With a plot thinner than a starving moggie, Cats is showing its age

Sydney Morning Herald

23-06-2025

With minimal plot, character development or conflict, the show is a series of party pieces in which various cat characters get a chance to shine.
Some shine brightly. Todd McKenney was terrific as fatcat Bustopher Jones in a costume redolent of Aunty Jack.
McKenney's dual role as Gus, the ageing performing cat, provided one of the night's rare affecting interludes as he recalled his glory days in a moving duet with Lucy Maunder (Jellylorum). This lifted the second act opening after a first act that became bogged down with the overlong Jellicle Ball dance section.
A sexy Rum Tum Tugger (Des Flanagan) rose to his rock star moment. Mark Vincent as Old Deuteronomy brought sonorous gravitas to the role of the tribal elder – no mean feat given he looked like a Womble.
Gabriyel Thomas was a strong presence in the key role of Grizabella, the former glamour puss, now more grizzled than bella, who has been rejected by the tribe. With her rich, powerful voice, Thomas invests with pathos the showstopper Memories.
Jemima (Ella Fitzpatrick) delivered a couple of teasers of the show's best-known song earlier in the piece, but a lack of vocal strength and brittle tone did not serve well the sweeping melody.
The energetic ensemble worked hard as they danced and pranced on and occasionally off the stage and into the auditorium. Yet much of the choreography and movement feels dated.
Whether it was sound balance or delivery, the lyrics to the ensemble vocal numbers were difficult to determine.
The off-stage orchestra, under musical director Paul White, was well paced and versatile in numbers that ranged across jazz, blues and pop to anthemic and operatic.
Cats was ground-breaking when it premiered, an immersive spectacle that helped usher in an era of mega-musicals.
Since then, the big-budget musicals it helped spawn have become increasingly sophisticated.
There may be nostalgic appeal in revisiting a work that feels rooted in an '80s era and aesthetic. So thanks for the Memories.
THEATRE
KOREABOO
Belvoir Downstairs Theatre, June 19
Until July 20
Reviewed by JOHN SHAND
★★★
Soon Hee never held her baby before she was taken away for adoption; she saw only her tiny pink feet retreating in the nurse's arms. She had become pregnant outside of wedlock, which, if discovered, would bring such shame on her family, and people would shun the little Seoul shop run by her mother.
The pink feet belonged to a girl christened Hannah by her adoptive Australian parents. She was a young woman before she sought out her birth mother, and now she's back in Seoul a second time to – what? Heal a wound? Form a bond? Discover her inner Korean self?
'Koreaboo', Michelle Lim Davidson explains in a preface to her play (here having its world premiere), is a pejorative term describing someone (usually non-Korean) obsessed with Korean culture.
The set-up to Davidson's play is autobiographical, and potentially implicit in any such forced separation is deep scar tissue. But rather than milking tears, the playwright is more intent upon teasing out the laughs as Hannah tries to find a place in Soon Hee's world.
Jessica Arthur's Griffin Theatre Company production has Davidson, herself, playing Hannah, and Heather Jeong (best known as a TV chef) playing her mother. Mel Page's set realises Davidson's vision of a Seoul convenience store, complete with noodles, toilet paper and an imposing pyramid of Spam tins.
This is Soon Hee's domain, and an Australian invasion is not especially welcome, not only because any scar in Soon Hee's heart has long been impenetrable, but because Hannah, keen to help, will just drive customers away with her hopeless command of Korean.
Jeong excels as the brutally honest Soon Hee, telling Hannah they look more like sisters than mother and daughter. She is exceptional at making the shop her castle and at raising the drawbridge against her daughter – not cruelly, but in a brusque, pragmatic way. Nonetheless, she makes us like Soon Hee because we see through the act from the start and we admire her stoicism and even her goofy obsessions with gnomes, Sex and the City and K-pop – notably in its TV talent quest guise of Star Power.
Davidson's performance is more problematic, and perhaps she shouldn't have been cast in her own play. As accomplished as we know she is as an actor, she can't locate the same truth in playing Hannah as she did in writing the role. The performance becomes one-dimensional – Hannah the anguished victim – and so wooden that her hands barely cease to dangle by her thighs.
Writing the play should have been enough. It's good, quirky work that doesn't seek to dot the 'i' or cross the 't' in complexity, but lets it simmer in the background. An actor who was not partially playing herself might have stormed into the role, made Hannah her own and trusted the words rather than being shy of finding the character's core both vocally and physically.
MUSIC
Lang Lang and the Sydney Symphony.
Opera House. June 18
Reviewed by PETER McCALLUM
★★★½
Lang Lang began the Bach-like improvisatory solo at the start of Saint-Saens' Piano Concerto No. 5 with ponderous spaciousness before accelerating to three declamatory chords held back as though announcing the day of judgment.
To me, the spaciousness was overdone, taking the wind from the sails with a resulting loss of tension, but Lang Lang kept a hold over many in the sold-out hall through a faux-majestic bearing, swashbuckling velocity and thunderous volume.
Lang Lang dominated the music throughout, pushing the tempo ahead at whim. Conductor Benjamin Northey faithfully stayed with him, even if, at times, the orchestra was left scurrying attentively to meet the needs of an overbearing general rather than participating as equals.
When the second movement reached the second theme, which leaps with playful daring from the cellos, Lang Lang thumped out the vamping accompaniment with grotesquerie like a cartoon-like caricature so that the cello theme could barely be heard.
He did, however, lower the volume to a lighter touch when it was the piano's turn to play it.
The Presto finale was written with such virtuosic impetuosity in mind, and Lang Lang played the main theme with daredevil brilliance. When Saint-Saens quietens this for a chorale on the woodwind, the composer gives the piano shady trill motives marked 'always pianissimo' but in this performance they were never so and drowned out the chorale. Lang Lang remains a consummate showman but one didn't feel he was listening closely to the orchestra or focused on realising the composer's musical intentions.
The first half was also devoted to French music and began with a delightful rarity, D'un Matin de printemps (Of a Spring Morning) by Lili Boulanger. Boulanger's spring morning dances with light energy and freshness, and Northey brought out small details of orchestration with care to produce a texture in a state of constant renewal.
Boulanger, who died aged 24, had the rare ability to create a sense of magic, sparkle and frisson. Northey and the SSO followed this with a work of kindred sensibility, La Mer by Claude Debussy, who died in the same year, 1918, aged 55.
The SSO's clarity and discipline and Northey's attention to detail were again welcome, although this occasionally inhibited the build-up of momentum and tension in the first two movements. The third was buffeted with surging gestures, closing with an energised blaze of magnificence.