Given “Cats” ’s dominance—it ran on Broadway for eighteen years—it’s difficult to remember that, in 1981, Lloyd Webber’s synthesizer-forward musical interpretation of Eliot’s whimsical poems seemed like a sure loser. Eliot’s verses have no connecting narrative, so Lloyd Webber and his director, Trevor Nunn, corralled them into a junk-yard revue in which various cats jockey for a prize from Old Deuteronomy, who will select one to ascend to “the Heaviside Layer.” If you overlook the nine-lives-are-a-burden, death-wish aspect—which the musical strongly encourages you to do—“Cats” originally played as a cross between a children’s song cycle and a dance fantasia consisting of eroticized aerobics, which were very much a thing in the eighties. (Schlock the show may have been, but I wasn’t the only one who fell for it.)