“Where’s the plot? Where is the dialogue?” I kept wondering as I sat through song after soaring song of the production of “Cats” in Chicago. When I finally read the program and saw it was based on a collection of poems by T.S. Eliot I felt a bit better about my inability to discern what was really going on beyond the fact that a bunch of crazy-wild costumed characters were dancing and singing in a junkyard.

Perhaps my confusion is a bit more forgivable if I tell you this was way back in the early 1980s, not long after Cats opened on Broadway in 1982 and well before it become a musical theater phenomenon and later the longest running musical on Broadway, a record it achieved in 1997.

The national tour of Cats is playing at the Fox Theatre August 4-8, presented by Theatre of the Stars.  This tour, the only one sanctioned by Andrew Lloyd Webber, recently celebrated its 27th year.

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