Hamilton Choreographer Andy Blankenbuehler Gives CATS a New Spring in its Step
CATS February 25-28
Sponsored by Country Bank Dan Hoy as ‘Munkustrap’ and the North American Tour of CATS. Photo by Matthew Murphy 2019.
“So many millions of people have a love affair with this show; I feel it is important to give them what they remember,” says Andy Blankenbuehler, who is choreographing the first Broadway revival of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s CATS, the musical phenomenon that has captivated audiences since the 1980s and will return to The Hanover Theatre for the 2020-2021 Broadway Series. Blankenbuehler, who is best known for creating the dazzling kinetic moves in this decade’s musical phenomenon Hamilton, will base his work on the original choreography by Gillian Lynne. The new production of CATS also retains director Trevor Nunn, and set and costume designer John Napier, both of whom won 1983 Tony® Awards for the original production. “I don’t want to break the DNA of the show, but I want to move it a little more quickly, deepen the storytelling and strengthen the characterizations, so that when audiences see the show, it will be something they remember, but which happens in a way that is not familiar.” Letting the memory live again, to quote from the musical’s popular hit song, could be a challenge. “I think the millions of people who saw CATS took away from it very different things,” notes Blankenbuehler. “As an audience member, you have romantic memories that moved you, but decades later you only remember the impact of the show.” He reports page 14
TheHanoverTheatre.org • 877.571.SHOW(7469)
that he recently talked to a young woman who recalled seeing the show when she was a preteen. “She remembered how she was sitting on the aisle, and the white cat, which is a sort of idealized vision of feline beauty [physically] touched her. That image of theatrical beauty stayed with her through her entire childhood. She now works in the entertainment business and she swears it was that moment that changed her creative life.” Blankehnbuehler himself was just 12, a Cincinnati preteen bitten by the theater bug, when CATS first opened on Broadway. As an aspiring dancer in 1990 at age 20, he says, he was inspired by the extraordinary success of the dance-focused megamusical when he moved to New York City to pursue his dream. “I literally had a photo of the Winter Garden [theatre] CATS billboard over my bed,” he recalls. “More than anything else, the impact the show made on me was that a historic thing could happen because of dancers — that dance could touch the lives of so many people every night and make a difference. It made the sacrifices of making no money and living in a five-flight walk-up in New York worth it. The irony was that I never got to dance in CATS,” he adds. In the mid-1990s, the young dancer went on tour with Lloyd Webber’s Music of the Night, but he got to know the composer personally only after he took
