The claws came out this week when Andrew Lloyd Webber treated fans to a live commentary of his singular stage musical Cats, and he had some very choice words for the film adaptation.
In case you somehow missed it, Cats was one of the most riveting cinematic disasters in recent memory, and is the only movie (so far) to feature Rebel Wilson ripping off her skin and devouring cockroaches.
On Friday night, YouTube channel The Shows Must Go On streamed a 1998 recording of the stage version of Cats, and Andrew Lloyd Webber himself was on hand to reminisce about it.
He spoke about adapting the songs from T.S. Eliot‘s poems, and the technical challenges of staging the production, but during a scene featuring fancy cat-about-town Bustopher Jones, he said:
“… watching this and thinking this is much closer to what I wrote than other productions … without interruption as I wrote it. Do not be beguiled by other versions. Other versions with unfunny interpolations which I begged to be cut out.”
One of those “other versions with unfunny interpolations” is surely the 2019 film, in which James Corden played Bustopher Jones, in a performance that relied heavily on pratfalls and fat jokes.
Andrew Lloyd Webber went on to say that the character of Bustopher was inspired by a posh London man he met in his childhood, adding that:
“He certainly didn’t hang around on a seesaw … I cannot tell you how absolutely un-Eliot it all was. This song is about wit not coarse jokes. It’s also about taking the song at the right speed.”
He also dropped an intriguing tidbit, saying that some jokes had been cut from the finished product and telling viewers on the live stream that he “did manage to get the worst of them removed.”
We know there’s a butthole cut of the movie floating around out there somewhere, and I have to say, I’m very excited to see what other horrors might be lurking in the deleted scenes of Cats.
