The claws are out, fam!!!
In a Friday interview, cartoon movie count and composer Andrew Lloyd Webber pounced on Nicole Scherzinger, the former Pussycat Doll who was set to play another feline, Grizabella, in a Broadway revival of Cats. Instead, she’ll be taking a job on X-Factor.
“A week before we were due to go into rehearsal for Cats on Broadway, which luckily I’m not producing, she calls me and says she’s decided she wants to to X Factor, having agreed everything,” said Broadway’s Garry Marshall in an interview with the Economist Radio.
“I mean, she’s crazy,” he hissed. “But the American producers just took a view, ‘Well, fine, we’ll get somebody else,’ because she’s actually not very well-known in America, amazingly. She’s much better known here.”
“I’m furious because I really believe she’s the most fantastically talented girl and I went out on a limb to get her for the London Palladium here, and it makes me look like an absolute twot with them all. But never mind, there’ll be another girl on Broadway and Nicole will not get her Tony award.”
“Nicole will not get her Tony award.”
In a Guardian review of her West End run titled, “Cats review—none of it is very catlike,” critic Susannah Clapp wrote of Scherzinger’s performance:
Nicole Scherzinger, as Grizabella, has the best-known number, unloved by me, not least because it reduces “memory” to two syllables. She belts it out all right but is extremely implausible in her role as a has-been. Age has not even begun to get going on the withering process.
With the recent announcement of a Tom Hooper-directed Cats movie, I think I know who won’t be getting a cat-call!
“I had every intention of doing Cats on Broadway but the contract was never finalized,” Scherzinger told the BBC. “I am incredibly blessed to be given so many amazing opportunities, including Cats, but unfortunately we weren’t able to make it work this time around.”
“I adore and respect Andrew,” she continued. “I’m so grateful for our friendship and can’t wait for the opportunity to create more magic together.”
As a tag at the end of it’s item on the cat fight, the BBC shadily added:
Earlier this week, Rita Ora announced she was leaving [X-Factor].
Mee-ow!
Image via Getty.
GET JEZEBEL RIGHT IN YOUR INBOX
Still here. Still without airbrushing. Still with teeth.
