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A young TS Eliot is at Harvard where the field of psychology is just now emerging. You can read Freud, of course, but there’s nothing like behavioral or analytic psychology that have yet to be developed. But there are dreams – and what, exactly, are those? Freud himself starts his book by citing what the Greeks thought that they were, which in many cases were visions of alternate realties, a channeling of the gods, a means of clairvoyance where the future, or at least possible futures, were revealed.

What was science supposed to do with all of that?

Well one answer, and one that TS Eliot studied, was that there was a place between heaven and earth, between the purely spiritual and the definitely physical. Eliot begins to wonder, as did Hamlet and then Victor Frankenstein, whether there was more in heaven and earth than was dreamt of in philosophy – or science.

And so the youthful Eliot, seeking a truth that the world itself was only beginning to come to grips with, would not only experiment with the occult but put it rather directly in the forefront of his literary work, including and especially his defining poem, The Wasteland.

After his fame arrived, he would take up a side project, writing a light book of children’s rhymes. About cats. One of those poems he never finished. That poem talked about the dreamspace, maybe that third space between heaven and earth. But that poem went nowhere. It was probably too serious for a children’s book. He just stuck the poem in the back of his stack of paper – the heavyside layer would not come out in his book about cats, but it would get resurrected after his death to form the central frame for the musical.

How deeply was TS Eliot involved with the occult? Why did he put that theme in such a central place in his best poem? How come he kept describing writing poetry like an instance of demon possession? Grab your rosary beads, let’s all stay safe in this episode of THM.

Poll about belief in God and the devil

https://assets.realclear.com/files/2024/01/2334_RCORToplineJan92024.pdf

Cursed books

https://bookbindersmuseum.org/you-have-been-warned-book-curses-and-cursed-books/

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Episode #4

The year is 1982. The liberatory vibe of the 1960s is long gone…Ronald Reagan is president, and it’s a bad time to be an air traffic controller, or a union member, or an Iranian hostage, or, maybe most tragically, if you’re gay. But there remain progressive voices, and one of those is the Village Voice, still an open champion of the avante garde in the world. If you have a new, edgy, and experimental piece of theater, the Village Voice should be your core audience.

But Michael Feingold, the theater critic for the Voice, does not like the genre-busting production he just watched, and he’s dripping acid off his pen to try to come up with something more demeaning than his previous paragraph, and by and large it’s working. Jessica Sternfeld recounts his prose: “Feingold tidily listed each disastrous element and how it contributed to a show clearly doomed to failure…the poetry itself, Feingold began, struggled painfully and unsuccessfully…the music is such inane, characterless drivel that only a generation of stoned clones and TV drones could have summed it up…the music doesn’t sound composed. It doodles randomly from chord to chord, never developing a theme or structure…Feingold did not further elaborate his problems with the music, but moved to the third horror, [the] choreography, which looked borrowed and represented all too directly the choreographer’s undistinguished career.”

“Cats,” wrote Feingold, “is a dog.” And with a special crescendo: “To sit through it is to realize that something has been peeing on your pants leg. For two hours.” And for the finale: “It ought to be retitled 101 uses for a dead musical, a reference to the popular book 101 uses for a dead cat.”

As we know, that view of Feingold would not be widely shared, and the musical would resonate with all those marginalized groups that the Village Voice would otherwise represent. In fact, it would become the longest-running, most lucrative, and probably most popular musical of all time. We’ll figure out what Feingold missed, with urine-busting scotch guard on our pants, in this episode of THM.

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Cats, 3rd episode

A show is about to open in two days. It features a power-packed pair of producers who would re-write Broadway history with two of the biggest musicals of all time, POA and Les Mis. The female lead is in one of the final rehearsals, and it will be her place in history to sing into the world a song so powerful, so vital, so memorable, that it will immediately become a top-10 hit, get re-recorded more than 600 times, including two MORE trips to the top 10 by two others who are mega-stars in their own right.

I can’t fool you. You are listening to a musical theater podcast. You know the performer, and you know the song. Elaine Paige is performing to an empty house, but she’s doing one of the final run-throughs of Memory, performing in Grisabella before the opening of Cats, and the mega-stars are Barbera Streisand and Barry Mantilow.

The other performers watch from the wings – it’s almost the only moment of the show where they aren’t all dancing during the musical numbers. The orchestra rises in anticipation; this is the song that will make the show. In fact, it’s the song that almost all the critics will point to as holding the entire show together, and show that will go on to play tends of thousands of times, win every major award, break all records for longest run and largest return.

It's a formula that’s worked before; Andrew Lloyd Webber, the composer, has paired with lyricist Tim Rice, and the magic that is conjured with the fusion of those two genius minds never fails to move audiences.

And then, breathlessly at first, she trills words that will soon be immoral: “Daylight / I won’t care if it finds me / With no breath in my body / With no beat in my heart.”

Wait. What? No, those aren’t the words. I really can’t fool you!

But they were almost the words…that’s right, the lyrics to maybe the most immortal song in Broadway history were changed 2 days before the show opened. And that was after the female lead had to pull from the show because she snapped her Achilles tendon, before the producers declared what the director had been done was not fit for the stage and threatened to pull the whole thing, before all the costumes were scrapped and re-done one week out.

And these are just some of things that almost derailed the show before it ever started. But, as we know, these obstacles were overcome. What had to happen for the show to get off the ground, and, most importantly, why did it work? In the words of director Trevor Nunn, “the theater creaked, the ghosts walked…” and we’ll find out where they went in this episode of THM.

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