Don't Cry Into Your Kitty Litter....

Back in the days when "recess" meant a 30-minute play break and "creative writing" meant a story about your weekend, it seemed as if Cats was the only musical on the planet. Those black t-shirts with the cat-eyes and the scrawled logo were as popular as Homey the Clown and Barbie dolls. If you didn't have a Cats t-shirt, you hadn't been to Broadway, simple as that.

But while Disney detritus like The Lion King remains, Broadway is losing the feline fluff that entertained our generation. More than a decade after it opened, Cats, the longest running musical in Broadway history, is closing.

In large part, it's the young audience that made Cats so successful. With a loosely-knit storyline based on T.S. Eliot's whimsical "Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats" poetry collection, bright, garish costumes and a razzle-dazzle set with lots of moving platforms, fake smoke and twinkling lights, Cats is cute, easy-to-swallow and not hard to follow. For hordes of tourists struggling through the Broadway throngs trying to placate grumbling kids, that made Cats the long-sought answer to their prayers-a Broadway production you could get the kids to sit through. But is Cats actually a good musical, or is it a compromise, buoyed more by an ability to keep kids quiet than to arouse the aesthetic interest of the rest of the audience?

Twenty-one years old and still without the t-shirt, I decided to go to Broadway and find out if Cats was worth the trip. Almost as soon as the production begun, I realized that more than the t-shirts were going to remind me of the kiddie culture of the Reagan era. The show looks like a flesh and blood version of the classic '80s cartoon Thundercats, with actors wearing striped spandex costumes with wing-like tufts of fur framing their faces.

Plot-wise, Cats seems a lot like the Smurfs. There a bunch of cats at the once-a-year "Jellicle Ball", and each cat has its own specific, stereotypical personality and a ridiculous, jackassed name. There are two thief cats, a rock star cat, a magical cat, an old, wizened cat and one really attractive cat that doesn't have any solos (Smurfette?). The conflict (what there is of it), revolves around two plotlines. First, it appears the glamour cat (Grizabella) has offended the kitty Christian Coalition, so she's fallen from grace and is living in tattered exile, though she periodically shows up to make the other cats feel sorry for her and to sing the musical's most memorable tune, "Memory," which reflects on her gilded past. You can't help remembering "Memory," either, since she sings the thing over and over again throughout the production. The other plotline centers on Macavity, who is kind of like the Smurfs' big enemy Gargamel. For no apparent reason, he swoops down on the cats as they're out at play, snagging the wizened old cat (Deuteronomy) and whisking him offstage.

But before you can make sense of any of this, or the kids get bored, these plotlines are efficiently dispatched. The magical cat (Mister Mistoffelees), who shows up nowhere else in the story, retrieves Deuteronomy from Macavity's clutches. Once he's back, Deuteronomy uses his magical powers to give Grizabella a second chance. The cats sing another song, mechanical stairs descend from the ceiling and take Grizabella to cat heaven, and that's a wrap.

Aside from "Memory," Cats' music seems like a Broadway reflection of aesthetic that brought us songs like "Thriller" and "Sledgehammer"-nice-sounding, unswervingly vapid nonsense. The opening number, "The Naming of Cats" will stick in your brain like bubblegum even if you don't care what it's about, and from there on out it's more of the same, with the oddly weighty "Memory" there to remind you that this is a Broadway musical and not a cartoon.

But given its lack of structural fluency and over-attention to special effects at the expense of acting, you can't help but feel like Cats is kiddie fodder. Without strong characters or a plot with any climactic forestalling, Cats never gives its adult audience a reason to care. Cats' success argued that a cathartic, memorable plot and strong songwriting came second to grabbing a big audience and making things look pretty. Broadway has yet to fully recover from the raft of stinkers that followed, hoping to capitalize on Cats' success. Maybe its closing can make room for more serious productions and leave the children's stories to Disney. Because for now, in the words of The Rumpus Cat, "The theater's not what it used to be."