I'll be the first to admit, I'm no regular theater-goer. I may have seen, on average, one play/musical on stage per year over the past 10 years. It's not because I don't enjoy it, because I usually do. I just rarely find myself thinking that a particular play is a "must see."

This year, my parents are hosting an exchange student. She was in the local high school's big spring production of CATS. The high school typically puts together some good productions, and the kids are usually very talented. This year's kids were no exception, they could sing and dance like pros.

However, I was a bit surprised by the show itself. All I knew going in is that it had run on Broadway for 15+ years. I had never seen it, nobody had ever told me the storyline. After seeing it, I now know why nobody told me the storyline. There is no storyline. I'm no artist, but shouldn't plays/musicals have plots? Dialog? Character development? I did some additional reading on it, and learned that the play itself is an adaptation of a bunch of individual poems. Basically, the common theme is that the poems all have to do with cats. THAT is what ties it all together. That's it.

Needless to say, I left the theater feeling a bit dissatisfied. The worst part about it is that 5 days later, I still can't get it out of my head. I can't stop thinking about how this horrible horrible play lasted so long on Broadway and elsewhere. I can't stop trying to estimate the amount of dollars generated by it. I WANT to stop, but I can't. Oh, and there are three songs from it that are stuck in my head also. This is pretty common with show tunes, but usually, I don't hate the show that the songs are attached to, so it's worse this time. The wife feels the same way. In her words, "I feel like I've been scarred. I can never get my pre-CATS life back."

Maybe that's how it lasted so long. It's like an infection, a virus. (Not a good kind of virus, like The Indie Virus that I've recently contracted.) This is the bad kind. I'd put CATS somewhere between syphilis and herpes. There's no cure, so it's worse than syphilis. But you're always very aware that you're infected by it, so it's not as bad as the commercials say herpes is.

So if you like your plays to have plots, skip this one. If you're all artsy and like free-flowing incongruously written shows that have no storylines, lots of nonsense songs, and some made up words, stop hugging that tree and go see CATS.