CATS began, improbably, as a set of poems. Andrew Lloyd Webber first set T.S. Eliot's Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats to music as a personal project in the late 1970s, with no clear plan for a full show. Director Trevor Nunn and choreographer Gillian Lynne helped shape those songs into a fully realised musical, adding the now-iconic "Memory" - written by Andrew with lyrics adapted by Nunn - to give the show its emotional core. CATS opened at the New London Theatre in the West End in 1981, staged in the round with the audience seated amid a junkyard set.

It became an instant sensation, running for 21 years and nearly 9,000 performances, and won the Olivier and Evening Standard Awards for Best Musical. The show crossed to Broadway in 1983, where it won seven Tony Awards, including Best Musical, and ran for 18 years - at the time, the longest-running production in Broadway history. Since then, CATS has been staged in more than 50 countries and translated into over 20 languages, seen by tens of millions of people worldwide, and it remains one of the defining musicals of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s career.