"Memories of CATS" by Harry Haun (The Phantom of the Opera Playbill, May 1997, Broadway) As CATS approaches a theatrical milestone, past and present cast members recall their favorite feline moments. Bernard Jacobs visited his Winter Garden on October 8, 1982 - the day after he, Gerald Schoenfeld, The Really Useful Company Limited, David Geffen and Cameron Mackintosh had transplanted there Andrew Lloyd Webber's musicalization of T.S. Eliot's Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats. Those who saw him that day recall how blissed out he was. "For Bernie, even a little excited was a lot, and he was very excited," says Stephen Hanan, one of the Cats in question, "thrilled about the box office. I vividly remember him saying, 'This is going to run longer than A Chorus Line.' It's sad Bernie's no longer with us because I'd love to remind him of that prophesy." Come June 19, 1997, this prediction turns statistic. A Chorus Line goes feline that day as Cats turns in it's 6,138th performance and becomes Broadway's longest-running show. For almost 15 years the show has been a launching pad for a whole generation of performers - kids who went out there kittens and came back cats. Spawned by Trevor Nunn and choreographer Gillian Lynne, stars were indeed born. Such is the stuff of memory - or, rather, "Memory" . . . The soaring Puccini-esque "Memory" carried Betty Buckley's Grizabella to The Heaviside Layer (which is as close to Heaven as you can get from inside Winter Garden), just as it took the actress to the Tony podium. Two other cats made the Tony running: Hanan's Growltiger and Harry Groener's Munkustrap. All agree the Cats premiere was purrfection. Cynthia Onrubia, who was originating her first Broadway role (Victoria) in it, remembers the opening-night gifts: a bottle of champagne and some Purina Cat Chow. Groener recalls the show-biz axiom that crashed and burned that evening: the one that said opening-night audiences are a notch or two cooler in the Reponse Dept. than preview audiences. "I thought that would happen with Cats because the previews were fabulous," he says, "but at the opening they screamed and yelled. I thought, 'Oh my gosh! I'll never hear anything like this again.' But I did. At the Crazy For You opening, the response from the house was so loud it came into my heart and pushed the tears out of my eyes. Imagine, in one lifetime, two nights like that!" Terrence V. Mann and Charlotte d'Amboise - now Mann and wife - met as cats: Rum Tum Tugger and Cassandra. And Timothy Jerome learned he was going to be a father just before going on as Gus the Theatre Cat; that momentous news pushed every lyric out of his head, and he came up dry for Gus's song, forcing him to ad-lib in anguish three whole verses. "I'll never forget the looks on those kid's faces - those stunned, shocked faces," says Jerome. "They told me the audience never caught on, but the cast sure did. Scotty Wise was sitting backstage howling over what was happening." (Wise readily allows he "never laughed so hard in a theatre in my life.") As Old Deuteronomy, lording majestically over John Napier's outsized junkyard set, Ken Page had to stay onstage during intermission, standing guard territorially by his throne, dealing cursorily with any paying customers who happened by to explore the fanciful environs. Only once, by his count, did he lose his cool. "Trevor never gave instructions about intermission, so what I did was stay in character. One evening I saw this little old lady coming at me with one of those I'm-going-to-take-care-of-business walks. She planted herself in front of me, stuck out her hand and said, 'Deuteronomy? Ruth Gordon.' I thought 'What am I going to do?' I couldn't gush like I wanted to, so finally I whispered to her, 'I'm not really supposed to talk like this, but I think you're wonderful.' She said, 'Well, I think you're wonderful, too. This is my husband, Garson Kanin.' We talked and talked, and she said, 'Make sure you tell everybody how terrific they are.'Some time after that, I ran into them in the street, out of make-up. They were walking arm in arm as they always did. I told them I was Deuteronomy, and they both looked at me like I was the Angel of Death for a second. I said, 'From Cats.' She said, "Oh, my goodness! You're a baby. I thought you were an old man. Look, Gar, he's a baby.' It was the thrill of my life to have met them." Page's primary rival for the role was another Ken - Prymus - who is now in the sixth year of his Old Deuteronomy reign. These two Ken's originally did a seven-round audition for that "fat cat" part, and Prymus's favorite Cats memory involves director Nunn. On the show's tenth anniversary, he remembers, "Our general manager came over to me and said, 'Trevor Nunn would like to talk to you.' I thought, 'Oh, boy, here goes my job.' When I went over, Trevor said, 'You were born to do this role.' That knocked me out, so I asked why he didn't hire me originally. He said, 'You didn't have the low notes.' He was right, too. Back then, I was truly a tenor and didn't have the low notes. Laurie Beechman gets back into her Grizabella getup this month and will do the role on Broadway beyond Labor Day. She first pounced on the part in November 1983 when she opened the first national tour in Boston. Six months later she bowed on Broadway and stayed there through 1988. The house electrician during her tenure, Joe Newman, looked it up and discovered she was the longest-running continuous principal-player to work the Winter Garden, surpassing Al Jolson and Angela Lansbury (but, now, not Ken Prymus). "You know, I never got tired of it," she's amazed to admit. Her favorite Cats memory? "I always had Chanukah in my dressing room. I'd have the menorah, wine and bits of gelt, the prayer phonetically printed out on the wall. Ethan Fine, a guitar player from the orchestra, would come up. It made quite a sight - kids in cat costumes celebrating Chanukah. For me, that's the spirit of the place." Turning Bryan Batt into a Cats cat was an arduous process, but it seems to have stuck. "I was reluctant to go out for the show because I'm not that great a dancer," he's quick to concede, "but the Munkustrap role is mainly for a singer-actor, so I did it. I wasn't to the level of some of the dancers, but they kept making me do the combination over and over. Finally, I just looked out from the stage and said, 'You know, the audience will never know how long it took me to get this.' They laughed, then I sang, and that was it. I got cast right then and there." Batt did the road show for six months, then joined the Broadway company and was still in Cats two years later when he went out for the doomed Darius in Paul Rudnick's Jeffery. "Originally, the character was a chorus boy in Grand Hotel. Paul looked at my résumé and said, 'Are you really in Cats?' I said, 'Yeah. Now and Forever.' Later he told me that's when he got the idea to rewrite the role as a guy from Cats." These days you'll find Batt in Forbidden Broadway Strikes Back - and back in his furry uniform for a skit called "Stop Cats (from passing A Chorus Line). Bernie Jacobs, who saw that coming 15 years ago, would have loved it! ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Many thanks to Shadow the ghost cat for this information!