The reviews for Cats are in, and if you liked the sensational original Broadway production, you’ll like this one too. As some reviewers proclaim, there’s no middle-ground when it comes to Cats – you love it or you hate it – and with this new version offering little that’s new, you’re unlikely to switch sides now. The production’s wins are plentiful: The scenery and costumes are still vivid and magical, the choreography (apparently updated by Andy Blankenbuehler but largely unchanged from Gillian Lynne’s original) is still impressive and imaginative, and the blend of lush songs and simple storyline still captivates. The whole cast is terrific, but the reviews are mixed on Leona Lewis’s Grizabella…though she sings “Memory” beautifully, is she Grizzebella-esque enough? If your walk through the alley made you purr the first time, get down to Neil Simon Theatre to meet the gang again.
NEW YORK TIMES REVIEW OF CATS
If I soon end up in a psychiatric ward, could someone please send the bill to Andrew Lloyd Webber? It has been some four days since I saw the revival of Mr. Lloyd Webber’s nigh-legendary musical “Cats,” which opened on Sunday at the Neil Simon Theater. And it’s been four days of persistent earworms. The show’s…
THE GUARDIAN REVIEW OF CATS
For the entirety of the two hours I sat watching Cats, which is back on Broadway after a 16-year absence, I had a version of the Muppets’ Statler and Waldorf routine going on in my mind. This revival is TERRIBLE, I thought; hideously dated, boring, empty, meaningless, unfunny, kitsch without meaning to be…
TIME OUT NEW YORK REVIEW OF CATS
My gateway show was not Cats—nor was it Les Miz or Phantom. I grew up, like any self-respecting theater snob, disdaining such tourist trash from afar. Lacking youthful nostalgia for Andrew Lloyd Webber’s synth-heavy score and the trademark image of actors writhing about in leg warmers, hissing through face paint…
VULTURE REVIEW OF CATS
Cats was always divinely snarkable, beginning with its provenance. How could anyone look at the morally knotty and verbally profound oeuvre of T.S. Eliot and say, yes, let’s make a musical out of Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, that collection of dorky ailurophile doggerel he extemporized for his godchildren?…
NBC NEW YORK REVIEW OF CATS
“Cats.” The “Hamilton” of its day? When Andrew Lloyd Webber’s love-it-or-hate-it musical transferred to Broadway in 1982, tickets were tough to get. Rather than wait a year for seats, my grandma paid $10 each so our family could stand in the back of the Winter Garden and hear Betty Buckley belt out “Memory.”…
Broadway Musical Blog 
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