Martha Randolph

The only problem for today's audience with Cats the film is that they are not acquainted with an all singing and all dancing film with virtually no dialogue except for British english nonsense poetry. The problem in making the play into a film is that the wit in the cat descriptive poems by ee cummings, is lost because the film has to image them too literally and none of that makes sense. In the theater the audience has to use their imagination to translate the descriptive poetic story to some actual cat they may have known. An overweight house cat that sleeps away most of the day does not literally get up at night and teach mice to sew and behave nicely nor does she organize roaches into a tap line. But she probably does suddenly run around at night chasing unseen somethings, or bumping into cabinets and may also really catch a large roach or two and leave them by your bedroom door as an offering. The visualization of the scene somehow kills the humor in the description. Cats has no big action scenes and no real story even though the directors/writers manufactured a little one because they thought it might help. Fans of TV shows like So You Think You Can Dance should be running to see this and will buy the DVD because the dancing is stupendous. Jennifer Hudson's performance of the famous show stopper "Memories" is worth seeing alone and she should be nominated for an Oscar for it. If she had done that on Broadway she would have gotten a Tony Award for best actress for sure. I recommend it because the songs are amazing as is the singing and it is fine for all ages no violence and in the end it is touching as the group comes to value an older decrepit looking cat with acceptance and compassion. One last note, Taylor Swift's new song Beautiful Ghosts is really good and in my opinion demonstrates that she has the talent to write for Broadway if she finds the right story to work with. I hope she has that thought in mind for her future.