In ‘Cats,’ ‘Memory’ is a ‘popera’ furball, but don’t blame Jennifer Hudson

Given that it contains dozens of digitally smoothed-out crotches, a chorus line of “tiny human-faced cockroaches� (to borrow a suitably nightmarish phrase from my colleague Justin Chang) and the sight of Dame Judi Dench as a cat wearing what appears to be a fur coat — this is basically the same thing as a human wearing a skin coat, right? — I can understand why the music of “Cats� has perhaps been overlooked in all the talk about the busy new big-screen adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s smash Broadway musical.

But “Cats� bears examining as a piece of pop, if only because the show’s signature song, “Memory,� has become an undeniable pop standard — covered countless times by innumerable artists including Barbra Streisand, Barry Manilow, Celine Dion, Susan Boyle and, of course, Nicole Scherzinger of the Pussycat Dolls — in the four decades since this artifact of the early 1980s premiered.

The accumulated weight of all those renditions has had something of a dulling effect on “Memory,� which is performed in the musical by Grizabella, a once-glamorous cat whose fall from grace has her looking back to a time when she “knew what happiness was.� To hear the song’s dreary opening arpeggios now is to reflexively brush off the possibility of encountering something that might move you; the tune, a happily trashy bit of ersatz Puccini, has become a kind of showbiz parody of the emotion it once sought genuinely to embody.

×

Funny, then, that Jennifer Hudson’s performance of “Memory� is the sole musical number in the new movie that summons real feeling. It’s not that she does anything radical to the song; indeed, it’s that she doesn’t in a film hell-bent on using every trick of technology, choreography and James Corden-ology to get a reaction — any reaction — out of you. Gazing into the camera, her wide face twisted with sorrow, upper lip wet with snot, Hudson simply sings the stuffing out of “Memory� with such intensity that you almost forget she’s wearing a pair of fuzzy cat ears.

With her husky-then-silky vocal tone and her precise navigation of Lloyd Webber’s tricky intervals, Hudson’s performance allows you to re-experience this most over-handled of cultural objects as music — as the pained outpouring of a woman (OK, a cat) for whom even a streetlamp has turned menacing. No wonder director Liesl Tommy hired Hudson to play Aretha Franklin in next year’s “Respect�: In the first trailer for the biopic, playing as we speak before “Cats,� the singer somehow gives the titular soul classic a fresh zing.

Hudson isn’t the only pop star — does that feel like the right thing to call an “American Idol� flameout turned Academy Award winner? — in “Cats,� which largely stays true to Lloyd Webber’s over-the-top orchestra-with-a-guy-on-synth sound. Jason Derulo, clearly jazzed to have been cast in what he takes to be a prestige production, shows up for an aggressively frisky spin through “The Rum Tum Tugger,� while Taylor Swift appears as an actor (in the slinky “Macavity�) and as a songwriter (in the earnest “Beautiful Ghosts,� a new tune sung by the cat named Victoria). They both look to being having a blast, though nothing about their performances made me want to cue up their contributions on the “Cats� soundtrack afterward.

Hudson is doing something different. She’s angling for a spot in the crowded pantheon of remember-ers.