Cats is a sung-through musical with music by Andrew Lloyd Webber. The musical tells the story of a tribe of cats called the Jellicles and the night they make the "Jellicle choice" by deciding which cat will ascend to the Heaviside Layer and come back to a new life. As of , Cats remains the fifth-longest-running Broadway show and the eighth-longest-running West End show.
Lloyd Webber began setting Eliot's poems to music in , and the compositions were first presented as a song cycle in Producer Cameron Mackintosh then recruited director Trevor Nunn and choreographer Gillian Lynne to turn the songs into a complete musical. The London production ran for 21 years and 8, performances, while the Broadway production ran for 18 years and 7, performances, making Cats the longest-running musical in both theatre districts for a number of years.
Cats has since been revived in the West End twice and on Broadway once. It has also been translated into multiple languages and performed around the world many times. Long-running foreign productions include a year run at the Operettenhaus in Hamburg that played over 6, performances, as well as an ongoing run in a purpose-built theatre in Japan that has played over 10, performances since it opened in Cats started the megamusical phenomenon, establishing a global market for musical theatre and directing the industry's focus to big-budget blockbusters , as well as family- and tourist-friendly shows.
The musical's profound but polarising influence also reshaped the aesthetic, technology, and marketing of the medium. Cats was adapted into a direct-to-video film in and a feature film in Cats is based on T. Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats is a collection of light poetry about cats that Eliot had originally written for his godchildren in the s.
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Due to the rhythmic nature of Eliot's work, there had been previous attempts before Cats at setting his poems to music, though none of these attempts had been met with much critical or commercial success.
