Kerry Ellis, who played Grizabella in the London Palladium revival of Cats, will reprise the role of the faded glamour cat when the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical returns to Taipei in June to celebrate its 40th anniversary.
Performances are scheduled at the Taipei Arena for June 16–19 followed by limited runs at the Kaohsiung National Theatre Opera House (June 24–27) and Taichung Chung-shan Hall (July 8–11). Ellis (Wicked, Oliver!) will play all three engagements.
The current tour opened in Seoul last September amid the pandemic. For a period of time, it was the only production of Cats running in the world and followed in the footsteps of Lloyd Webber's The Phantom of the Opera, which also ran in South Korea from March to September 2020.
Based on T. S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, Cats received its world premiere in 1981 at the New London Theatre, where it played for 21 record-breaking years and almost 9,000 performances. The production was the winner of the Olivier and Evening Standard Awards for Best Musical. In 1983 the Broadway production became the recipient of seven Tony Awards, including Best Musical, and ran for 18 years.
The tour is produced by GWB Entertainment, S&CO, and KHAM by special arrangement with The Really Useful Group Ltd. Click here for ticket information.
As reported earlier this month, mother-daughter theatre duo Dori Berinstein and Sammi Cannold are in post-production for a new documentary examining the resilience of the theatre industry in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, titled The Show Must Go On. Cannold traveled to Seoul and London last summer and fall to examine the several productions, including this tour.
Robert Torti and company in the original Broadway production of Starlight Express.
Alan Campbell and Glenn Close in Sunset Boulevard (Broadway, 1994)
