Reading something old, something new, something borrowed, and something blue
Caught Repertory Philippines’ Seussical previews this weekend (thanks to Jeeves for the friday night, and my boss for Saturday morning) and I’m still singing along to the songs. Even my dog likes Seussical — he wags his tail every time I play the soundtrack.
I’ve been seeing The Cricket in Times Square ever since the librarians let me sneak into in the “big library” when I was in first grade (the primary levels in our school used to have a separate kiddie library), but somehow I never got to read it, not until I found the audio book at the bargain bookstore.
I can’t listen to an audiobook without having read the book first, because my attention tends to drift away after a while, and I end up tuning out the sound. I wanted to listen to the Cricket audiobook because the box said it was narrated by Tony Shalhoub, so I dug out the wornncopy of the book I had lying around in Planet TBR and decided it was finally time to give it a shot.
I read T.S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats last year and found out it was the book on which the musical Cats was based. I didn’t think I would get to see the musical on its Manila run because the tickets are fabulously expensive, but a couple of orchestra tickets magically fell into my hands on Friday afternoon, courtesy of my boss (thank you! thank you!), so my sister and I got to watch the musical that same night.
Cats is one of the longest-running shows in the history of musical theater. Its composer, Andrew Lloyd Webber, counts Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats as one of his favorite childhood books, and most of the musical is based on the cats in Eliot’s verse, except mainly Grizabella the glamor cat (who has grown old and gray) and a few other cats, who (presumably) were written in to tie the story together.
