By Neil Durham

WORTH A LOOK?: ****

WHEN? Saturday 1 August (matinee), opens 6 August and runs through 12 September 2026 RUNTIME: 135 minutes (including a 20-minute interval)

It’s the extraordinarily moving song Memory – sample lyric: ‘I remember the time I knew what happiness was, let the Memory live again’ – which elevates this Andrew Lloyd Webber musical based on T.S. Eliot’s poems in Old Possum’s Book Of Practical Cats.

• Read on for reasons including how to see this show on tour around the UK after this run

Director Drew McOnie, also artistic director of this glorious venue, gives us a Cats with the emphasis on dance as you might expect from his CV, explaining in the programme: ‘This piece levitates somewhere between a concept album, a choreo-poem, a song cycle, a poetry recital and a ballet and what I find thrilling is that it’s the very fact that it’s none of these forms exclusively that makes it a musical’.

We 1st saw it on its original run with our family in the 80s at what was then the New London Theatre and is now the Gillian Lynne Theatre named after the innovative choreographer who 1st got her paws on this show.

We remember it because the cats interacted with the audience in a way we’d not experienced before in the theatre and there is a little of this as the feline characters enter the outdoor auditorium at the start of the show.

Singing Memory and playing Grizabella, an outcast cat with a glittering past, would normally be Rachael Wooding (Standing At The Sky’s Edge, National Theatre) but we see her understudy Taziva-Faye Katsande who is in fine voice.

The charm of Cats and perhaps the reason some may find it a little twee is that each of the creatures has their own song, like a long-form SIX, and Gary Wilmot (Anything Goes, Barbican) is charming as Gus The Theatre Cat who also performs Growltiger’s Last Stand.

Melanie La Barrie (Hadestown, Lyric Theatre) also proves she can lead a cast as Old Deuteronomy who is ringleader for the only real plot you need to know as the Jellicle cats choose which cat of them will ascend to the Heaviside Layer and come back to a new life.

A little like The X Factor then with songs which mostly have a whiff of Starlight Express about them but appeal to us because we studied these characters beyond the dawn of time at school.

This trip was very much a last-minute change of plan for us and we might return to see this show in its full wonder as the sun goes down but do remember to apply your suncream if you attend the matinee as we did in what was blazing sun.

Before the show we spy its director showing some chutzpah wearing a sports shirt with his surname on his back and asking a colleague for a copy of the script which makes us chuckle because there aren’t many lines.

This production will tour the UK and Ireland from October 2026 until 2027 and who would bet against it finding a home at the Palladium at some point in the near future? Tour details

• Main pictures via Facebook courtesy Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre Tickets
• Have you seen Cats before and what did you think of it? Let us know what you thought in the comments below
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