{"id":725706,"date":"2026-08-03T08:55:08","date_gmt":"2026-08-03T08:55:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/725706\/"},"modified":"2026-08-03T08:55:08","modified_gmt":"2026-08-03T08:55:08","slug":"never-felt-so-scared-the-cats-obsessive-whos-created-a-feral-dance-version-of-the-purr-fect-musical-stage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/725706\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Never felt so scared\u2019: the Cats obsessive who\u2019s created a feral dance version of the purr-fect musical | Stage"},"content":{"rendered":"

At the age of 17, Drew McOnie was so determined to be in the musical Cats<\/a> that he snuck out of school to audition. Four days later, he was on a flight to Germany to join the international production. (Luckily, he was at a performing arts school and they forgave him.) It was a life-changing moment: at that point, McOnie\u2019s stellar career as a dancer, Olivier award-winning choreographer and director began \u2013 and, 23 years later, it\u2019s all about to come full circle. McOnie has created his own version of the musical he\u2019s been obsessed with since childhood.<\/p>\n

For any dancer growing up in the 1980s and 90s, Cats was the musical: dance wasn\u2019t just an accompaniment, but instrumental to the show. Gillian Lynne\u2019s original choreography is iconic \u2013 much copied by local dance schools and student shows of the era. Lynne was a force of nature, still doing the splits at 88, four years before she died in 2018. For McOnie, artistic director at Regent\u2019s Park Open Air theatre and famed for his blazing choreography in Jesus Christ Superstar, it takes some nerve to remake it.<\/p>\n

double quotation markThere are a lot of kittens in the cast. My task is to make each one light up<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t think I\u2019ve ever felt so scared,\u201d he says. Not because he doesn\u2019t think he can do it, but \u201cbecause I was in the original and I adore Gillian Lynne. The challenge is to honour her with the amount of rigour she put in \u2013 to match that ferocity of spirit, that ambition.\u201d<\/p>\n

The energy is buzzing \u2026 McOnie and cast in rehearsals. Photograph: Mark Senior<\/p>\n

We might now think of Cats as a \u201cglorious celebration of the 80s\u201d, says McOnie, but we shouldn\u2019t forget how original and contemporary it was when it first came out. He wants his version to feel the same to audiences today. That means movement that brings in current influences from street and commercial dance, as well as jazz and classical, \u201cwhile also staying within that world of being a cat\u201d.<\/p>\n

As I enter Studio 1 at Regent\u2019s Park, the energy\u2019s buzzing, the moves are sensual, low slung and slinky, earthier than the original, but with bursts of wild, joyful energy. Then the dancers suddenly go full pelt. It\u2019s more feral than you might expect. \u201cI don\u2019t think many of our cats are house cats,\u201d says McOnie.<\/p>\n

Because his youthful experience on Cats was so formative, McOnie deliberately went in search of standout student dancers to add to the mix. \u201cThere are a lot of kittens in the cast,\u201d he says. The young dancers are so effortlessly cool, he tells me, not like Tiggerish McOnie was at their age, bouncing off the walls. But in rehearsals, he started digging beneath their inscrutable exteriors, letting them loose in solos. \u201cOne lad just completely lit up and I was like, \u2018OK, there\u2019s the teenager.\u2019 I said, \u2018I like the version of you bounding about with your eyes on fire.\u2019 My task is to make each one of them light up.\u201d<\/p>\n

Cats isn\u2019t known as a particularly \u201ccool\u201d show, but McOnie thinks we forget how impressively out-there Andrew Lloyd Webber\u2019s musicals can be. \u201cThey\u2019re extraordinarily off the wall, completely form-busting and brave,\u201d he says. He has nothing but praise for Lloyd Webber. \u201cHonestly, my time with Andrew over the last year, with the combination of Jesus Christ Superstar and Cats, has been utterly thrilling. He\u2019s incredibly funny. He\u2019s very witty, he\u2019s very sharp, and he\u2019s really, really rigorous.\u201d McOnie is awed by Lloyd Webber\u2019s ability to see the big picture. \u201cHe\u2019s like a musical architect,\u201d says McOnie, able to glean how every detail fits into the larger show. \u201cThere\u2019s definitely a magic about what he can hear.\u201d<\/p>\n

Wonder and joy \u2026 Gary Wilmot as Gus the Theatre Cat. Photograph: Mark Senior<\/p>\n

McOnie does admit Cats is a bit weird, though. Based on the TS Eliot poems in Old Possum\u2019s Book of Practical Cats, with portraits of Mungojerrie and Rumpleteazer, Macavity and Skimbleshanks, it doesn\u2019t exactly have a strong narrative. \u201cIt sort of levitates somewhere between a choreo-poem, a ballet, a song cycle, a piece of vaudeville and a kind of pagan ritual,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

What it isn\u2019t is a bunch of cute talking animals. In this production, the costumes won\u2019t be fully formed cats, and they\u2019re not masked. McOnie sees it as \u201ca ritual that endows the performer with an animal form through which they can express deeply human emotion\u201d. There\u2019ll still be some \u201cgreat glittery numbers\u201d though, don\u2019t worry. \u201cIts core themes are wonder and joy.\u201d<\/p>\n

I have to ask McOnie briefly about the much-maligned Cats film<\/a>. It turns out he loved a lot of things about it but thinks it was doomed from the start. \u201cIt just isn\u2019t a filmic idea,\u201d he says. \u201cCats is one of the most extraordinary expressions of theatricality of all time,\u201d he says. \u201cCapital-T theatre \u2013 because so much of it hangs in the imagination. You have this mass of bodies giving all of their soul to that music, with that exchange of energy live in the room.\u201d<\/p>\n

It all comes back to Gillian Lynne\u2019s legacy. She trusted dancers and the power of what they could do. McOnie has exactly the same animal instinct.<\/p>\n

Cats is at Regents Park Open Air theatre, London<\/a>, until 19 September<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"At the age of 17, Drew McOnie was so determined to be in the musical Cats that he…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":725707,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[96,59,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-725706","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-entertainment","tag-gb","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/725706","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=725706"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/725706\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/725707"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=725706"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=725706"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=725706"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}