cynick

More of my art @alwaystiredshark

And then 40 years later, Andrew Lloyd Webber found a lost cat poem that T.S. Eliot had cut from the cat book for being too sad for children, and ALW was like “woahhh. A cat….that’s sad. That’s deep, man. I wanna make a musical out of this”

So the producer assigned to the project was like “okay, I guess you could maybe read these cat poems as a satire of 1930s British society? We could probably do something sort of interesting with that, I’m thinking a cast of about 5 and–”

And ALW was like “no. Forget the satire. Also I want a cast of dozens and the most advanced special effects technology ever seen on stage. I’ve taken out a second mortgage on my house to fund this”

And the producer was like “wh– you– wh– do you even have. a plot”

So ALW got a bunch of actors and writers and artists together and they holed up and did cocaine workshopped for 5 weeks, and at the end of it they emerged and said “the plot is that a bunch of cats are having a dance contest for the right to take a ufo to cat heaven :)”

because everyone wanted to do it as a cartoon- which seems logical for a book of children’s poems about cats, right? -but she thought something which Webber compared conceptually to the risque dance troupe Hot Gossip (active 1974-1986) would be more in line with her late husband’s vision

“He is exactly the poem I wanted to write.”

Often quoted as if it’s romantic. But here’s the thing