If Mamma Mia! Was Badly Produced and Happened in an Alley or, Why We Shouldn’t Hate Cats
by Talia Marshall
Though I think most of 2020 made us forget December 2019, the Cats movie skyrocketed to theaters on December 16, 2019, garnering positive reviews across the board. I’m joking--Cats haters are everywhere, and even I was, at one time, on the “Cats is a flop” train. But no more. Recently, I realized that Cats is simply Mamma Mia! set in the alleyways of London with poor production value, and I became a Cats fan. For the purposes of this article, I will be focusing on Mamma Mia! (2008) and Cats (2019) and by the end of it, you will be singing along to both.
Like any good musical-enjoyer, I am a Mamma Mia! fan. I will also be the first to admit that Mamma Mia!’s merit comes from everywhere but its plot. The 2008 movie is, at its core, a glorified music video. ABBA’s music makes the soundtrack catchy and danceable, as anyone who’s ever turned 17 knows. The cast is attractive and clearly “having the time of [their] life.” The setting, fictional Kalokairi and the real-life Aegean coast of Greece, is enviable and reminds us all of a horrible beach vacation we have, for some reason, decided to romanticize as perfect in our minds. The music, cast, and setting make us forget that barely anything is happening beyond us singing along to some of ABBA’s greatest hits.
I don’t mean to imply that Mamma Mia! has no merit. We can extract narratives about single motherhood, true love, and the power of female friendship all we want. People have been doing that since it first came to Broadway in 2001--that is not what this piece is about. The purpose of Mamma Mia! was nothing more than to bring a piece of art (in this case, ABBA’s music) to Broadway, and most importantly, to have fun. In the film, this also meant showcasing the art to a broader audience, showing off the beauty of the Aegean coast, and putting the talent of people like Meryl Streep on full display. The crew and production team succeeded in all of this.
I saw Cats in theaters when it came out and I laughed. It’s absurd, has no plot, and was produced horribly. Over a year later, I realized that I was just being a hater because everyone else was a hater. Cats is, at its core, a showcase of the musical and dancing talents of its cast. The soundtrack is catchy and danceable if you let it be. The cast of the 2019 film is weirdly star-studded, but having fun nonetheless. The setting, the witching-hour alleyways of London, is unpleasant, and the CGI leaves us begging for more. Unlike Mamma Mia!, the setting does not allow us to sit back and enjoy the music and talents of the actors
The question of why they chose to keep some human body parts and not others is so confounding that by the time Skimbleshanks begins tap dancing, we are inclined to just turn the film off entirely. What we really should do here is sit back and enjoy the incredible talent of the dancers. Skimbleshanks the Railway Cat” is the eleventh number in Cats. The eleventh number in Mamma Mia! is “SOS.” If you paused both films during their eleventh number, I’m guessing that most people could not tell you what is happening in the plot. If we looked at both numbers out of context, all we could probably say is that they are musically beautiful and it would probably have been fun to be a performer in the chorus singing and dancing in the background, had we the immense talent it would have required.
Similar to Mamma Mia!, Cats has narratives we can meditate on if we so choose. What does the jellicle ball say about hierarchy, Grizabella’s treatment say about cliques and exclusion, and the film as a whole comment about, say, extravagance? But again, that is not what this is about. The purpose of Cats was nothing more than to bring a piece of art (in this case, T.S. Eliot’s poems) to Broadway, and most importantly, to have fun. In the film, this also meant showcasing the art to a broader audience and putting the talent of the cast on full display. The crew and production team failed in this by distracting us from the music, art, and talents with their sub-par CGI and over-reliance on a celebrity cast, rather than talented actors that performed in Broadway productions.
The biggest difference between the two films is in the settings. So next time you see Mamma Mia!, ask yourself if you would still like it if it took place in the midnight alleyways of London, with a horribly CGI-ed cat Judi Dench singing “Money, Money, Money” instead of Meryl Streep. In your inevitable watch of Cats after that interrogation, ask yourself if you would still be a hater if Amanda Seyfried sang “Macavity” on a Greek beach instead of Taylor swift singing it in a warehouse. And if anyone in the Cats production team is reading this, I ask you--please do better the next time you adapt poetry into a Broadway musical that becomes a movie. I wanna see Sylvia Plath: The Musical starring like… Anya Taylor-Joy or something.