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'Cats' at Stafford's Riverside Center Dinner Theater is pure entertainment, feline style Date published: 9/7/2006
By MARGARET LAWRENCE For THE FREE LANCE-STAR The plot is whisker thin, and it has no real dialogue to speak of, but Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical spin-off of T.S. Eliot's charming little book of poems about cats is still the second longest-running show in the history of Broadway. Only "Phantom of the Opera" has outperformed it, and that show actually does have a story. Any theater critic, particularly on a hot day, will tell you that numbers don't make it a great musical--but they do say something about its appeal. Riverside Center Dinner Theater ventures into new territory with its presentation of "Cats," as this is the first professional Virginia dinner theater showing of the hit that has been seen around the world. To their credit, they have taken the time, spent the money, and paid the dues. Cats come out to dance by the light of the moon in the hope that one of them will be chosen by their patriarch, Old Deuteronomy, to be born into a new life. That's it. That's what happens. What they sing and what you see is what makes this, well, "Cats." It takes a lot of money to make a theater look like a garbage dump in an alley on the backside of a city, and Riverside has solved the problem of authentic-looking staging by renting the set that was used for the national Broadway-cast tour. Mounds of junk, strings of lights, stairways of refuse and giant tires spill over the stage and into the audience--as do the cats of Eliot's imaginatively named Jellicle tribe. Songs and dances introduce individual cats and tell their stories. None of them is long enough to drag, and there's enough variety to keep a fresh sense of discovery, though many of the characters represent personalities more familiar to people than to actual cats. Bustopher Jones, for instance, played by Stephen Hayes, is "the cat about town," the sharply turned out, middle-aged gent with an eye for the ladies. Mistoffelees (Billy Smith) dazzles with his lithe footwork, and Macavity (Andy Braden), aka "the Mystery Cat," is a jolly prankster, a troublesome but good-natured rogue who disappears just as the net tightens.
Date published: 9/7/2006
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