It’s often easy to forget that Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cats was adapted from a collection of poems by T.S. Eliot, but Webber himself is happy to remind you. After critics and fans spewed hairballs all over Tom Hooper’s feral film adaptation last year, Webber took aim at James Corden’s bawdy take on Bustopher Jones, calling it all very “un-Eliot.” Now, he’s returned with some more general criticism, calling the film “ridiculous” and causing us to wonder when he last saw a production of Cats, a play in which humans dressed as cats screech at the moon until one of them goes to heaven.
“The problem with the film was that Tom Hooper decided that he didn’t want anybody involved in it who was involved in the original show,” Webber said in a new interview with the Sunday Times (via Deadline). “The whole thing was ridiculous.”
Of course, it’s not the unfinished CGI or fox-fucking costumes that upset Webber, but rather the emphasis on “coarse jokes” over “wit.” But, even without Corden’s comic asides, it’s unlikely Eliot’s wordplay would have transcended the film’s cavalcade of nightmares, especially when the only people who could make it to the end were stoned out of their gourds.
Sadly, the legendary composer has yet to comment on the movie’s elusive “butthole cut.”