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My mother, being a Boomer, a Brit, and a Broadway girlie, is a huge Andrew Lloyd Webber fan. I hold her fully responsible for the fact that I know all the words to “Starlight Express”1, and she’s also the reason I’m a defender of the musical Cats. Yes, that show is essentially Cocaine Furries: The Musical, but that’s part of its charm! I don’t need my musicals to have a detailed or even coherent plot; “cats introduce themselves and their one personality trait as they vie for a chance at reincarnation, and everyone is wearing full-body spandex” does me just fine. Like, Hal, it’s about cats.

This orientation put me at odds with my wife, who actually saw the Broadway production when she was a tiny tot. She had incredible seats, too; close enough to the stage that some of the performers climbed over her and pawed at her like coked out little kitties. Unfortunately, this experience was not desirable for this six-year-old introvert who did not like to be touched or even perceived, especially not by strangers earnestly meowing in her face. For nearly 30 years, she carried a deep hatred for musicals in general and Cats in particular. Until, for reasons that remain obscure to me to this day, she decided to see the 2019 cinematic adaptation in theatres. Which is what brought the worst movie of 2019, and possibly the worst movie musical of all time, into my life.

Some grace where it’s due: adapting Cocaine Furries: The Musical is no easy feat. What works for any show onstage doesn’t necessarily translate to the screen, especially when what works for the show is the performers’ infectious earnestness. The super-athletic choreography and one show-stopping vocal performance nearly require you to be in the room where it happens to fully appreciate them. But dynamic stage productions have successfully translated to the silver screen, so it’s not impossible. It’s just impossible the way this movie did it.

Writer/director Tom Hooper (more on him shortly) and co-writer Lee Hall sought to give this story’s slim narrative some structure, so they created a new character as an audience insert. Every cat in town is no longer introducing themselves to an audience, but to Victoria, a random white cat with no personality who finds herself abandoned on the streets of London. Some friendly alley cats take her in on their way to the Jellicle2 Ball, the annual competition where each cat makes their case to be sent to the Heaviside Layer3 for reincarnation. The cat judge presiding over the competition is Old Deuteronomy, played by Judi Dench. There’s also a criminal con artist cat named Macavity (Idris Elba), who’s trying to kidnap and cheat his way to the Heaviside Layer. The cast list remains bewildering: there’s Rum Tum Tugger (Jason DeRulo), Bombalurina (Taylor Swift), Gus the Theatre Cat (Ian McKellan), and fallen woman Grizabella (Jennifer Hudson). And since it was 2019, James Corden is also in the movie.

Tom Hooper had directed a terrible musical adaptation already: 2012’s Les Misérables. Hooper, with the boldness of a man who doesn’t know anything, decided to record all of the audio live, so the performances would be more “authentic” and improvisational. Which sounds good in theory, unless you know anything about singing, recording sound, or this particular show’s intentionally tight musical structure. I’ll be brief and say this: a vocally demanding show like Les Mis is not written to be performed over multiple takes. Even the strongest vocalists don’t perform their biggest numbers at full force multiple times a day; in fact, they quite specifically do the opposite.

But nobody learns a lesson from earning over $400 million at the box office and winning multiple Oscars, so Hooper brought the same “I don’t know how any of this works” arrogance to Cats. The poor VFX team reported that he was a tyrant, refusing to review partial CGI renders. This means the team had to fully render each scene for him to review and then re-edit, an extremely expensive and time-consuming process that is literally unheard of. This diabolical workflow is why the VFX team was working 90 hour-weeks, and why visual effects weren’t completed until hours before the film premiered. Which, of course, led to some egregious mistakes in the final print.

At the 2020 Academy Awards, professional awful people James Corden and Rebel Wilson dressed in their Cats costumes to present the award for Visual Effects and dunk on the people who had the worst time of anyone involved with the picture. Fuck them for real.

While we’re on the topic of Rebel Wilson: I will physically fight whoever dreamed up her Jennyanydots, the Old Gumbie Cat routine. You can watch the full routine here if you dare, or you can watch this gif that encapsulates all the worst parts of it, but mercifully soundless:

Yes, she forces these cockroaches with human faces to tap dance for her, eats one of them, then unzips her fur to reveal a cute little fuchsia tap costume so she can tap dance alongside the cockroaches who, again, have human faces. That’s correct. That’s what you saw.

SKIMbleshanks the RAILway CAT gives my favourite performance, because he’s a sassy little tap dancer with sassy little pants and an exquisite mustache.

But Skimbleshanks should not go to the Heaviside Layer, according to me, because he has found his calling here on earth. In this competition, I think the cat who most deserves to escape their existence is Grizabella, who all the other cats shun for being old and formerly slutty4. And look. You hire Jennifer Hudson to do one thing: blow everyone else’s wig off with a powerhouse vocal performance. (Unless you’re Michael Patrick King, in which case you hire her to receive the ugliest bag ever stitched together.) And she did that. Welcome to the Heaviside Layer, Grizabella. Welcome to your second chance.

Lamentably, the visuals really are what sink this movie. Presumably the goal was not to inflict motion sickness on the audience, but that’s what happened. There is no consistent scale between shots; sometimes the cats appear mouse-sized, and other times they’re roughly the size of a human child. It’s impossible to get your bearings, because no thing visually relates to any other thing onscreen. The colour palette is garish, muddy, or both. And all of the visual discord just illuminates a frantic joylessness that drags everything down. It’s a wretched thing to experience.

For her 2020 birthday, my wife’s only request was that we organize and host a virtual screening of this movie with friends. Mind you, she had already seen Cats in theatres, so she knew what she was getting us into. But I think she wanted more witnesses to validate what she had gone through. So 15 beloved members of our squad tuned in at 9:00pm on a Saturday night to watch together.

I believe this was the moment that America realized we didn’t want James Corden anymore. Within three years, he was back in the UK, never to be seen or heard from again5. So, that’s nice at least.

In a way, no, because I understand my wife’s need to have as many witnesses to this monstrosity as possible. I made her watch Suicide Squad, after all. And I’m writing this column to boot. But in another, more important way, I regret every second I’ve spent participating in this movie’s existence. What an ungodly mess.

On the next Terrible Tuesday: Tyler Perry will answer for his crimes.

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