Cats (musical) Cats (musical) Cats is a sung-through musical composed by Andrew Lloyd Webber, based on "Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats" by T. S. Eliot. The musical tells the story of a tribe of cats called the Jellicles and the night they make what is known as "the Jellicle choice" and decide which cat will ascend to the Heaviside Layer and come back to a new life. Directed by Trevor Nunn and choreographed by Gillian Lynne, "Cats" first opened in the West End in 1981 and then with the same creative team on Broadway in 1982. It won numerous awards, including
T. S. Eliot went to Oxford instead. At the time so many American students attended Merton that the Junior Common Room proposed a motion "that this society abhors the Americanization of Oxford". It was defeated by two votes, after Eliot reminded the students how much they owed American culture. Eliot wrote to Conrad Aiken on New Year's Eve 1914: "I hate university towns and university people, who are the same everywhere, with pregnant wives, sprawling children, many books and hideous pictures on the walls ... Oxford is very pretty, but I don't like to be dead." Escaping Oxford, Eliot spent much of his