<i>Cats</i> Closes

"Tonight is the last night of Cats' first life on Broadway," Andrew Lloyd Webber said after the exuberant cast and orchestra players took their bows. "So I wouldn't get too excited. I don't quite know what the fuss is about."

Cats, Broadway's longest running show, is now as much a Memory as the song that was its most persistent refrain.

After a nearly 18-year run, the Lloyd Webber musical closed with a roar Sunday at the Winter Garden Theater before an invited audience of friends and fans.

The audience, filled with former members of the cast, sang along, shouted encouragements throughout and turned the final performance into a reunion of family and friends.

AP

Andrew Lloyd Weber speaking onstage after the show.

They cheered, screamed and even cried during an emotional, confetti-strewn final performance - number 7,485 - that was interrupted by several standing ovations.

"Oh, it was incredible," said former cast member Rosemary Loar. "I mean, everybody in the whole theater has done the show, so we were all singing the words along and screaming and crying — I was crying through the whole thing. It was just, it was such a great memory."

"It's hard not to remember exactly how the choreography and the movement felt on your body as you're watching them do it," added another former cast member, Eric Scott Kincaid, both to CBS News.

The original New York cast of 36 felines opened the show at the Winter Garden Theatre on October 7, 1982. The show is still running in London.

Within the New York cast Sunday night was one original member, Marlene Danielle, who played Bombalurina.

Lloyd Webber, who wrote the show's music, was applauded as soon as he entered the theater and before the house lights dimmed. The most applause? For The Jellicle Ball, a big dance number near the end of the first act, which received the night's longest standing ovation, literally stopping the show.

"It's possibly difficult for you to realize here," Lloyd Webber told theatergoers after the final curtain. "Cats was already a big hit in advance before we came to New York, but in London, it was a huge, huge risk. People don't believe this but we opened with quite a lot of our capital missing. The only thing I will say is musical theater has got to continue to take risks."

Among the people called on stage by Lloyd Webber were director Trevor Nnn, choreographer Gillian Lynne and producer Cameron Mackintosh. As they waved goodbye, a shower of yellow, white and silver confetti filled the theater, covering the cast and still-applauding theatergoers.

Cats was based on Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats, a collection of poems by T.S. Eliot. The St. Louis-born poet was praised by Nunn as "the greatest English and American poet of the 20th century and who was my unwitting collaborator in writing the words for Memory — probably unwillingly, if he had known."

The poems by Eliot, who died in 1965, also provided the lyrics for the other numbers in Cats.

Memory is sung in the show by Grizabella, the musical's faded glamour cat. Betty Buckley, who was the original, watched Linda Balgord sing her signature number Sunday night.

"It's just a wonderful show. It's great T.S. Eliot poems, of course. And it's set to wonderful music by Andrew Lloyd Webber," said Buckley. "I personally think it's like moving art, you know, it's so beautiful to look at. I can't imagine what it's going to be like around here without Cats."

Now for the first time since 1982, the Winter Garden, one of the few Broadway theaters actually on Broadway, will be dark. Yet there will be one more Cats event in the house. Next Saturday, props, costumes and other mementos from the musical will be put on sale in a giant theatrical garage sale. It will be a benefit for Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS.

"It started as a curiosity and saw me through some pretty good periods, as well as helped eased pain during bad times," said Hector Motalvo, a computer software salesman from New York who counted this evening's performance as his 703rd. Motalvo's devotion to the show earned him an invitation from promoters.

More than 10 million people saw the Broadway production, according to promoters.

The show's producers announced they would close the musical in June. However, ticket demand jumped, causing them to extend the run for 10 extra weeks.

The bittersweet festivities moved from the theatre to a gala party, with Grucci fireworks, at Chelsea Piers, a sports and entertainment complex along the Hudson River.

But neither Lloyd Webber or Nunn would be in attendance. Both were flying back to London to tend to new projects.

"In the words of T.S. Eliot, we have to remind ourselves of these words, `Every end is a new beginning,'" Nunn said. "Translated into Broadway terms that is 'Another openin', another show.'"

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