'Cats's 'Memory' is a popera furball, but don't blame Jennifer Hudson
” and the sight of Dame Judi Dench as a cat wearing what appears to be a fur coat — this is basically the same thing as a human wearing a skin coat, right? — I can understand why the music of “Cats” has perhaps been overlooked in all the talk about the busy new big-screen adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s smash Broadway musical.
The accumulated weight of all those renditions has had something of a dulling effect on “Memory,” which is performed in the musical by Grizabella, a once-glamorous cat whose fall from grace has her looking back to a time when she “knew what happiness was.
With her husky-then-silky vocal tone and her precise navigation of Lloyd Webber’s tricky intervals, Hudson’s performance allows you to re-experience this most over-handled of cultural objects as music — as the pained outpouring of a woman for whom even a streetlamp has turned menacing. No wonder director Liesl Tommy hired Hudson to play Aretha Franklin in next year’s “Respect”: In theAdvertisement
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