I'm playing "Cats" in July

[heldenbone]

...for a 1-week run. The set the troupe has rented (I haven't seen the part yet) I'm told has one trombone part. Can anyone tell me what to expect? Listening to the soundtrack on Youtube reveals a lot of electronics and percussion.

[tbdana]

I played it for a couple months about 35 years ago. All I really remember was that the single trombone part was pretty boring. Nothing particularly difficult. The hardest parts were keeping track of rests and getting thoroughly bored with what I thought was a very pedestrian book.

Sorry, not the detail you're looking for. But maybe it gives you a small sense of it, or at least how I felt about it.

[heldenbone]

Thanks. That is the impression I got from my cursory listen of the soundtrack. Maybe a week will be enough to learn the meaning of "jellicle."

[WGWTR180]

I'm so sorry.

[Schultz]

There are over 20 different orchestrations of CATS, 6 of which don't use tromnbone, so it's anyones guess as to which one your production will be using. Here's a webpage that lists the different versions and where they were used.
https://catsmusical.fandom.com/wiki/Orc ... ur_Version

Possibly yours is the 2016 Licensed version?

[heldenbone]

I won't know 'til I see what they rented, but "authorized 2016" is a good guess.

[Mikebmiller]

I saw it a couple of weeks ago at Flat Rock Playhouse in NC. It was great but they only had a 6 piece band. Not using the trumpet for this show is criminal as there are so many good licks on the soundtrack.

[heldenbone]

I survived CATS. It was a revised 16-piece 2019 version marked ""Cats Definitive" and likely based on the Really Useful Group publication, but now distributed by Concord Theatricals. Much of the high trombone writing was rewritten to be lower, not just octave transpositions. Most of the part but not all looks like bass trombone. I played it on a Duo Gravis and things went OK.

There was a lot of counting. The part was repetitive. The electronics (guitar, bass, 3 synths) were very loud.
The cast was very good. It turns out "jellicle" is probably a synonym for "smurfy."

[harrisonreed]

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