Cats at Regent's Park: a feral, four-star revival that claws back credibility

Andrew Lloyd Webber's Cats has always been a hard sell. A musical about alley felines competing for reincarnation, built on T S Eliot's whimsical poems, it asks audiences to suspend disbelief for two hours of adults in fur costumes introducing themselves. The 2019 film adaptation only deepened the scepticism. But Drew McOnie's new staging at Regent's Park Open Air Theatre proves the material can work, if you let the cats be cats.

McOnie, who directs and choreographs, has stripped away the balletic stiffness that plagued previous versions. His ensemble moves like a genuine colony: flopping atop one another, hissing, flexing, prowling across Sami Fendall's minimalist moon-shaped set. The instruction appears to have been "act like cats" rather than "dance as cats," and the difference is startling. The production feels looser, more instinctive, and strangely wiser for it.

A Jellicle Ball under two moons

The narrative remains threadbare. The Jellicle tribe gathers for their annual ball, overseen by statesperson-like Old Deuteronomy, who will choose one cat for rebirth. Each feline presents their case through song and dance. Jaydon Vijn steals scenes as Rum Tum Tugger, channelling a charismatic, Harry Styles-coded swagger. The mischievous duo Mungojerrie and Rumpleteazer delight. The villainous Macavity looms. But the emotional centre belongs to Grizabella, the outcast who left the tribe and returns seeking redemption.

On press night, understudy Taziva-Faye Katsande stepped into the role. Her rendition of Memory is vocally superb, though the casting reveals a tension: she is too young to carry the character's required weight of nostalgia and regret. Similarly, Melanie La Barrie's Old Deuteronomy, at 51, lacks the ancient gravity Eliot's poems imply. The production as a whole skews youthful, which may be a deliberate choice for an open-air summer run but softens the work's meditation on age and memory.

Why the setting completes the show

Fendall's design places a glowing moon at the top of the stage, inviting glances upward to the real sky above Regent's Park. Under that double moonlight, the musical's abstract logic settles into something like coherence. The strangeness becomes the point. Eliot's poems were never meant to be literal; they were feline vignettes, glimpses of secret lives. McOnie's production honours that by refusing to explain, only to show.

The run continues until 19 September. For a show that has spent decades inviting ridicule, this version offers something rare: a Cats that feels like it knows exactly what it is.