Thread by @AlexandraErin

The set design in Cats (2019) makes a lot more sense when you consider that cats

1. Can't actually read.
2. Assume everything is about themselves.

We have a lot of fun here on Twitter Dot Com talking about what bizarre trashfires of shows Andrew Lloyd Webber puts together, but I think his work suffers from the word "phantasmagoria" having fallen mostly out of currency in modern English.

The word refers to dreamlike qualities, but was also used for a mostly horror-centric genre of magic lantern show, and because of the resemblance to "phantasm" and "gory" it's still mostly preserved in horror (and thus nightmarish) contexts.

But forget the horror angle...

...and for the moment just focus on the idea of a dream-like series of images.

Now imagine every Andrew Lloyd Webber show being summarized as "someone trying to describe a dream they're trying to remember about [actual summary]."

"You know that old French horror novel? The Phantom of the Opera? There were a bunch of movies about it, Lon Chaney was in one.

Anyway.

I had a dream about it... it was all chopped up, but it was very vivid and powerful, and even the parts that made no sense felt meaningful."

A dream about Jesus being a celebrity in a cult of personality, a dream about Eva Peron's life being narrated from the point of view of Che Guevara, a dream about a kid playing with trains like the kid in the basement in the Lego Movie but the trains are horny for each other.

"I fell asleep reading a book of T.S. Eliot poems and had this weird series of dreams where cats were describing themselves to me and I had to choose which one was going to die, but in a happy way? I don't know. It all made sense in the dream."