In the Artscape Theatre studio, the smell of 30 singing-and-dancing performers three hours into rehearsal is unmistakable, though the dank funk isn’t quite eau de wet dog. They’re preparing for Cats, after all, with the applause of opening night just a few days away.
The sweaty aroma of hard work fills the room as the late choreographer Gillian Lynne’s sinuous steps are drilled into the cast. Half a dozen members of an international creative team are watching closely, and listening acutely, picking up on the tiniest missteps that, if not corrected, might mar the show. So they’re working the scene one more time, then again. One moment it’s a reminder to the performers to arch their spines as cats do, and the next it’s London-based assistant director Matt Krzan showing them how to flex their hands “so they’re paws, not claws”.
Krzan, a veteran of the show, is sleek and towering, with legs up to his armpits. Though his strapping physique is very much that of a dancer, he came to musical theatre as a singer — but then went to dance college and thrived there too. Now 44, he’s half a lifetime on from when, as a student, he’d watch videos of his favourite shows and dream of being in Cats. “I obsessively watched that VHS tape every night,” he says.
Of all the Cats casts he’s worked with, Krzan says he has never taught the show to such a hungry, open-to-learn ensemble. That’s high praise indeed from someone who, during his 20-year involvement with the musical, worked closely with both Lynne and director Trevor Nunn, who together shaped the original 1981 West End production.
The predominantly South African cast members are steadily building up their endurance for what is perhaps the most exhausting musical out there. Each time the music stops, there’s a swell of heaving breathing. As one dancer bends forward, hands on his thighs, I hear another whispering her disbelief: “How the f*ck are we going to get through this?”
They will get through it, of course, and not only will they be show-ready come 10 December, but they will have developed the stamina required to see them through a lengthy run. After Cape Town, the show will be touring the world for many months, the first stop being Joburg. It’s Krzan’s job to prepare the cast members for what may be the most demanding performance in their careers.
There’s a moment, a little later, when silence fills the room and someone lets out a mighty meow. All eyes are suddenly on actor Dylan Janse van Rensburg — tall, broad-shouldered and hot from his titular role in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat — seated on a chair sufficing for what will probably be a pile of tyres in the scrapyard set where the Jellicle cat tribe gathers. He’s playing Rum Tum Tugger, the vain, sexy-and-he-knows-it rock star of the tribe, a charismatic wildling with anarchic energy who is adored by the younger cats. He’s also the show’s coolest cat, his first solo easily the sexiest number in the entire show and a chance to seduce the audience.
Even in rehearsal, triple-threat Janse van Rensburg drips with sensuousness, the talent just oozing out of him. He’s got that rock ‘n’ roll, hot-to-trot bad boy energy, his hips gyrating, not just suggestively, but also vaguely salaciously. Very grrrr!
Days later, Rum Tum Tugger’s song is still earworming around my head. The lyrics speak of a disobliging, dismissive cat who always demands the opposite of what’s offered. The music, though, knows precisely what it wants, the tune impossible to dislodge from my brain.
“Yes, Andrew Lloyd Webber knows how to create a catchy tune,” says Krzan when we meet to discuss the show.
Not that the music — or the musical — is everyone’s cup of tea. Lloyd Webber, whose idea it was to set TS Eliot poems from an obscure 1939 children’s collection to music, had a devil of a time getting the show produced. He reportedly had one director fall asleep while he was pitching the idea to him, and Twyla Tharp rejected a request for her to choreograph it.
At one point, despairing and desperate, Lloyd Webber himself is said to have called the show “suicidally stupid”. In rehearsals, Judi Dench, originally cast as Grizabella, snapped her Achilles tendon days before opening night. She was replaced by Elaine Paige, whose performance of the song “Memory” helped seal the musical’s reputation as one of history’s most successful.
As with any hit musical, it has its devoted haters too — even more so since the atrociously CGIed screen version was unleashed on the world in 2019.
None of that matters to Krzan, though. He does what he does for lovers, not haters, and because of his own abiding love of Cats. He says it’s the embodiment of what musical theatre is about: singing, dancing, acting through movement, and telling a story by successfully integrating those elements. “That’s the whole point of musical theatre,” he emphasises.
He enjoys the physical challenge of the show too, and loves the feeling that he’s worked hard. “You can’t do Cats without sweating,” he says.
Krzan played Munkustrap — the cat who’s both narrator and de facto leader of the Jellicle tribe — for three years without a day off. “I just kept going,” he says.
“It’s really tough on your body, and as I get older I’m more aware of the injuries I have suffered. My big toe’s warped from playing Munkustrap, and this shoulder’s not in the right place, probably from where he lifts the white cat above his head. My knee? Who knows? As dancers do, you get twinges. But you work through them.”
The twinges barely begin to cover the extent to which the show “kind of takes over your life”. On top of long stints in the dressing room for hours of makeup, as well as costume and wig fittings, there are also warm-ups for body and voice, so nobody just breezes into the theatre an hour before curtain-up. “You have to make sure you eat at the right time to maintain your energy,” Krzan says. “And on a two-show day, you have to stay in the theatre between performances, because you can’t take your makeup off.” And forget about even thinking of a social life during your Cats incarnation.
It might all sound mildly masochistic, but it’s not kink so much as relentless devotion to the craft. “To get through eight shows a week, to have done it to the best of my ability, to have entertained people and told a story — that’s what I love,” Krzan says.
Yet, having been involved in Cats for more than two decades now, this is the first time he has worked on the show without being part of it. “It will feel strange not to be on stage,” he admits. “I couldn’t even tell you how many times I’ve seen and done this show. It’s all in my head.”
And it’s in his body too. “I think the theory is that when you have done something 100 times, it gets into your muscle memory. You could wake me up in the middle of the night, put on the music, and I’d be able to perform Munkustrap.”
After years spent getting under that feline skin, you’d imagine he would have considerable insight into what makes cats tick. But, as Lola, his beloved Cavapoo (a Poodle crossed with a Cavalier King Charles Spaniel), will tell you, her human remains resolutely a dog person.
Cats are a bit unpredictable, Krzan says. “You never know if a cat that’s sitting on your lap, all innocent and sweet, is suddenly going to claw you.”
Which is pretty much what Eliot was getting at with his poems that inspired a cultural phenomenon: with cats, you never really know, do you?
