It is important to remember that the conceit of Cats, the era-spanning musical adapted into a film this winter, is that all the characters are cats—singing cats, dancing cats, fat cats, skinny cats, cats that prowl the docks: cats. The show is dogged in reminding us. The songs, when not explicating the wisp of a story, describe varieties of cat, such as the Gumbie Cat and the Railway Cat, while the cast, on-screen as on-stage, have cat ears, fur, and tails. But whatever else it was, Cats the musical, which premiered in London in 1981, was primarily a human variety show: a pastiche of twentieth-century music and dance tethered to some of T.S. Eliot’s lightest verse. Amid the jazz choreography and leg-warmers, the trash-strewn Thatcherite dystopia of the set and the guileless pizzazz of the performances, the stars of the Broadway run were never convincingly cats, just particularly exuberant humans. In Cats the movie, they are not even convincingly human.
Source : The Slog Comes in on Little Cat Feet
