What a spec-cat-ular!

A cast to die fur. Songs to melt the heart. Hi-tech wizardry to make you purr... slink behind the scenes (and poetry) of the all-star miaow-vie version of one of Britain’s best-loved musicals

AS ONE of the most popular, and long-running stage musicals of all time, Cats has a legion of fans. And yesterday they were given the first glimpse of director Tom Hooper’s big screen version of the Andrew Lloyd Webber (by way of T.S Eliot) musical.

A remarkable two-and-a-half minute trailer released by universal Pictures and Working Title films is but a taster for the film in all it feline glory when it is released in December.

A host of British names are among the all- star line-up, including Dame Judi Dench and Sir Ian McKellen, along with Idris Elba, James Corden — and u.S. singers Taylor Swift and Jennifer Hudson.

Hooper will be hoping to mirror the success of Les Miserables, which was released in 2012 and earned £336 million and eight Oscar nominations, from which it won three.

The cast of characters in Cats was first brought to life by poet T.S. Eliot, in his 1939 book Old Possum’s Book Of Practical Cats — nonsense verse tales written for his godchildren and based on his friends’ cats. The whimsical stories about whiskery creatures with names like Macavity, Mr Mistoffelees and Rum Tum Tugger has continued to delight generations of children and their parents.

The musical — set over a single night — revolves around this tribe of colourful kitties, called Jellicles (Eliot’s word) who are preparing for a ball and an ensuing ritual in which one Jellicle (cats, of course, have nine lives) is chosen to ascend to heaven and become reborn.

Andrew Lloyd Webber brought Cats to the stage, writing the musical version that first appeared at the New London Theatre in 1981, where it played for a record-breaking 21 years and 9,000 performances.

The Broadway production won seven Tony awards in 1983, including Best Musical, and ran for 18 years, taking more than $388 million at the box office.

Since its premiere, Cats has been performed in more than 30 countries, translated into 15 languages and seen by more than 73 million people worldwide.

Both the original London and Broadway cast recordings won Grammy Awards for Best Cast Album and the hit song Memory — sung by Elaine Paige playing Grizabella at the world premiere in London — has been recorded by more than 150 artists, including Barbra Streisand, Liberace and Barry Manilow. Curiously, it’s the only song that doesn’t come from a T.S. Eliot poem.

Most of the song lyrics were adapted from Eliot’s book and augmented with verses from his unpublished poetry, with additional words written by lyricist Richard Stilgoe and director Trevor Nunn. B

ut Lloyd Webber, who had to take out a second mortgage to bring his dream to reality, was by no means certain he was onto a winner.

‘It was a very fraught, very risky venture with everybody thinking that we were absolutely stir crazy for doing it. That it was going to be the biggest disaster in the history of musical theatre,’ he once said.

‘We never knew whether the public was going to love Cats until the moment we saw a cat go on stage. It could have been the most terrible moment in musical theatre. I remember sitting backstage waiting for the response. Somehow, we got away with it.’

Director Tom Hooper has some history in bringing long-running stage musicals to the big screen; he was responsible for giving us Hugh Jackman in Les Miserables.

He also directed dramas The King’s Speech, for which he won an Oscar, and The Danish Girl.

Hooper contemplated whether the film could be made using computer-generated images or live action, or a combination of both.

In the end, all the cats in the movie are played by humans. But the very realistic fur that viewers of the trailer see? That’s the work of a painstaking process by film technicians, who have added each actor’s fur, frame by frame.

Hooper spent more than a year working out how to make his cats as feline as possible and in the end thousands of computer analysts on four continents were hired to apply ‘digital fur’.

The trailer also reveals the production is cat- sized, with an giant set built to make the human cats look like, well — feline.