Cats

A lot of people are about to learn one of Broadway’s biggest secrets – which is that Cats is one of the weirdest musicals ever made. Most of the audiences for the stage show have simply expected to see actors jumping around in dopey costumes while singing about being a cat. Instead, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s bizarre hit revolves around freaky felines putting on a talent competition in a bid to be chosen for death and reincarnation. This big-screen adaptation adds a few twists, with the biggest (and most predictable) being the transformation of the pimpin’ cat Macavity into a proper supervillain. There are even enough changes that veteran Cats fans might doubt that the fix is in after Grizabella (played here by Jennifer Hudson) gets the spotlight with “Memory.” Fortunately, those changes include Ray Winstone getting to steal the show with a different kind of performance as the dread pirate Growltiger. Francesca Hayward’s Victoria (now serving as the audience’s surrogate) is also given a new song by Taylor Swift that’s far more impressive than the pop diva’s own turn as the previously C-list cat Bombalurina. The end result is a pleasantly insane time at the multiplex, with CGI that works overtime to expand a stagebound property into an overblown new world. Just don’t try to figure out the actual scale of these cats to their surroundings. That pretty much changes with every new shot.

[PG]