. He also has some sort of hypnotic ability that allows him to put the Jellicles in a trance-like state and is a master of disguise, able to fool the Jellicles.

Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats doesn’t tell a single story, but the stories of the many Jellicle Cats – each poem standing alone as an individual story. When creating the musical, Andrew Lloyd Webber and Trevor Nunn felt it needed a narrative thrust, a way of linking the poems together so that the audience could fully engage with the characters and understand the environment they live in. A combination of the idea of the Jellicle Ball and the story of Grizabella (from an unpublished poem) and a fragment of an idea from Eliot about the Heaviside Layer came together to form the narrative thread Andrew Lloyd Webber and Trevor Nunn were looking for – that the cats gather together once a year for the Jellicle Ball, a chance to share stories and entertain one another, with the added inducement that one fortunate cat will be chosen to travel on to the Heaviside Layer. The audience has been ‘allowed’ in to witness this magical and secret ceremony in order that they will come to more fully understand the nature of cats.

T.S. Eliot was born in America in 1888 but became a British citizen in 1927 after twelve years of living in the United Kingdom. His writing would have been influenced by the different cultures he grew up with, the long years he spent studying at different universities and the political and social changes he experienced, including the First World War. Eliot wrote Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats during the late 1930’s and it was published in October 1939, just after the outbreak of the Second World War. In January 1965, Eliot passed away in London. There is a memorial to him in Poet’s Corner, Westminster Abbey.

Andrew Lloyd Webber was born in 1948 and enjoyed reading Eliot’s cat poems as a child. He began writing CATS in the late 1970’s, after the success of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Jesus Christ Superstar and Evita, on which he collaborated with Tim Rice. CATS opened in 1981, forty-two years after the poems were published and was a close collaboration with Trevor Nunn and Gillian Lynne, who had previously worked together at the Royal Shakespeare Company. All these different people, with their different backgrounds in the arts and various ideas had an influence when creating the show.

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