Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats

Image from Favini Costume Design
http://www.favinicostumedesign.com/

T.S. Elliot wrote an adorable anthology of poems about cats called Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats. Andrew Lloyd Weber adapted the poems (among others) to create a musical. I got to see the musical performed last summer in Sacramento. Beautiful costumes, amazing sets, and emotionally moving music combine to make an artistic and visually exciting play.

In McCloud's book, Understanding Comics, McCloud describes the unique combination that comic books use to tell a story; words, pictures, time, and space. I think that this form of analysis should be applied to more areas of design. Musicals combine different elements, but I think it is the same kind of special combination of art and design. Musicals combine story, song, music, dance, costume, and set design. These different aspects can stand alone (as in comics), but as a whole, a new universe is created with the design of a musical.

In The Musical Cats, costume design is as important as the songs. The human form is taken into consideration and then applied with feline characteristics. The mobility and sleekness of cats is conveyed through slender form fitting costumes, and cat-like human qualities conveyed with symbolic cultural dress. For example; the costume of Grizabella the Glamour Cat (an old, worn, tired and lonely, once glamourous, stray cat) is conveyed by portraying a cat-like bag lady. The bag lady is depicted by drawing on the stereotype of an older woman who pushes a cart down dirty streets wearing filthy, over sized clothes that were once glamourous as she herself may have been. Her loss of youth, beauty and possibly sanity apparent in her choice of dress. Using these emotional stereotypical cues Paul Favini created timeless characters whose personalities were communicated with their dress alone. The feel of the musical is tied together by the costumes.

The choreography and movement of the actors and actresses expresses feline motion, the songs convey mood, the lyrics evoke feline concerns, and the set places the characters and scales them to size by using unusually large props, but the musical would be a miss without the design of the costumes by Paul Favini. (The image is Paul Favini's artwork for the costume design of Grizabella)

Watch this You Tube video of Grizabella