“I felt like I was losing my mind,” Sarah says. “I was just concentrating on taking deep breaths.”
But then there are the people for whom “Cats” under the influence was positively moving.
“I was so delighted,” says Kat (yes, her real name), a 32-year-old in Los Angeles. “I was like, ‘Is this genius? Is this the best thing I have ever seen?’ ”
“I had a realization partway through that I am the only person in the world who understands ‘Cats,’ ” says Kate, 31, a medical researcher in Chicago, who soon found herself plotting “Cats”-based doctoral thesis while still in the theater: She would examine the class dialectic of 1930s London (when T.S. Eliot wrote the poems that inspired “Cats”), the late ’80s heyday of Webber and police brutality in 2019.
“It doesn’t sound as groundbreaking now,” Kate says, “but please remember I was very stoned.”
In New York, a 26-year-old man named Ryan, who messaged The Post while still high on the edibles he took for that evening’s screening, expressed his lust for “a particular cat I would love to do bad things to me.” (It was Munkustrap, played by chiseled ballet dancer Robbie Fairchild).
In Michigan, a 33-year-old man named Zachary, also on edibles, wrestled with his own attraction to the cat version of Swift. (“Her face still looks like Taylor Swift,” he tells The Post — and also, it seems, himself. “But no, she’s a monster.”)
A 40-year-old Washingtonian named Danielle found herself confounded — first in an academic way, then in a giggling-uncontrollably way — by the below-the-belt anatomies of the creatures on-screen.
In Seattle, a 26-year-old teacher named Dan ate a 20-milligram THC caramel and popped on his headphones to see if “Cats” would sync up with Pink Floyd’s “The Dark Side of the Moon,” like “The Wizard of Oz” is supposed to do, according to stoner lore. If you spin the album twice, Dan reports, McKellen’s performance of “Gus: The Theatre Cat” aligns perfectly with “The Great Gig in the Sky.”
In Los Angeles, a 23-year-old actor named Davis, who went to the movie with some friends, took a huge hit of amyl nitrite (i.e. “poppers”) at a key moment. “It was literally as Jennifer [Hudson] screams out, ‘Touch meeeeee, it’s so easy to leave meeeeeee,’ the poppers for all three of us kicked in,” he says. “I felt myself hit the Heaviside Layer like Grizabella, the glamour cat.”
Could “Cats,” dead on arrival with critics and mass audiences, ascend to the Heaviside Layer to be reborn as a stoner classic? There’s talk that the movie could be the next “Rocky Horror Picture Show,” a cult film from 1975 that still inspires audiences to dress up as the characters and yell at the screen. On Twitter, someone posted video of an audience member in a cat suit dancing along to the credits. Some theaters, like the Alamo Drafthouse, are hosting “rowdy” screenings of “Cats” where people — many in various states of inebriation — are encouraged to yell at the screen. Other screenings not explicitly designated as “rowdy” are becoming communal experiences nonetheless — or, perhaps, mass trauma events.
One “Cats” viewer who ate a THC-infused caramel, a 43-year-old Tony-award-winning Broadway producer in New York, described a “bonding experience” with other attendees in the sparsely populated theater: “Just like, okay, we’re doing this together, this is a thing that is transpiring, and we are bearing witness.”
The precise moment when he “punctured the looking glass” happened toward the end of the movie, following the kidnapping of Old Deuteronomy, played by Dench. When Mr. Mistoffelees, the magician cat, “conjured Judi Dench back, and she sang his tune for the 900th time,” he says, “I lost touch with what we understand is reality. At that point, the rest of the audience was in gales of laughter as well, and then it was just a slide down the chute of hysteria to the end.”
When they left the theater, “there was just silence, no one had words,” says the Broadway producer. “No one could name what had happened to us.”