The popularity of Cats at the Xiqu Centre says something encouraging about Hong Kong's cultural confidence. WestK is increasingly becoming a place where audiences can move between treasured Chinese opera, contemporary performance and big international theatre without treating them as separate worlds.
Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical has returned with all the familiar spectacle: the oversized junkyard, feline makeup, elastic choreography and a score that has outlived the fashions of the early 1980s.
Based on T S Eliot's Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats, the show is less a conventional story than a parade of characters, songs and dances during one strange night for the Jellicle tribe.
Its loose structure is part of the appeal. Cats does not ask the audience to follow a plot so much as enter a world: a junkyard of rivalries, rituals, jokes and sudden feeling.
The touring company understands that the show depends on physical command as much as vocal power, and keeps the evening moving through ballet-inflected ensemble work, tap, comic turns and big musical-theatre numbers.
As Grizabella, the outcast cat whose big number is the famous ballad Memory, Cindy-Ann Abrahams gives the song a strong emotional pull.
In contrast, Dylan Janse van Rensburg's Rum Tum Tugger, the show's strutting rebel, supplies the opposite pleasure: vanity, swagger and mischief.
The show's durability helps explain the turnout. Since opening in London in 1981, Cats has been staged in more than 54 countries, translated into 23 languages and seen by more than 77 million people worldwide.
The Hong Kong season at the Grand Theatre closed last Sunday, after an extension prompted by what the producers described as overwhelming audience response.
For WestK, Cats shows that Hong Kong audiences have an appetite for large-scale musical theatre when the spectacle is matched by craft. The show's lasting pleasure lies in its commitment to theatrical make-believe.
It asks a great deal from its performers and a little surrender from its audience, then rewards both with color, rhythm, humor and feeling.
For all its oddities, Cats remains what it has always been at its best: a wonderfully inventive night at the theatre.
Bernard Charnwut Chan is the chairman of the West Kowloon Cultural District
