Todd McKenney back in 'Cats' Whiskers 37 Years after original Run
11:08 Share

40 years ago this month, one of the most successful musicals of all time opened here, opened at the Theatre Royal in Sydney. Well, you'll know that music. It is Cats. It's Andrew Lloyd Webber's Cats. It does not get much bigger. And just a few years later, after its debut here in Australia in 1985, one of my guests in studio made his debut.

in Melbourne, performing in Cats. Well, Cats is back, Theatre Royal, and the stars of the show join me, Jared Draper and Todd McKinney. Gentlemen, thank you for coming in. Pleasure. Thanks for having us. I didn't want to make you feel old, Todd, but you were a child star. You don't have to do that. It just happens. I am. You were a child star.

So 1987. 1987 I did it, yes. It was actually my second show, second musical. I started with an Andrew Lord Brewer show called Song and Dance, and then that finished, and then I did something for the STC, and then they asked me to do Cats, and yeah, so I did it for a year, and I was the acrobatic cat. The Cats cast is sort of split up into the young groups, which I called kittens, surprisingly enough, and then I did the cats.

And then us. Then the others. Well, now I'm the others. Back then I was the kitten, but now I'm the others. And I was the acrobatic cat, so I acrobated all over the stage. And I looked a lot better in Lycra in 1987 than I do now. Gerard, were you born? I suspect not. Oh, don't! I actually wasn't. I was born in 96.

Right, so we're talking 10 years earlier. I'd got 20 shows by then. Well into your career then. We were just saying outside before we came in, so I play two characters in this version. I play an old aristocratic fat cat in a fat suit in the first half, and then the second half I play an old...

theatre cat who just reminisces about his days in the theatre and I have to change my makeup in the show twice so while these guys are finishing act one I'm down in the dressing room putting on more lines and becoming the old cat and I realised last night for the first time the best way to do it is I just have to smile and I get my paintbrush and I just colour in the crevices like seriously and that's how I put on my makeup for the old guy

So you're not playing the same characters, given you just explained as two parts, effectively, the cast? Well, the cast in general is sort of the younger kids. Well, I'd say the average age of the cast would be about 25. Yeah, something like that. I bumped the average up a little bit. But there's not many of us in the older group. So it is kind of split up. But the dancing is so intricate and so hard and so sort of...

fascinatingly awkward in the show because we're being cats that you kind of need people in their 20s to pull it off. Yeah, totally. Odd question. What do you have on your feet? Jazz shoes. Old 1980s jazz shoes. Like slippers. Like jiffies. You're both wearing lycra suits. Yeah, with a lot of support under them. I'll tell you. Oh!

I'm actually wearing Spanx. You know when you, modern football jerseys, if you watch footy shows and when they're taking their jerseys off, they have to get the trainers and they stretch them to take them off. Is it sort of the same with a catsuit? It kind of is, to be honest. Yes, it kind of is. The lycra, you could wring it out and it would not be very nice.

Tell me about the physicality of it, Jared, because Anthony Warlow was in the studio a couple of months ago talking about his latest production. It was just telling me about the physicality of his roles and night after night and then on a week. We spoke to him on a Friday, so he was doing a matinee on a Saturday night the next day and physically he was just telling me how demanding it is. Yeah, it is. It really is, especially a show like this. I mean, there's all different kind of styles of dance as well, but just the nature of the show too.

you're a cat so our physicality automatically changes too so we're kind of tensing different muscles in our necks to kind of stay alert so everything is always engaged so when you leave the theater yeah and you just get on we go home and has a bowl of milk i do

I do. But when you're walking around, do you find that physically you're almost adopting that cat stance? I actually haven't consciously noticed anything, to be honest with you, but...

I'm sure there are, you know, little tidbits that have crept into my daily life. I think I'm just trying to make it through the day without falling over, to be honest, because I'm very sore. Jared yesterday before the show was just going through his list of ailments. I know. But the whole cast was like that. For me, in my experience over the last 42 years, the two hardest dance shows would be West Side Story and Cats.

It's that hard. And this is only just the start of your run. You're in the Sydney season at the moment. You've got Adelaide later in the year and Perth and Melbourne. It's daunting. I felt like yesterday when I was listing off my ailments, I was like, we've got to do this for quite a long time. But I guess that's the game, the nature of the business. You work out the routine that works for you in each different gig that you do. And it's a lifestyle change too to take on this job. You're essentially...

elite athletes that are performing their task every day. So we're kind of competing at the Olympics every day. It's a really good comparison. So many elite athletes will tell you after they play a game of football on a Friday night, they won't get to sleep until three, four o'clock in the morning because their body is so wound up. Is it similar for you, Tom? It's exactly the same. It is. Yeah, it is. Winding down is...

is part of the process and working out how to do it without using crutches like alcohol. Yeah, yeah. Which is a bit of an issue in our industry because otherwise if you want to try and sort of wind down naturally with no cup of tea, nothing, just go straight home, you can look at the clock and it could be 2 o'clock in the morning. And then if you've got a 1 o'clock matinee the next day on a Wednesday, you're then doing two shows on seven hours sleep, which is not enough.

It's not for the faint-hearted. You've got to take that on as part of the gig. It's a discipline. I'm intrigued by what you just said there about alcohol. We think of, say, the rock and roll world, sex, drugs, and rock and roll, and the nature of performing a gig, coming off stage at 11.30 at night, and then going back to a hotel room, winding down. That's why rock and roll stars get into the habits they do. Are you telling me in the stage world there are some similarities?

Well, I think it's just an easy crutch, isn't it? It's an easy wind down. But it's also, it's a bit of a trap because then you can't do this show with a hangover. Because of the physicality of it. The physicality and the sweating. Yeah, especially this show. Yeah, and also the vocals. I mean, you've got to be rested. You have to have the right sleep and an alcohol-induced sleep is not the right sleep for your voice, for your pipes to work. And so it's

You learn all that stuff as you go along in your career. You're a bit more Teflon coated when you're younger, but certainly as you get older, you've got to look after yourself. Honestly, people would have no idea that there are those similarities between that and the sporting world. And we have to do it in Lycra with a smile on our face.

We've been so used to seeing you on stage, yes, for years, but screen as well and telly, and we've worked in radio years ago together as well, Todd. But you seem to have been so busy in recent years on stage. Since COVID, we're now going back a few years, but has stage in this country had a real resurgence?

Absolutely. It has. And I think also for parents who wanted to take their kids out and get their kids off screens and get their kids socialising again, and theatre provides that. And I've definitely seen a resurgence. There's so much on. We're just all in the industry...

You know, we're in Cats, so we can't audition for anything else at the moment, but there's a lot out there auditioning. That's great. So I think after COVID, it really gave it a boost. People were ready to get out again, and that's hung over. You know, that's carrying on, which is great. I mentioned on the show late last week that you were coming up and would be on the program this week, and I received a lovely email that I want to read to you from one of our listeners here on 2GB. This is from Stephanie. She lives in the Blue Mountains. It says, Can't wait to hear the interview. I've seen Todd in many shows.

Huge fan. I saw Cats yesterday afternoon at the Theatre Royal, and as usual, it was awesome. Absolutely awesome.

And she's going to go back as well. But she also raises this one. And she'd love to hear from our audience on this one. She did notice some people rustling chips and drinks in the audience. And she thought, look, this is a bit rude for people to do this. And this just doesn't happen just at the Theatre Royal. This is in theatres all over the world. When you're on stage and somebody maybe whips out a phone or they pull out their candy and

They're rustling up the Smith's crisps. How do you react with that? Well, I think with this one, it kind of aids what we're trying to do. We come out as cats and essentially the audience are in our territory. I don't think that's the case at all. You don't. Put their chips back in their bag. And I think the theatre owners have something to say about it. They should sell those things in Pringles packets, which aren't noisy. The chips. I don't mind it.

Did you know what? When I was doing... I did the musical Barnum a couple of years ago, just in Melbourne season of it. And in that show, my character gets caught between his lover and his wife and his mistress. And the way they've staged it is I have to walk on a tightrope. So I had circus lessons for months leading up to it because I have to walk from one side of the stage to the other on a tightrope. And as I stood on the little platform to walk across...

This lady decided to get her chips out, right? Now, it takes incredible focus for me not to fall off the wire, right? I trained for months and I put one foot on the wire and I went, no, I can't do it. She was right in my eye line at the other end of the wire and so I just stopped and I said, now is a really bad time for you to eat chips.

Anyway, she laughed. And then I had a lady in my one-man show who was in the front row that was just on her phone. She clearly got dragged there by the rest of the family, didn't want to be there. And she was just scrolling. And so I was in the middle of my song and it was annoying me. Her face was lit up so I couldn't look at anybody else because the light was taking my focus. And I've got to think in that show because it's just me and my band.

And so I literally kept singing and I walked off the stage down to the front and I took her phone and I put it on the piano. I said, you can get it at the end of the night. So I don't like it. I don't like it, but I get it. See, they think they're sitting in the dark.

So they forget while they're watching us in the glow of the light, we're actually watching them. Well, there was someone the other day watching the football the entire time while... On their phone. Yeah, while some of us were out in the audience interacting with them, they were watching the football. Yeah.

I actually, I walk through the audience and I hit a phone out of someone's hand. So you hate it. As a cat. So the phones are a different story, I think. I think they're more distracting. Compared to the chips, yeah. The food itself is one thing, but the phones, I understand that. I would take a phone. Cats is playing at the Theatre Royal in Sydney where it did make its debut in 1985. You can book tickets, catsthemusical.com.au. Todd, Jared, thank you so much for coming in. Thank you. Jared Draper, Todd McKinney, the stars of Cats.