Cats – Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre

Melanie La Barrie and cast in Cats at Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre, London. Picture: Mark Senior

Cats continues at Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre, London until 19 September 2026.

Star rating: five stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

Under a canopy of London plane trees and the genuine night sky, Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre welcomes Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cats for an eight-week season, ahead of a UK tour running through to June 2027. It is, on paper and in promise, one of the most anticipated theatrical events of the summer – a show whose reputation precedes it by more than four decades, now reborn in an outdoor amphitheatre uniquely suited to its feral, moonlit world.

Directed and choreographed by the venue’s own artistic director Drew McOnie, this new staging swaps the proscenium arch for the open air, allowing the Jellicle tribe to prowl a stage bordered by real trees and real weather rather than painted flats. It is a natural home for a musical that has always traded in transformation and spectacle: the junkyard was never meant to be tidy, and Regent’s Park, with its rustling foliage and encroaching dusk, supplies an atmosphere no indoor house can quite replicate.

The show’s afterlife since its West End opening in 1981 (running for 21 years) and Broadway transfer a year later (18 years), along with ‘Memory’ becoming one of the most recorded songs in musical theatre, has been eventful, if uneven.

A direct-to-video animated adaptation appeared in 1998, and in 2019 Universal Pictures released a live-action film directed by Tom Hooper, employing digital ‘digital fur technology’. The film was, by near-universal consensus, a critical and commercial misfire, remembered chiefly for its uncanny visual effects rather than any fidelity to the stage show’s tactile, dance-driven charm. If anything, the film’s stumble has thrown the strengths of a well-drilled live staging — the physicality, the sweat, the proximity of dancers to audience — into sharper relief, and it is precisely that live, danced spectacle that this Regent’s Park production seems poised to reclaim.

The production’s Old Deuteronomy, the wise leader of the Jellicle tribe, is played by Melanie La Barrie whose stage resumé of leading character roles reads like a survey of the West End’s biggest titles of the past two decades. This makes her casting as the tribe’s benevolent patriarch feel less like stunt casting and more like a natural culmination.

Gary Wilmot takes on the dual role of Gus the Theatre Cat and Growltiger, the faded feline actor whose reminiscences form one of the score’s most theatrical set pieces.

The role of Grizabella is principally played by Rachael Wooding. At the performance under review, however, the role was taken by first cover Taziva-Faye Katsande who made a strong impression in the role. Katsande brought a rawness and vulnerability to the outcast’s late-night redemption that never tipped into melodrama, culminating in a ‘Memory’ that earned one of the evening’s loudest ovations. It is exactly the kind of performance that makes the case for attending more than once.

Jaydon Vijn takes on the flamboyant Rum Tum Tugger, Millie O’Connell plays Demeter and Jack Wilcox appears as Munkustrap, the tribe’s watchful second-in-command who guides much of the show’s narration.

The role of Tantomile, one half of the tribe’s telepathic twins, was played on the night by Taela Yeomans-Brown, ordinarily a swing and co-dance captain for the production; her sharp, precise physicality made a strong case for the show’s uncanny stillness amid the ensemble’s otherwise feline chaos.

The wider ensemble – a demanding, dance-first company by the standards of any musical – includes Danny Nattrass and Briana Craig as the mischievous double act Mungojerrie and Rumpleteazer. Jet Yau is wonderful as the illusionist Mr. Mistoffelees, surprising with a turn toward hip-hop and headspins in place of the character’s iconic tour jetés, while Patricia Zhou, as Cassandra, brings the balletic style straight back moments later.

Another highlight of the far superior Act II is, expectedly, the long-anticipated arrival of Macavity – always the jazziest number in the score – delivered with spectacular flair by Dianté Lodge as the elusive mystery cat.

Behind the scenes, the production reunites several of Regent’s Park’s most trusted collaborators. Sami Fendall leads the design team, inheriting the show’s most totemic image — the design of Gus the Theatre Cat — from John Napier, the original production’s set and costume designer, whose junkyard aesthetic effectively invented the show’s visual language in 1981.

Lighting design is by Jessica Hung Han Yun, tasked with conjuring the show’s signature moonlit transformations without the luxury of a fully controllable indoor rig – no small feat in an amphitheatre exposed to the elements and the last of the evening light. Sound design is by Adam Fisher, musical supervision by Alex Parker and musical direction by Geraint Owen, with Ingrid Mackinnon serving as intimacy director and Kev McCurdy as fight director.

In the end, what lingers longest is the visual transformation – though there is something quietly apt, too, about Cats arriving at Regent’s Park in the first place. A show that has always asked audiences to suspend disbelief and accept a company of dancers as feral, moonlit creatures finds, in this open-air setting, an environment that does half the imaginative work already.

McOnie’s staging carries real ambition, matched by the pedigree of its leading players. But it is the design work that leaves the deepest mark: the costume and wig design by Fendall – who also created the efficient single set with its moving moon – and the make-up design by Guy Common have stripped the cats of their 1980s legwarmers, perhaps the most dated aspect of the original production.

The cats look more human here, and certainly more contemporary – yet that modern palatability (especially by virtue of a shortened runtime), won’t offend fans of the original; it’s not a reinvention like the recent Broadway production of Cats: The Jellicle Ball, but an improved and dusted-off version of a classic, whose main weakness – the lack of a real storyline – will always remain.

Patrick Honoré