Huge in reputation and production value, Cats comes to the Civic in a collaborative, education-driven way

Ryan Wasson photos

Nicole Ostlie as Sillabub in the Civic’s production of Cats.

Cats was an unlikely theatrical phenomenon. The musical’s primary source material is Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, a collection of quirky children’s poems by T.S. Eliot, the same literary figure who gave us ominous and melancholic works like The Waste Land and The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. It indulges in a mythology entirely of Eliot’s imagining, complete with invented concepts like the ‘Heaviside Layer’ and the ‘Jellicle Ball.’

And because

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