Nearly half a century after CATS first opened in London, it is Lloyd Webber’s music that still brings an audience to its feet in the masterful new production at Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre.
As the familiar opening music of CATS begins and cats quietly emerge from the aisles, an old memory returns. CATS was one of the first musicals I saw as a teenager, and it opened up a new world of theatre for me. Watching performers move and sing like cats expanded my idea of what theatre could be.
Drew McOnie, director and choreographer of the new production at Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre, was similarly captivated by the show at a young age. At seventeen, he skipped school to attend an open audition for an international production of CATS. A week later, he began his professional career as a performer in Germany. Decades later, he has returned to the musical that started it all, this time as its director and choreographer.
First staged in London in 1981, CATS grew out of T. S. Eliot’s 1939 poetry collection Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats. Andrew Lloyd Webber set Eliot’s poems about a collection of distinctive cats to music and developed them into a musical built around a special night when the cats gather together. One by one, they introduce themselves through song and dance, before their leader, Old Deuteronomy, chooses one to ascend to the Heaviside Layer and begin a new life. Grizabella, an ageing cat cast out by the community, also returns, singing of the life she has lost and her hope of beginning again. Gathering under the moonlight to reveal themselves, they dance together and eventually choose one among them; the cats form a tribe.
A particular ease comes only from thorough rehearsal. It is the freedom to look directly at the audience and enjoy the moment without thinking about what comes next or watching someone else for a cue. The most striking quality of this production is its performers’ confidence. They know their bodies and their characters, and they trust those moving alongside them. That ease becomes confidence, and that confidence gives them freedom.
Rather than imitating cat behaviour, McOnie’s choreography finds feline qualities within the human body. The performers remain recognisably human, while flexibility and fluidity give their movements an animal quality. The choreography moves easily between individual movement and ensemble work. Cats who appear to be following their own paths suddenly turn in the same direction and move as one, making the Jellicles feel like a single tribe. In contrast, Grizabella’s isolation becomes all the more visible as she remains on the edges of the group.
Sami Fendall’s costumes reinforce this approach. Instead of the fur-covered costumes traditionally associated with CATS, Fendall uses fabric, embroidery and texture to suggest fur while leaving the performers’ bodies and silhouettes clearly visible. The ears and tails are simplified too. This keeps muscle movement and body lines visible, bringing greater clarity to the choreography.
The colours reveal their full effect when the cats gather as a group. Each costume reflects an individual cat’s personality, but when the company gathers, the colours flow naturally into one another, creating a gradient across the stage. Different shades come together to form a single visual composition. The costumes are most beautiful as an ensemble, reflecting the structure of a musical in which very different cats come together to form one tribe.
Another element that makes this CATS distinctive is the venue itself. Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre is a place made for enjoying the brief British summer. Its steep, stadium-like seating surrounds the stage, with tall trees rising behind it and the sky completely open above. For this sold-out performance, every seat was filled, while more people sat on the grass beside the auditorium. With the park immediately outside, sounds from beyond the venue occasionally drift in.
Yet sitting inside the circle formed by the high banks of seats and surrounding trees can feel like entering a small island cut off from the middle of London. The setting overlaps naturally with the world of CATS: a hidden society of cats existing alongside the human city, but largely unseen by it. The designers have imagined the production around that idea. The open-air theatre within the park effectively becomes the cats’ secret world.
The space’s atmosphere shifts as the performance continues. When Act One begins, there is still light in the summer evening sky. It gradually fades, and by Act Two darkness has settled over the whole space. Above the huge crescent moon on stage stretches the real night sky, with the deepening darkness becoming part of the lighting design. The actual trees behind the stage are deliberately lit as well, incorporating the surrounding landscape into the production.
As night falls, the cats gather, dance and perform their own rituals beneath the trees. CATS was the musical that changed the life of seventeen-year-old Drew McOnie. Now he has brought the work that launched his career into a world of real trees and open sky, creating a new CATS for this stage.
Yet beneath all this reinvention lies something unchanged: Andrew Lloyd Webber’s music. CATS unfolds as a succession of episodes in which different cats step forward to introduce themselves through song and dance. The music connects these individual appearances into a single show. Melodies return and transform, carrying the stories of very different cats through the course of one night.
And then there is ‘Memory’. It is famous enough to have a life far beyond CATS, but heard within Grizabella’s story, it takes on a different weight. Cast out by the Jellicle community, she looks back on the life she once had while longing to be accepted again. At the performance I attended, Taziva-Faye Katsande played Grizabella, powerfully capturing her loneliness and longing for acceptance. When ‘Memory’ ended, the audience rose to give her a standing ovation, even though the show itself was not yet over. Nearly half a century after CATS first opened in London, it is Lloyd Webber’s music that still brings an audience to its feet.
CATS is playing at Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre until September 19.
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