Future of SA musical theatre is in good paws

Students at the Luitingh Alexander Musical Theatre Academy (Lamta) staged 20 Years of the Tony Awards — a tribute to some of Broadway’s best from the past two decades — in December. There were snippets from jukebox musicals that most in the audience would recognise: American Idiot (songs from Green Day), Beautiful (Carole King) and Jagged Little Pill (Alanis Morissette). There were numbers from genre-busting shows that haven’t been performed in South Africa but that local musical enthusiasts have longed to see: Hamilton, The Book of Mormon, Six.

And then there were a handful of performances that even those of us who thought we were aficionados — apart from the nerdiest of musical theatre nerds — had to admit we barely knew by name: Hadestown, Next to Normal, Once, Come From Away, Maybe Happy Ending. These were a gentle reminder, as one of the continuity presenters made explicit in a joke touching more than a few nerves, that South African audiences tend to behave as if “there have been no new musicals since Joseph, Phantom and Cats”.

Touché. But the jibe was self-mocking too, because the dynamic duo behind Lamta, Anton Luitingh and Duane Alexander, also love their Andrew Lloyd Webber. Last year they co-produced Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat with Pieter Toerien, who owns the Lamta premises at his Theatre on the Bay in Cape Town. Over the years, they have both performed in and directed dozens of Lloyd Webber shows, and they have sprinkled their magic dust on various acclaimed productions of “old favourites”: My Fair Lady, The Sound of Music, Annie and many more.

So the students at Lamta are not trained to be highbrow neophiles. But given the success of at least one attempt to introduce the unknown to South African theatre consumers — the celebrated Spring Awakening, which premiered in New York in 2006 but was “new” to local audiences when Luitingh and Alexander brought it here a few years ago — I couldn’t help but wonder if the Joseph, Phantom and Cats jest was a wry cri de coeur or a veiled mea culpa. Especially because, while working with the Lamta students on their Tony Awards showcase, Alexander was also putting the finishing touches to a new iteration of Cats.

It was in his capacity as resident director of this touring production, which opened for a month at Artscape in Cape Town before transferring to the Teatro at Montecasino in Johannesburg, that Alexander granted me an interview. We spoke as the Artscape run was coming to an end, and the company was preparing for its get-in at the Teatro. But this, Alexander noted, was only the first of many such transitions; the production is, to put it mildly, going places.

Confessing to “a constant push and pull” between much-loved musicals with global brand recognition and fresher, less well-known works — “We want to introduce audiences to new shows, but also have to think about what will pay for itself” — Alexander affirmed that “there are only a handful of musicals that are known just about everywhere, and Cats is one of them. So when we take this production to places such as Oman, Mumbai or Bangkok, we can be sure there are audiences waiting for us. And, of course, we’ll go to China and Korea, where people are obsessed with the show.”

Across Asia, North America and Europe, Alexander added, Cats is a guaranteed “crowd favourite”. And yet it strikes me that the show is equally a favourite among musical theatre performers. To adapt another comic gag: how do you know if someone has been in Cats? Don’t worry, they’ll tell you.

What gives Cats this special status among theatre artists? Is it especially difficult to pull off?

“Certainly, everyone wants to have it on their CV,” says Alexander. “But the main reason it’s momentous for those in the cast is that it is such an immersive show. Cats changes the way you think of yourself as a performer.” Alexander should know; with Luitingh, he was a member of the cast in the first South African production in 2001, which toured worldwide for four years.

For the audience, the stage design is striking: the world of the “Jellicle cats” (as they are called) is reproduced at a feline scale, so everyday objects become superhuman in size. For the performers, this becomes their world. Of course, members of the ensemble also “live” inside the show’s much-loved melodies. And then there is the movement — the process of becoming a cat. “There are certain tricks and postures that we work into the choreography,” explains Alexander. “It’s important that people feel they are watching a story about cats, not human beings dressed in Lycra.”

It is testament to the performers’ excellent execution that this transformation can take place, and that audiences can so readily suspend their disbelief. After all, to be candid, the whole Cats concept is kind of … weird.

TS Eliot’s poems from his 1939 volume Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats were written as comical entertainment for his godchildren. They contain fun rhymes, large doses of nonsense, and details that locate them quite specifically in early-20th century London. They are not obvious material for a musical comprising a series of largely unrelated songs by furry performers, and the resulting mash-up does leave one guessing which drugs Lloyd Webber was using as he entered the 1980s after his first handful of hit shows.

Indeed, the show’s concept wasn’t particularly appealing to most of the potential investors approached by producer Cameron Mackintosh when he gave them the Cats pitch. Lloyd Webber even had to take out a second mortgage on his house. (One of the people who had the foresight to put money into this untested commodity was Toerien, a decision that shaped subsequent South African theatre history in untold ways.)

Despite its rocky start, which also included mishaps that would otherwise be taken as indicative of a theatrical curse — from Judi Dench bowing out of the original cast after snapping her Achilles tendon during rehearsals, to a bomb scare at the New London Theatre on opening night — Cats went on to become one of the longest-running shows yet on the West End and Broadway. It is iconic but, as Alexander points out, part of its success is that “each creative team updates the look and feel of the show to some degree: lighting, design, make-up, wigs, characterisation, movement. So Cats stays fresh. It’s not just stuck in the 1980s.”

Most people know of Cats, but only by reputation. And it can be divisive — there is this sense that you either love it or hate it. But we have also had plenty of converts who arrived to watch the production with eye-rolling cynicism and left full of childlike wonder and delight.

—  Alexander

Anticipating gripes about “yet another production of Cats”, Alexander observes that more than 15 years have passed since the last time it was on South African stages in 2009.

“That’s a whole generation. And there are so many prospective audience members, young and old, for whom this is a first. They’ve heard about the show, they’ve listened to a few songs, but they’ve never had the chance to see it live.”

Paradoxically, one of the challenges with finding new audiences for Cats lies in its cultural ubiquitousness. “Most people know of Cats, but only by reputation. And it can be divisive — there is this sense that you either love it or hate it. But we have also had plenty of converts who arrived to watch the production with eye-rolling cynicism and left full of childlike wonder and delight.”

Sceptics may well have Tom Hooper’s disastrous 2019 film version front of mind. That expensive blunder made Cats, with the screen celebrities who signed up for their coat of digital fur, a Covid-era laughing stock. What the film lacked was an element of camp and knowing irony that redeems Cats and a few other Lloyd Webber musicals on stage. It requires a perfect blend: the absolute dedication to craft of each brilliant cast member, with the complete absence of self-seriousness.

Yet, as with all successful musicals, there is also a profound beating heart — an “emotional core” that, as Alexander puts it, makes Cats “more than a forgettable spectacle”. The narrative may be circuitous and disconnected, the vocabulary of the premise at odds with its existential implications, but underneath all the fun Cats is really about ageing, loss, regret and longing. The past weighs heavily on many of the characters, and so too does the promise of the future.

The gathering at the annual “Jellicle Ball” is an opportunity for each cat to tell their story. It is a universal human (rather than feline) need: to be heard, to be recognised by one’s fellows, to plead with unseen gods for a reprieve from mortality. Or, if death must come, we hold fast to the hope of being reborn — what the Jellicle cats call “ascending to the Heaviside Layer”.

Lloyd Webber freely acknowledges that his experiments in adapting TS Eliot’s playful Old Possum material could never have become Cats without a generous intervention by Valerie Eliot, the poet’s widow, who shared an unpublished fragment about a cat called Grizabella. This former “glamour cat”, now old and frail, cuts a mournful figure; Eliot decided not to include her in the collection because she was “too sad for children”.

Salvaged for Cats, however, Grizabella gives the show a throughline — will she be allowed back by the other cats, or perhaps given a chance at rebirth? — as well as a melodic refrain, culminating in the show-stopping number Memory. The lyrics for this song, arguably Lloyd Webber’s most famous, were inspired not only by Eliot’s sad lines about Grizabella but also by his much earlier poems, Rhapsody on a Windy Night and Preludes.

Companionship and community

Here we find not the rather staid, conservative, grand old man of letters Eliot would become but rather the tortured, energised young poet wrestling with the alienation and disruption of modernity. Grizabella, infused by this version of Eliot, dwells on “the burnt-out ends of smokey days”, on lonely midnights when streetlamps beat “a fatalistic warning”, and on “the stale cold smell of morning”. Eliot saw little hope for late-industrial society. Yet Grizabella still yearns for companionship and community — for the comfort of another’s touch.

It is a happy quirk of musical theatre history that Trevor Nunn, who was admired for his work with the Royal Shakespeare Company but had not previously directed a musical, committed to collaborating with Lloyd Webber on Cats. It was his version of Memory, rather than that of the celebrated lyricist Tim Rice, that was sung by Elaine Paige when the show opened (Paige had replaced the injured Dench). Since then, the song has rung out from thousands of stages and millions of speakers.

In the new South African production, the pressured privilege of portraying Grizabella falls to Cindy-Ann Abrahams. Abrahams, who trained at the University of Cape Town’s College of Music and is by now something of a musical theatre veteran, has been producing collective gasps from audiences night after night when she belts out those famous D and E flats.

But this is an ensemble chock-full of talent, and one can’t help noticing how many of its members are Lamta graduates (11 in total). Alexander is justifiably proud of what he and Luitingh have built over the past eight years. The spur to founding the academy, Alexander recalls, was a mismatch of supply and demand: “At the time, there were a handful of international touring productions — Matilda, Evita, The Lion King and more – with a lot of South Africans in the casts. So much experience and expertise was being shared with the world, but it wasn’t in the country. Lamta was born from the need to continue growing the pool of local talent.”

With an intake of only about 20 students a year, Alexander and Luitingh are highly selective in auditioning applicants. “This limit on numbers also means great value for students, with one-on-one attention,” Alexander boasts, “though it’s not creating the kind of income that Anton and I can retire on.” But, as the saying goes, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it — and the Lamta model has proven itself again and again. “Students are in for the same ride now as they were when we started: three years of rigorous training, after which they will leave very sure of their strengths as performers.”

It may be a while before the current cohort of Lamta students can flex their triple-threat muscles in a professional production of Cats. Or, for that matter, Joseph or even Phantom. Regardless of the vehicle, the future of musical theatre in South Africa looks bright. Yet the question remains: can local audiences be brought gently into the 21st century?

• ‘Cats’ is at the Teatro at Montecasino until February 22.