How Taylor Swift Really Feels About Her Box Office Flop Cats

Andrew Lloyd Webber is a divisive figure amongst theatergoers. There is an entire generation that considers him the (admittedly tuneful) devil incarnate, a simplistic composer of earworm-y tunes that occupy the space of empty-minded musicals. "Jesus Christ Superstar" and "Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat" were excused during Broadway's weird Christian revival in the late 1960s and early 1970s, but Webber hit his creative peak with "Evita." Historically and politically, it's a muddled affair, but Webber and lyricist Tim Rice rouse the audience with one showstopper after another before delivering one of the most astonishing (and, according to the diva d'estime Patti LuPone, difficult-to-sing) musical numbers in the genre's history with "Don't Cry for Me Argentina."

What do you do after a critical and commercial success like "Evita?" Webber parted ways with Rice and decided a full-length musical based on T.S. Eliot's poetry collection "Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats" was what Broadway needed. He was, inexplicably, right. "Cats" was a Broadway sensation. It was, at one point, the longest running show in the Great White Way's history, a tourism centerpiece that, for many, felt more vital than trips to the Empire State Building, the World Trade Center, or the Statue of Liberty. You hadn't really, truly visited New York City if you left without seeing "Cats." "Saturday Night Live" even did a whole sketch riffing on this.

When I moved to NYC in 1996 to pursue a career in theater, the great playwright Milan Stitt, with whom I worked at the Circle Repertory Company, was constantly exhorting me to hit the TKTS booth and see as much as I could. When I told him I was going to skip "Cats" (because I'd listened to the Original Broadway Cast Recording and found it shallow outside of the show's sole good song, "Memory"), he gasped, replying, "Jeremy, you've got to see 'Cats.' You've got to see what works." Meanwhile, Taylor Swift was seven years old when I bought my reasonably priced ticket for a weeknight performance of this weightless musical.

I followed Stitt's advice and wound up sitting through a sluggish musical where actors in mangy-looking, foul-smelling costumes enveloped me in a stank-ass wonderland of rankness. (The Winter Garden was refurbished soon after my visit.) It was a true ordeal. "Cats" was the precursor to Julie Taymor's spectacular stage adaptation of "The Lion King," but its immersive qualities couldn't cover up its narrative and musical shortcomings. Webber was off his songwriting game, to the point that I couldn't imagine why anyone liked this show in the first place.

Later Webber shows boasted better tunes and more compelling stories (e.g. "The Phantom of the Opera" and "Aspects of Love"), but they're triumphs of stagecraft. What makes them special doesn't translate to the big screen. "Cats" lacked their melodic juice, so I couldn't understand why Universal moved forward with a film adaptation of such an inert musical in the late 2010s. There was no better way to expose the show's horridness than trapping moviegoers in a multiplex theater and assaulting them with an ultra-impersonal, CGI-heavy production.

With the mediocrity merchant Tom Hooper at the helm (the director of "The King's Speech" and the fatally compromised "The Danish Girl"), "Cats" received the lackluster movie adaptation it deserved. Amazingly, Hooper roped in some of the greatest actors alive, along with the godawful James Corden (whom even Webber couldn't stand in the film) and, arguably, the biggest pop star on the planet — and, amazingly, Swift didn't immediately disown her involvement with this massive box office bomb.

In January 2020, Taylor Swift earned a Golden Globes nomination for her performance of "Beautiful Ghosts," a ho-hum new song that got shoehorned into Hooper's "Cats" to ensure that the film would be a shoo-in for at least one Oscar nomination. When the movie opened to savagely negative reviews and lousy box office returns, though, it became clear that "Cats" was DOA across the board as an Academy Awards contender.

Swift took on the role of the flirty Bombalurina in "Cats" and, to her credit, played her part to the sensual hilt. Alas, the fact that she's a cat saps her portrayal of all erotic power; it's disturbing because, as a cat owner, I can't get off on watching an attractive pop star go all come-hither as a feline-human hybrid. It's icky, just like the rest of the movie around her.

Swift could've immersed herself "in the studio" at this point (even if she wasn't actually writing or recording music), but, in an interview with Variety prior to the Golden Globes ceremony, she stood by her work in "Cats." As she told the trade publication:

"I'm happy to be here, happy to be nominated, and I had a really great time working on that weird-ass movie. I'm not gonna retroactively decide that it wasn't the best experience. I never would have met Andrew Lloyd Webber or gotten to see how he works, and now he's my buddy. I got to work with the sickest dancers and performers. No complaints."

That's a perfectly diplomatic response. She paid respect to Andrew Lloyd Webber and glowed up a talented collection of dancers and "performers," the latter of which included Ian McKellen, Judi Dench, Jennifer Hudson, Idris Elba, and Jason Derulo. Yes, it's a rotten movie based on a musical that had long ago lost its magic, but she responded to the misfire like a champ. In the meantime, if we could get someone to fix the book of Webber's "Aspects of Love," we might have a masterpiece on our hands.