The "I Am" Song. As in "I Am Still Thinking About The Film Cats".

 

 A full year now after experiencing the film of Cats, I'm still seeing, and enjoying, video essays on youtube trying to explain exactly what went wrong, and also – far more intriguingly, for me at least – what the original stage show therefore got right. I don't expect anyone else to share my sickness however, nor do I expect anyone who doesn't share it to get through the above video from Sideways which I watched last night while waiting for the results to come in from Georgia. I only share it now because it's introduced me to a musical trope I'd never heard of before: the "I Am" Song. 

 

 Heroes of a musical – or more normally heroines – are supposed to get an "I Want" Song. I knew that. But what I hadn't clocked before, was that for every "Somewhere That's Green" or "Part Of Your World" there was also likely to be a show-stopping "Dentist!" or "Gaston" or  "This is America". It doesn't necessarily have to be the baddie that delivers the "I Want" Song. For example, as Sideways explains, what happens in the original Cats (but not the movie) is a succession of "I Am" songs sung by cats who want to get into whatever the Heavyside Layer is, all passed over in favour of the one cat with an "I Want" Song.

 

 It is normally the villain who gets the "I Am" Song though. And I found that fascinating, even before what happened this morning in Georgia, or what's happening now in Washington DC – this distinction between the hero who sings "I Want", and the villain who sings "I Am". 

 Here's Stacey Abrams.

 

Sometimes this blog will just be a cat I drew in January.

 Because I'm going to try to go to bed at a reasonablish hour now. Wish me luck.

Cats. It's about Cats.

 Here's a figure from today's Defoe that took me surprise, relating to the number of domestic animals in London at the time of the Great Plague: "I think they talked of forty thousand dogs, and five times as many cats; few houses being without a cat, some having several, sometimes five or six in a house." That is a lot of cats. So many cats. I really didn't think of seventeenth century London as having that many cats. I'm finding it hard to stop thinking about cats. Ever since I saw the film of Cats in fact, which was like hearing Pennywise the Dancing Clown was back in Derry. Staring that beast in the face once more, however, I realised my uneasiness watching the movie was, if anything, the opposite of the uneasiness I'd felt watching the show as a child. There was no mystery to the movie, it was simply a mistake. But the stage show was not a mistake. It was intentional, unfathomable.

 (source)

 And as an adult I now admire that; particularly as an adult lucky enough to have participated in shunt, incredibly odd but popular theatre made entirely on its own terms, theatre - I guess like Cats - where there was nothing to "get". No questions. And yesterday I found myself actually defending Andrew Lloyd Webber on f*c*book, when Ed Morrish was having a pop at Jesus Christ Superstar - entirely fairly, he'd just seen it for the first time, and hated it - but I wrote: "A musical's really got to know what it is, and more and more I'm, quite reluctantly, realising how well Lloyd Webber's hits do this, given how mad the ideas are... Mad subject matter may actually help a musical, because its only quality can be its total 'itself'iness... Itselfiness is a very fragile thing though. There's so much not-getting-a-project that can happen down the line. That's what makes the hits so interesting to me." 

Interesting, I said. Not necessarily great.

 And I should probably go into this idea in more detail, but my eyes are tired and reasearching Cats does not help tired eyes. Lyndsay Ellis, who makes great videos about musicals, including the contribution at the top of today's post, does quite a deep dive into the differing fortunes of - and motivations behind - the Cats stage show and Tom Hooper's intughpretation here if you're interested. Here's today's Defoe, in which an adventure begins, an adventure in editing that I probably won't try again:

This Week's Drinks

 It's tax day today, and it's Brexit day, so Joel Morris and I met this evening for what turned out to be a responsible three and a half pints each. I brought Joel up to date with other drinks I'd had this week, and we both took notes. Joel noted, for example, that there should be a Liff word for the person in a group elected to explain the rules of a boardgame, an observation borne from me recalling how last Sunday I'd tried to explain the plot of the film "Cats" to John Finnemore. (I'd forgotten how easy it can be to make John weep with laughter.) Joel also noted how often he was hearing Tom Petty in pubs these days, and how effectively the pitch of his voice cut through the murmur of a crowd, like the tambourine in a Motown track that makes those songs so ideal for a jukebox. I passed on a Fun Fact I'd learnt in a bar from Mark Steel the night before, attending a recording of David Reed's outstanding podcast "Inside The Comedian", a fact for which I can find no evidence online... Actually before I tell you, think of the thinnest celebrity you can imagine. Okay. Now think of the widest. Okay, now here's the fact: John Cooper Clarke's school bully was Giant Haystacks.

Something else the "Cats" film reminded me of.
 

 What else? We talked about the background noise of vanishing coin, something I'd felt suddenly absent from the second series of "Fleabag" for example, and of the work of freelancers who constantly live with that background noise, and of the creative, commissioning and critical decisions of those who don't, and how so much British Cinema in our lifetimes seemed to be the work of the latter, telling stories that either ignore money completely or contrastingly find poverty fascinating, and I thought that might explain why so many British films are either Boring or Horrible. I was probably on my third pint by then. Cracking chat.

 And here's a neat place for plugs. Joel and Jason Hazeley's "Rule Of Three" podcast serves as lasting proof of just how good at talking they are, and is hearable here. David's podcast "Inside the Comedian", in which guests are not allowed to tell the truth, can be heard here, also if you can get over to one of the live recording at Kings Place I'd really recommend that too. David and I are of course both in Joel And Jason's scandi-nougat "Angstrom" which is apparently available on BBC Sounds forever here. Oh also, David has a scifi comedy pilot out next week here, "Napoleon Moon", which should be excellent. John meanwhile, though not credited as one of the writers of Armando Iannucci's "David Copperfield", is from what I've seen of the trailers absolutely all over it, so we should redouble our efforts to see that too. It looks neither Boring nor Horrible. The photo of Soho is from my Instagram. The image of the 50p coin celebrating the UK's joining the EEC in 1973 and depicting a Ring of Hands is from this video. And finally, not really a plug, but l wrote this post the day before the decision to leave the EU was taken three and a half years ago. I still think it's a dumb decision, and Europe, I love you, and we will be back. Bissous.

A New Year's walk in the Countryside...

... and then we saw "Cats".