Cats is an interesting example, because I couldn't tell from the article when the author refers to "the music," does he mean the instrumentation or the lyrics?
From the example provided ( "ten-dollar Founding Father without a father" and "when the British taxed our tea we got frisky,") it seems that the author is referring to the hip-hop rap. If so, then comparing it to Cats is comparing Lin-Manuel Miranda to T. S. Eliot.
The author never delves into the orchestrations, the staging, the choreography, or anything else. With Cats, the staging intended to put the audience into the perspective of a cat, with oversized junkyard objects. The costuming and make-up gave each character a unique style. And then there is the composing of Andrew Lloyd Weber. None of these aspects is discussed in the article.
What people complained about with Cat was the seeming lack of plot, leaving people unsure of what they just saw. It is better thought of as a revue. I was familiar with T. S. Eliot's collection of cat poems Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats, so I knew what to expect, and was delighted to hear these poems put to music.
Just so I understand, when you say that you didn't like Cats, did you mean that T. S. Eliot "sucks" as a poet?
-PJ
They didn't give out the Nobel Prize for "The Rum Tum Tugger."
Some people just don't like musicals.
And some musicals are better constructed than others.
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What I object to in the article is turning the musical into some political cause célèbre. I can understand somebody saying it's an enjoyable show that teaches you something. I can understand somebody saying its bad music and worse history. But I don't think either view is necessarily tied to any particular ideology. Most of the people who've said they like Hamilton live in the deep blue states, but that's true of most of the people who say anything about Broadway shows.
I didn’t realize that it was even set to TS Eliot’s poems. Shame on me.
First of all Andrew Lloyd Weber’s Jesus Christ Superstar was great. Probably the best musical I ever saw. The man who played Judas singing a capella showed me what real talent was. I couldn’t believe that a man could just belt out a song like he did with no musical instruments and just sound so beautiful.
As for TS Eliot....”Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky “.... as a teenager with short attention span at the urging of an old Army artillery officer I read it and because of immaturity and stupidity refused to let it “take me” or “show me” anything. As I grew older and revisited it, it almost brings me to tears reading The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. Some things just can’t be understood by the young.
I don’t like rap music. It’s just not my thing. Like I said I love almost all forms of music in Western Society including some nifty Norteno mexican music, Cool Jazz (Chet Baker and the west coast style), rock, folk, country etc...but I just think that Hamilton and a lot of the “hits” on Broadway remind me of the French farting geeks that were thought to be oh so amazing by the elites but were just a marker to be used to show which “class” of person you belong to.
I think that’s what Hamilton has turned out to be. I saw a video of some of the performance and once I saw the race, gender and music.... I must admit I was just thinking, “this is going to be a PC rewrite of the founding fathers”. Art is propaganda...long live art.