Music: Andrew Lloyd Webber
Director: Drew McOnie
You’ve probably half made up your mind about the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical Cats long before you enter the auditorium for Drew McOnie’s revival at Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre. Once the longest-running musical in the UK, lasting over 20 years, its slightly kitsch 1980s aesthetic and loose collection of feline personality-based songs now has a rather wacky reputation. But with Lloyd Webber’s work being very successfully reimagined by a new generation of directors and choreographers in recent years, this is McOnie’s punt at restoring Cats to the top tier of the composer’s works. You may not be wholly convinced by what remains a bizarre spectacle, but treat it like a loose variety show of musical acts and there’s plenty to enjoy in this latest revival.
The plot, such as it is, involves an annual gathering of preposterously named moggies who celebrate themselves until dawn, at which point their renowned elder Old Deuteronomy (Melanie La Barrie) will select one worthy cat to ascend to the Heaviside Layer where they will be reborn. In the meantime, the party guests are presented in song, based on the poems by T.S. Eliot, showcasing the naughty and mischievous, the thieves and the theatre cats, the railway and the ever-hungry upper-class puss.
McOnie has left behind Gillian Lynne’s famous choreography and created a whole new show which retains its ballet roots but leans into jazz but also street and break dance for Magical Mister Mistoffelees (a superb moment for performer Jet Yau). The segments with the full ensemble are sometimes too jagged, perhaps under-rehearsed, not fully synchronised, giving the first Act a particularly shabby feel, and it’s not always easy to grasp the chaotic-looking arrangements. But the solos are much sharper with a cleaner performance on the whole in Bustopher Jones: The Cat About Town (Eliot Broadfoot) and Mungojerrie and Rumpleteazer (Danny Nattrass and Briana Craig), although McOnie doesn’t always make things easy for them with unwieldy props and hoops.
Act Two is far stronger with more showstopping moments that come alive once the sun has gone down, including Gus the Theatre Cat (Gary Wilmot) with an entertaining recreation of his famous piratical role as Growltiger. Everything feels much bigger and tighter in this part of the show with a fun ensemble piece for Skimbleshanks: The Railway Cat (Matthew Caputo) riding a mini engine, along with a ring of real fire for the dangerous McCavity: The Mystery Cat (Diante Lodge).
One of the oddities of Cats is that the characters aren’t often given solos about themselves, so the shunned Grisabella’s Memory is a rare exception. Delivered at the press performance by understudy Taziva-Faye Katsande, it is a powerful moment for the young performer and the audience, delivering arguably the most recognisable and commercially successful musical song of the last 50 years.
Cats is described as a sung-through musical, but danced-through is probably a more accurate description, demanding an enormous amount from its hard-working 25-plus cast who remain on stage for most of the show and are central to bringing the different stories to life. It’s a shame the music under Geraint Owen hasn’t shaken off the synthesised sounds of the 1980s which make some of the score feel dated, but there are parts of Lloyd Webber’s composition that swoop and glide, force you to tap your toes and draw you in. And it’s held together well by semi-narrator Munkustrap (an excellent and poised Jack Wilcox) as a master of ceremonies.
“The theatre is certainly not what it was”, theatre cat Gus complains and seeing Cats again, that is arguably true. This remains a tricky show; the tonal changes are rapid, the anthropomorphism sometimes alarming and the personalities variably interesting. McOnie makes half a case for it with this hit-and-miss revival but doesn’t quite reach the Heaviside Layer before daybreak.
Runs until 19 September 2026
