I never thought I’d say this, but Delta Goodrem was the best part of something.

 

I saw Cats over the weekend and to say I was unimpressed is putting it lightly.

I’m sorry Delta – you’ve been through some stuff, you’ve beaten cancer and somehow managed to build a viable career in the Australian entertainment industry, which I imagine is hard to do when it’s built almost entirely on pitifully fawning over anything that is popular in America. Your rendition of Memories was powerful and sounded bloody nice. Your hair is pretty good and you know what? I quite enjoyed Hating Allison Ashley. But I’m just not your biggest fan.

 

So for me to say that Delta was the only good thing about the show, that’s saying something. Sitting through that tripe was like enduring a lengthy workplace health and safety meeting where you’ve been promised a mystery treat at the end – you debate whether it’s worth sticking it out for the potential payoff (maybe it’s a custard danish, maybe it’s an emotional experience achieved through the climax of song and clever set decisions) or whether you should soil yourself as an excuse to leave abruptly.

 

Now don’t get me wrong, I bloody love musicals. Wicked changed my life, Guys and Dolls was a treat despite being a high school production and Julie Andrews is my homegirl. At 16-years-old my friends and I traipsed to an empty house heavy with shame after a big night of drinking Passion Pop and fraternising up with questionable boys and the only thing that would lift our hungover spirits was Maria and her curtain-clad posse of singers. Musicals are fantastic. But even productions that don’t go five minutes without someone breaking into song need to have a storyline. And that was something Cats was lacking in a big way.

 

The show wasn’t a coherent sequence of events that had any real substance, it was basically the musical theatre version of Eat, Sleep, Rave Repeat except with more fur and less angry kebab shop owners but probably the same amount of cocaine-fuelled rambling. It wasn’t a story; it was a list. Now, I as well as any internet user, will tell you of the merits of a listicle – which is essentially an article written in list-form (e.g. Top Ten Burger Joints in Brisbane if you’re from The Urban List with actual words or Things You Like About Nutella, with key points conveyed in gif-form if you’re from Buzzfeed). Listicles, usually, have structure, are easy to digest and always serve a purpose. But a musi-list is not valid format for entertainment unless your idea of entertainment is digging your nails into your skull in an attempt to try to keep awake.

 

I expected a backstory that maybe explained why cats had fallen from their godlike ancient Egyptian status to trashcan dwellers, or maybe a tale about the species’ plot to imprison the world while displaying their dominance over all earthlings. I thought there would be complex relationships and power struggles between the cats, like a feline Game of Thrones. I mean, it was one of the longest-running Broadway shows and had fans the world over – I at least hoped to see some weird sexy cat scenes which both turned me on and made me shut down socially while I internalised questions about whether I was some kind of sick bestiality-loving freak. I expected to feel disappointed and ashamed of myself in this regard, but instead I was left shaking my head at humanity. Why the hell do so many people like this garbage?!

 

A major reason I wanted to see the show – besides raunchy fetishism, that is – was because there were so many Cats jokes in a real masterpiece of modern entertainment – The Nanny. Everyone is constantly hanging shit on Mr Sheffield because he passed on producing the show, while his archrival Andrew Lloyd Weber took it on and became a god of Broadway. I wanted to understand the constant jibes and laugh along with the studio audience at every reference to the show and its infamous producer. But after seeing this spandex-clad dribble I have to say that I’ve changed my tune. I never thought I’d take sides with the man, but I have to say that Maxwell was right. The show never should have been a hit because it was rubbish and Andrew Lloyd Webber is an idiot. I feel so strongly about this I’m almost tempted to make shirts that say “Team Maxwell” and “Fuck Andrew Lloyd”.

 

There were a few positives to the performance, namely that I didn’t have to pay for this boil on the arse of musical theatre – my sister had gifted the experience to me as a birthday treat. An added bonus was that my sister was of the exact opinion as me, which meant we were able to exchange unimpressed looks between indulgent, unnecessary and completely disjointed solo performances. “I’d never let my children see this,” she told me. At the half time point I whipped out my phone and desperately searched the corners of the Internet for an explanation of what I had just witnessed. I thought that maybe I was mishearing the lyrics, or maybe this was a shortened version of the show with more singing and less speaking, or maybe I had accidentally inhaled crystal meth without realising it and was experiencing a hallucination from the costume cupboard of hell. Unfortunately the description we found online did not enlighten us further. We considered making a run for it before the lights dimmed once more, but we had come this far and we resolved to grimace, bear it and let it finish. Yes, Cats was like that frighteningly energetic boy who uses a vaginal canal like a sock and my sister and I were that poor girl laying there confused, infuriated but determined to at least get something out of this experience.  The choice was wrong for both situations.

 

Both of us groaned as the “show” started up again, both regretting the fact I had neglected to bring my earphones into the theatre with me. Had we been able share an earbud, we would have downloaded and watched Centre Stage – the greatest dance movie ever to be made – right there in our seats. Unfortunately I had not anticipated the need for devices to distract us from the chopped liver bloodying up the stage. I finally understood why the little boy sitting a few seats over have smuggled a book into the theatre – how I envied that crafty little prick.

 

Eventually the lights came on again and we were free to put as much space between us and that production as possible. Now, I haven’t the eloquence nor the knowledge of enough curse words to sum up my feelings on the disaster of a production, so I’ll conclude my thoughts in a similar fashion to how Cats was structured – a meaningless list of unrelated points. My sister spent the rest of the afternoon making a list of the things we’d rather do than endure the performance again. Here are some of the highlights from that list to finish this session:

 

Things I’d Rather Do Before Watching Cats Again*

– Sit in a hot car for the same amount of time as the show lasted

– Talk about music with a grown up scene kid who now posts pictures of every Triple J sponsored gig they go to with one of the band’s more obscure lyrics in the caption to show everyone how much they love music

– Forget my headphones at the gym

– Eat a bruised banana and I’m not talking just one pissy little blemish, I’m talking a lost in the bottom of a school bag, squashed by a dictionary banana  – Scrub oil off rocks after a severe spill off the coastline

– Vacuum old people

– Be laughed at for attempting to serve gazpacho at a barbecue

– Get 10 paper cuts

– Bang my hip into a desk, twice

– Write nice things about Anthony Mundine

– Watch back-to-back-to-back episodes of The Big Bang Theory

– Untangle a small child’s pony tail after she used Clag glue as styling mousse

– Rub foundation into Donald Trump’s neck skin

– Spend three hours trying to find the end of the sticky tape

– Have chilblains for a whole working week

– Always accidentally say “love you” before hanging up a work call out of habit of ending conversations with my family that way

– Vomit into the lap of a local dignitary

– Trim my father’s eyebrows

 

* Please note, this not an exhaustive list.