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[0:00] Speaker 1: Hi, I'm Ariana Grande, hi. I'm Cynthia Erivo, and you're listening to the Broadway Podcast Network. Visit bpm.fm, to discover more.

[0:13] Speaker 2: Welcome to the wrong cat died the podcast breakdown of the cat catastrophe. I'm your host, Mike Abrams, and today we're going to cover the dancing white ballerina cat Victoria, before I Cue the intro music, I want to cover a few things here. Since a lot has happened over the past few weeks, I know we're living in the podcast world, so you may be listening to this in the distant future, but for those listening at the present, the cats movie released digitally on March 17, 2020, now I've stated a billion times that this movie has made a ton of baffling decisions, like, you know, releasing against Star Wars movie, but this is another one of those weird decisions, releasing on St Patrick's Day just doesn't make sense to me. I can't tell if it's dumb, since most people go out drinking for the holiday, or if it's brilliant, since it takes copious amounts of alcohol to even understand this movie now, the dumbness is a little lesson, since most people are social distancing and working from home, and I know there's a lot going on, a lot of people thinking about a lot of stuff, including Broadway, not happening right now, so I'll give a quick small side plug. The wrong cat died. Will not be covering the impact of the virus on Broadway, but there are a ton of great episodes from the podcast and the Broadway Podcast Network family. I highly recommend checking out Broadway podcast network.com to find some great content. But the movie headlines didn't end there. Cats. The movie won six Razzies. That's right, the movie performed best or maybe worst at the Razzies this year. Here's what it won. It won, worst picture, Worst Supporting Actor or supporting actress, worse screen combo, which was for any two half feline half human hairball combos, worse screenplay and worst director. So congratulations to the cats movie for all your Razzies that you won this year really swept up the awards. As I mentioned, I'm not going to cover the Coronavirus, but it brought cats into the news even further. Idris Elba tested positive for the virus, and a major news outlet decided to write the headline cats. Actor, Idris Alba tested positive. So let's get this straight. This guy who's won a Golden Globe, has been in the Marvel Universe and has been incredibly successful in his entire career, is going to be remembered as Macavity. As his most notable accomplishment is that really where we are now, the internet did not back down. They did their thing, making all kinds of funny jokes about this. So people are referencing all of these actors from their lesser known works. So I'm not super well versed in the Broadway history and the Broadway universe outside of cats, I've stated that 1000 times on this podcast, so I asked my friends from broad wasted and the theater podcast with Alan Seales to help me come up with some Broadway comparisons. So here are their jokes. NBC sitcom, Kristen. Actress Kristen Chenoweth, CBS drama, bull star Christopher Jackson, the goodbye girl, musical star Bernadette Peters, Smurfs to actor Neil Patrick Harris, Merlin. Musical cast member Nathan Lane and Mary Poppins return supporting character Lin Manuel, Miranda. And if you're a sports fan, here are two basketball ones for you too, Los Angeles Lakers, power forward, Karl Malone and Washington Wizards guard Michael Jordan. But wait, there's even more. Since most people are stuck at home, a bunch of celebrities decided to watch the cats movie and document their experience. That's right, people got high and watched cats, and one that made the most news was Seth Rogen. Seth Rogen went on a massive Twitter rant about his experience watching the movie stoned, and it was great, but what made it even better is what it sparked because someone on Twitter responded to Seth Rogen saying that his job was to help edit out the movie, and part of the visual effects and his particular part he was editing out were the cat butt holes. That's right, you heard me correctly. There's a rumor that at some point there were cat butt holes as part of this movie, and this guy's job was to edit them out. The studio is giving very vague answers about if this is true or not, but at one point, hashtag released. The butthole cut was trending on Twitter. It was a massive, popular Reddit thread as well, and it's now becoming one of my favorite parts about the cats movie. So every time I think the cats movie can't get weirder, a digital butthole edit comes around and makes you wonder all over again. Now I don't know how to transition from hashtag release the butthole cut to Victoria, so let's just Cue the intro music. There's

[4:40] Speaker 1: a cat over here, there's a cat over there, and the wrong one died, and the wrong one died.

[4:57] Speaker 2: Welcome to the wrong cat died, the podcast breakdown of the cat's after. Today we're going to talk about Victoria. Normally, I nickname all the cats, but Victoria is pretty short, so I'm going to stick with that for this episode. Now, Victoria needs two different versions of a background. I need to split it into the musical version and the movie version, because they're very different. And since I'm more focused on the musical, let's start there. Musical. Victoria is the Dancer of the show, and focuses mostly on ballet, dance moves. Before I go too much further, I should give this disclaimer again, as I've stated, I know very little about Broadway, but I at least have a few musicians in my family, so I can at least string together a coherent thought or two about the music. But in terms of dancing, I don't know squat. I don't know how to analyze it. I don't know how hard it is to do I just enjoy watching it. I do know ballet is incredibly difficult and takes an absurd amount of flexibility, but again, that's about it. So with that in mind, musical Victoria is very hard for me to analyze. Musical Victoria doesn't sing a single line in this entire musical, but she's featured throughout most of the dance numbers. Very early in the musical she does a solo dance. It's during the invitation to the joke a ball, and it's very slow, mature dance number. A lot of fans interpret it as a symbolism of her coming of age and going through puberty, which makes sense, since watching a cat dance through puberty fits the level of weirdness I've come to expect from this musical, plus rum tug Tugger dances shortly after, and his dance is so adult that the evolution of a kitten to a full on sex cat with this transition dance seems fairly poetic. Her early dance number also is likely the explanation on why she's picked as the movie protagonist, which we'll get to shortly after the solo dance number, the sing for murder competition starts, so we don't really see her again, besides as a background dancer, until we get to the jello cabal during the Jellicle Ball. She is shown doing a dance that is interpreted as a mating dance. She does this with different cats, depending on the production, but Plato seems to be the most common. It is quite a dance number, and it is slightly uncomfortable. In the 1998 movie, they are borderline having sex on stage with them, running their hands up and down each other's Jellicle parts. The only other thing worth noting for Victoria is in the musical, she's the first one to reach out to touch Grizabella, to accept her. There seems to be some admiration, but it also might be pity, and we'll get into a little bit of that in the rumor mill. So basically, if I were to summarize Victoria's plot line in the musical, it would look something like this. Within the first 10 minutes of play, she does a solo dance number as one of the youngest kittens getting ready to kick off the murder competition. She then dances in the background for nearly everything else, until she bumps and grinds with play. Doh at the jalaka ball, she's virtually useless until she's the first one to reach out to touch Grizabella, to bring her back to the tribe and let her die, to go the heavy side layer, end of show. But if we change gears with movie Victoria, it's a whole different ball game Tommy hops, which is my new nickname for him, now, decided to revolve the majority of the movie around her. I had mixed feelings on this decision going into the movie. On the plus side, it does make a little sense if you follow the musical timeline, since Victoria is one of the first things to happen with her dance, I also thought Francesca Howard was incredible. So it could have just been a decision to revolve the movie around one of the standout parts. On the other hand, Victoria doesn't really feel like a major part of the murder competition, which is the core piece of the show. She's just eyes for the audience to experience the madness, which to me, felt a little bit off. Either way, the movie basically starts out with Victoria being tossed in a bag into the junkyard where a bunch of the cats are there ready for her. She's then as rushed around as each one does their dance number and does a little bit of dancing herself. She also steals a bunch of Grizabella storyline from other cats, as well as getting an entire backstory to allow her to be the audience's eyes. On top of all that, Andrew Lloyd Webber and Kardashian Nemesis Taylor Swift wrote the movie Victoria, an entirely new song called Beautiful ghost, which is performed after memory at the end of the movie. I gave you musical Victoria story arc. So here is movie Victoria story arc. Movie Victoria is abandoned by humans to kick off the movie and learns it's the night of the Jellicle Ball. She is the one who gets introduced to all the murder contestants one by one, until she gets the ball and meets the Jellicle leader, Old Deuteronomy, where she's told she's not yet a Jellicle when the cats chase grizzabel Out of the ball, Victoria follows her to hear memory, and then she sings beautiful ghosts in response, she's the one who encourages Grizabella to come back inside. And after Grizabella chosen to die, Old Deuteronomy tells Victoria she is now a Jellicle cat. And the movie ends with Judy Dench breaking the fourth wall. The only other thing I'll add about movie Victoria is that she has a very sexual relationship with Mr. Mrs. Which was very weird to watch on screen. We're gonna get into the relationship in the rumor mill, but the movie romance was a lot to watch. Overall, Victoria went from being a dancing kitten in the musical to the main storyline in the movie. It's going to make her hard to rate, but it also gives her a lot more depth in the cat's universe. So how does Victoria's song differ from the poem? Well, Victoria doesn't have a song in the musical, so there are no lyrics to analyze. So instead, I want to touch on beautiful ghost, because Victoria sings that in the movie, and it's been. Bothering me a little bit. The main line in the song goes, and the memories were lost long ago, but at least you have beautiful ghosts. Can we interpret this in any way? Because the memory call out makes me think that this is being sung to or about Grizabella. However, if it's being sung to her, the next line is confusing, because saying you're going to have beautiful ghost, does that mean she's not reborn? Does that mean she's staying in the heavy side lair until the next cat dies next year at the Joker ball? I need to know more about this and how they wrote it. If this is discussed in the director's note with the movie. I haven't listened to it yet. So hopefully Tommy hops gives you some answers, and if not, Andrew Lloyd Webber and Taylor Swift, you know how to get in contact with me. Let's dig into some real and fictional characters for Victoria. Now, since Victoria is a dancer, let's pirouette our way into some parallels. First up is one of the weirdest ballet movies I've ever seen, called Black Swan. So could Natalie Portman be Victoria? Is there a reason she wasn't casted as Victoria in the movie Black Swan was so beautiful yet so strange that it kind of reminds me of cats. Now, before we go back to solo dances, let's give her some parallels to her play doh dance number, the first I see is the end dance and step up, which would make Victoria Nora Clark. Nora is the best dancer in that school and is sympathetic to an outsider, which fits with Victoria being sympathetic to Grizabella. Plus, I never saw the streetcat version of rum, tug Tugger, but most of step ups music is hip hop related, which means I could totally see Victoria break dancing during one of the street cat room tug Tugger performances. The other pair dance that fits for Victoria is Dirty Dancing, which would make her baby, besides Victoria being a kitten and baby is named well baby, there are a bunch of other parallels between cats and Dirty Dancing. For starters, half of the dances and cats are dirty dances. Plato has his hands all over Victoria when they dance. Rum tuck Tucker's entire song is about having sex with anything that walks and I still need a cold shower anytime I even think about Macavity songs. So yeah, cat says the definition of Dirty Dancing. But the other parallel is in the 1998 movie, there's a pseudo version of the famous Dirty Dancing lift where Plato picks up Victoria. And what a feeling that must have been. Last up, we're going to the 80s to stick Victoria into Flash Dance as Alex Owens, this is one of my favorite references by far, since I could see Victoria being a non talking small town welder girl who's just trying to make it on the big stage. But this parallel gets even darker. Alex in Flash Dance is moonlighting as a sensual dancer, which basically means she's the PG movie version of a stripper, which is exactly the type of place Buster for Jones would be going, and who is on stage dancing during Buster for Jones's song. You guessed it, Victoria. The only way that this would have been a better parallel is if Victoria died to go the heavy side lair in a dramatic fashion by pulling a bucket of water to drench her sitting on a chair in the middle of the stage. Welcome to the internet rumor mill. I'm not quite sure what to make of Victoria's rumor mill, so let's just jump right in to start Victoria's astrology. Sign is Aquarius done. Moving on. Here's my favorite one about Victoria, which is that she's deaf or mute. This is a musical only theory, since she obviously speaks during the movie, but in the musical, she's a dancer, and she does not utter a single sound during the entire musical. I wanted to do some parody references about mute TV or movie characters, but I thought better of it. Up next, there's a rumor that Victoria is not truly a stray and that she leaves her owner's home at night, every night. This is the explanation for why her fur is perfectly white. I'm not sure I buy this rumor, though, since I still don't really know which cats are strays and who are owned by rich families, and as I mentioned in monkeys traps episode, she's on the list of cats who are supposed to be from wealthy owners. Before I get to the family tree, the last rumor is that, originally, Andrew Lloyd Webber wanted one actress for both Victoria and GEMA. He wanted someone who could do both the dancing and the thing, since Victoria does the majority of the dancing and Gemini does a line or two of memory, I'm not sure what to make of this rumor, since he clearly split them out, but it did seem like something he was trying to cast for early on. And now to the cat's family tree. Let's start with the easiest one, which is she is rumored to be made with Plato. If you watch more than 30 seconds of that dance, you'll think the same thing. So this is not even remotely surprising, but that's basically it for the obvious ones in the family tree. The rest gets a little dicey. For example, one rumors that Victoria is Grizabella daughter. This would explain her acceptance of grizzabel at the end of the show, but not much else lines up with this theory. The main reason for that is, as I covered in Episode 11, Victoria seems to be the love kitten of monkeys trapping Demeter, which seems like a way more plausible scenario, but that leads to some weird family tree lines with the rumored Mysteria, which is Victoria's relationship with Mr. Mrs. And Victoria, they seem to be very cuddly during the Jellicle Ball and the. Black fur of MRIs and the white fur of Victoria are a nice contrast. So a lot of fans think they're together. In some fashion, the movie also points to this with a romantic relationship, albeit one that's very uncomfortable to watch. The jury is still out, though, on this one, half the world seems to think that they're together, and the other half of the world seems to think they're brother and sister. But here's where that gets shaky. It seems like Macavity monkey strap and Demeter all are in a love triangle, and that produced at least Victoria and likely Mr. Mrs. One key theory is that Macavity and Demeter are parents to Mr. Mrs. And monk and Demeter are parents of Victoria, which means that if Mr. MREs and Victoria are indeed sleeping together, they're doing so with at least some level of incest. Since Demeter is very likely the mother to both of them, I'm starting to think that Andrew Lloyd Webber never thought through all of this. Because if he did, I have some very, very, very specific questions about what he is searching on Google. Let's dig into Victoria's YouTube comments. Here are my favorite. Richard bowler, Victoria was my first Broadway musical crush. There I said it, Richard, I totally get it. Lisa, aka lease, I can't even tie my shoelaces while standing on one foot without losing balance within five seconds. Amen to that. Lisa, this dance sneak was is very incredible, and I couldn't do a single second of it either. Amy Dan genovic, How on earth does she do that? I guess it's Victoria's Secret. I agree. Amy, we can all use a good cat pun, right? Me out and last but not least, feather moss ASMR, I wish I could move like that, but nachos prevent me. Feather Moss, totally agree. But it's not just nachos for me. So why does Victoria deserve to die over Grizabella? It's hard to make a case for the youngest kitten, who we learned isn't even a Jellicle cat until the end, and I'm not even sure she's eligible, but as someone who can't dance at all, her dance numbers are incredibly impressive and worthy of at least some recognition. Plus Francesca Howard was one of the best performances in the movie, and that deserves at least some recognition. Quick counter, as amazing as Victoria is, I've never booted up the 1998 movie and fast forwarded to Victoria's ballet dance number, but I have fast forwarded to memory a few times, and so Grizabella gets a few bonus points there. So how do I rate Victoria on a scale of one to nine cat lives. I give Victoria an incomplete cat. I don't actually think she is part of this murder competition, so I'm unwilling to score her in this competition for the podcast. Thanks for listening to episode 12 about Victoria on the Ron cat died. The podcast breakdown on catastrophe. Follow along. You can subscribe on Apple podcast, Spotify, Stitcher, or anywhere else you listen to podcasts, follow us on twitter or instagram at the wrong cat died, or check us out on our website, the wrong cat died.com you.