Cats

A company of London cats gathers in a junkyard for the annual Jellicle Ball, where their leader, Old Deuteronomy, will name one of them to travel to the Heaviside Layer and be reborn. As the assembled cats introduce themselves one by one through song, the celebration is disrupted by the scheming Macavity, and the shunned Grizabella, once a glamorous figure and now an outcast, hopes to be accepted again. The musical is based on T. S. Eliot's poetry collection Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats, with music by Andrew Lloyd Webber.

This 1998 British production is a filmed staging of the long-running stage musical rather than a conventional narrative film, running two hours. It has two credited directors, David Mallet and Trevor Nunn. For Mallet it sits third among his listed directing credits, between concert films for Pink Floyd and Janet Jackson; for Nunn it follows Lady Jane and Twelfth Night and precedes Oklahoma! and Red Joan. Webber produced. The cast includes Elaine Paige as Grizabella, John Mills as Gus the Theatre Cat and Ken Page as Old Deuteronomy, with Rosemarie Ford, Michael Gruber and John Partridge among 41 credited performers.

Audiences have received the recording warmly: it holds a rating of 7.3 from around 6,400 votes on IMDb and 7.2 from 187 votes on TMDB, while a small sample of critics' reviews averages 5.2, noticeably lower than the audience scores.