An idea will come sometimes out of nothing, the spark of imagination somehow bursting into life with the will of a star experiencing the desire to go supernova; it only takes the right spark to set in motion a chain of events that eventually and gloriously end up from page to stage with wondrous inevitability.
Moggies The Musical is the rightful next stage in the life of the Mersey Moggies, the brain child of Cathy Roberts, storyteller, book lover, a beating heart within the Liverpool arts scene and above all someone who truly understands compassion, it is the searing quality that makes her creation of the Mersey Moggies so entrancing and a gentle reminder of what it means to be human; to care for something other than one’s self, and in Moggies The Musical there truly is so much to care about.
Moggies The Musical might seem to be the type of artistic endeavour that some might wonder what is on offer, the allusion to Cats would be thrown up in some quarters but this would be a complete travesty, a speculation tossed onto the fire by those who have just find life to be void of imagination; this is after all a series of characters born in the most wonderful way, that of the city of Liverpool and something to which all can identify with. Unlike the cold aloofness that arguably comes out of the other musical, Moggies The Musical is something to really get excited about.
Catching up with Cathy Roberts is not only a pleasure but due to the nature of her life, she can be difficult to track down as rehearsals and 1001 other demands can find their way into the diary at short notice; the wheels of imagination are always kept busy in some very fortunate people. The regular feature on B.B.C. Radio Merseyside is now going to be a hit on the stage, it only seems right to ask:
I’ll start with the obvious question – how are the rehearsals going?
Cathy: “They are very lively and it’s really great for me to see professional actors taking on the roles that I’ve been doing on the radio for the past four years, its lovely to hear that.”
Is there a difference between how you’ve portrayed them on the radio to how the actors are doing it?
Cathy: “Yes there is, in some cases you think that’s exactly how’d I’d do but it in other cases, they might bring something to it and you might think why didn’t I think of that? I’ve not had anyone come up with anything that I think is not right, that’s the beauty of it, when an actor goes with it, they are trying to find the character themselves so they try out different aspects and go into the depths of it more than I do. I’ll give you an example if you want, we have one of the characters is called Motley Fleece Log and he’s a theatrical cat and in all my stories he’s very, very pompous and he’s always going after roles and never getting them and he loves to soliloquise and he’ll take any opportunity he can to get attention but he never does ever get any real roles.
The actor who’s taking him on at the moment turned to me and said that he was trying to work out why he wasn’t getting the roles, why wasn’t he? So he decided to give him a slight lisp, a slight speech impediment and it doesn’t half work and you think that’s why he’s not getting the work and it opens up different aspects, your heart goes out to him because he’s trying so hard to get all these roles but he’s not going to get one speaking like that. I thought that was great because it added an extra dimension to the character instead of him just always being the one who irritates the rest of the cats, suddenly there’s a bit of sympathy for him and a bit of affection – I like that.”
You talk about affection, these Mersey Moggies, these four cats, the heroes of these stories are so well loved aren’t they?
Cathy: “They seem to be, people seem to engage with them. For example, I’d had two occasions that I can think of when people have come up to me in the shop and have asked on the progress of the cats when I sent them on holiday for a period of time. When the cats go on holiday, they either go to Formby Animal Rescue or they picked up and go to New Brighton and they go to the Fort. A couple came in and they asked when were the cats coming back off holiday and the best one I’ve ever had – another man came in and Glyn’s Fine Feline Diner, Lark Lane? I said yes, he said I’ve walked up and down Lark Lane love and I can’t find it! (laughing!)
Actually, the café was based in the fish shop on Lark Lane, a traditional fish shop but it’s changed a bit, the idea is that the café is in the fish shop yard. So everything is rooted in truth and I believe that cats are the most popular image that’s put on the internet, it seems to be a recognised fact and I think that we’ve discovered having the show is that the two things people like to talk about around here are the local area, local history and their heritage and their pets. If anyone has got a pet they will talk about it and the cat will have its own life and they will describe it as though they were a person so I think that’s what it is, people recognise aspects in the characters that I do in their own cats and people now write to me with pictures of their cats, giving me snippets of what their cats have done its just opened up a whole new world. In another era I would be incarcerated as I actually hear these voices!”
How does it feel seeing these particular characters from say being in your head to wonderful books to being on stage?
Cathy: “Actually, what we’re doing now is deciding how we present them as we’ve got a number of options and last night we spent a couple of hours looking at them make-up that we want because traditionally on stage, if you look at the musical Cats that’s very stylised make-up that they put on the cats, which I always thought was a bit scary to be honest, I think the look of those cats is pretty scary and I certainly thought on that. We’re not putting people in cat suits so we just need to suggest the idea of cats but it’s sort of coming to a head. We don’t know whether to go the whole hog and do full cat make-up which we can do, we practiced last night or whether we just tint the faces and that’s a decision we have to make now with Brian McCann the Director.
It’s more the characterisation that the actors come up with that brings them to life just as on the radio all I’ve got is a voice but what you can do on the radio is – if you want to create a deluge of rain you can just say it and people will imagine it, you can’t create that on stage, not easily. So it’s things like that, I find that its picking out the essence of them but when I sometimes take people on huge distances in my stories and I’ll have a character list of about 15 on average which can expand to about 40 in the space of the four minute stories that I do and obviously for us on stage we can’t do that so it’s just really getting the essence of them but I think it works because what’s coming out in rehearsal is the relationships between the actors and the Director and the physical gestures that they can do which I can’t do on the radio but actors can convey with just a simple movement a huge range of emotions and relationships, it’s very clever and so yes we’re using very minimal props and things because we want all the focus to be on the characterisations and the actors.
Of course, this is also a musical and we’re very lucky use such wonderful songs to convey emotion and they certainly do that, they really do. We previewed five of the songs at Parr Street on Sunday and they went down very well and considering it was the first time the actors had actually performed in public with this music and they are not off script yet as a couple of the song lyrics had just been changed that morning. They delivered them well and the response was very good. We’ve got some pretty powerful emotional moments in the show and none the least being Susan Hedges who is just a revelation with her singing but she can act as well and the combination of those two things with Brian’s music behind it is pretty moving, it really is. Susan Hedges is playing the music, Brian has written the music and Susan has adapted the melody of one songs, we wanted the style changing a little bit which she’s done but the majority of the music composition is all Brian’s. Susan has a song which she sings, she plays two characters – she plays one of the kitchenettes who are three overweight kittens who sing when the fridge opens and so she plays one of them, they are like backing singers and then she plays Moggie Mae West. It’s the Moggie Mae West character that sings at the Catlantic Hotel on the Dock Road, it’s her song that turns out to be extremely moving, it’s beautiful.”
She’s a delightful singer as well isn’t she?
Cathy: “Yes she is but we’re also very lucky to have another fine soprano in Edwina Lee and Edwina is playing Forella De Font and also one of the kitchenettes and she has a lovely song called Catwalk and again it’s very powerful, it’s a different insight into these cats who are one step up from alley cats, struggling to survive like everybody else in an increasingly hard world but they daydream like we all do and they like to think of themselves as maybe one day turning out to be glamour pusses like that so they have all those moments that we have. The rest of the story, without being too political is that the fat cats are threatening to take over and it’s how these cats are trying to protect their own world with these incredibly destructive fat cats and again that song that Brian’s written – The Fat Cat Song is a very powerful piece. We didn’t realise how powerful it was, we found ourselves almost venturing into Les Mis territory with it – it’s rousing!”
It’s going to be an excellent piece of theatre, there’s a lot of people looking forward to it!
Cathy: “I think so, there’s variety in it, it’s different, it’s certainly not Cats, nothing like it! We’ve got personalities and characters that I think people will recognise – I’m sure everyone knows a Dutch and a Lefty and a Moose and a Mo and I’m sure everyone knows a Motley and they’ll certainly know a Fat Cat, because they have the same sort of traits that we have ourselves I think that’s one of its strengths. We’ve got a lot to do, it’s very raw, we’ve only got eight rehearsals left and it’s going to be three nights at The Unity Theatre, it’s very much preview time, no doubt there will be things that we’ll have to change but if you don’t try it you’ll never find out and that’s where were up to so we’re hopeful of an entertaining evening. It’s on the 14-16 April, it’s on at 8pm which is The Unity’s usual time for a show and it’s not an overlong show, at the moment, we’re running at 45 minutes each way like a football match with a 20 minute interval. So it won’t be too late for people!”
The cats have their football don’t they?
Cathy: “They have their pawball – Dutch was sadly dragged into the pawball game and found himself in the back of the net attached to the ball. They have everything that we have, everything that you might read about in the local paper, they have in the Liverpool Weekly Squeak so we cover all aspects. I think I’ve covered just about most professions! We’re getting very excited!”
I’m sure it will be fantastic!
Cathy: “Just one thing though I must give credit to Peter Grant as he’s given us most of the starting points to the songs, he’s provided lyrics and ideas and has shaped the songs and the themes of the songs are very much down to him – so I want him to get that credit!”
Ian D. Hall