Twenty-five years since it first burst upon an astonished world, Andrew Lloyd Webber's Cats is paying a welcome seasonal visit to the New Theatre.

What a Christmas treat this great show is offering to the thousands who will see and marvel at it over the next couple of weeks.

Ticket sales are booming - many, no doubt, being snapped up by people who delighted in the production that visited the theatre three years ago and want to relive the magical experience again.

Cats is, on one level, a night of tremendous visual splendour, with set, costumes and lighting that speak big-budget values and enormous professional expertise. OK, the setting may be a rubbish dump - but this is not a dump such as you and I might know. It is tricked out with batteries of lights and an ascending platform that lifts one of the characters at the show's climax towards what I take to be pussy heaven.

Musically, the lapel-grabbing score cleverly embraces the rock style, without ever losing sight of the traditions of the stage musical as it has developed down the decades and, indeed, those of the classical idiom.

While there is only one absolutely show-stopping number, the affecting Memory - stunningly performed by Dianne Pilkington, as the ageing glamour puss Grizabella - there are many other meaty songs shared out between the members of a hugely talented cast.

In all cases these dance as well as they sing, for movement (recreated by choreographer Chrissie Cartwight) is as important as music in this celebration of the cat, one of nature's most glorious creations.

Tunes are belted out to an accompaniment provided by an 11-strong band, under musical director Graham Hurman. Their contribution to the show is such that it seems rather a pity that they cannot be lured from their hiding place beneath the set to take a well-deserved bow at the end of the evening.

Then there is the characterisation, which is the pre-eminent achievement of the show. This is a matter first, of course, of the wonderful poems by TS Eliot, which provide the words of the songs and dialogue.

In these are delineated, with the accurate observation expected of our greatest writers, the looks, attitudes and behaviour of the gallery of felines we meet in the course of the show.

Naturally, we are all going to have our favourites - the result, perhaps, of our own special interests in life.

I, for instance, was hugely taken by corpulent Bustopher Jones, the Cat About Town, as portrayed in his tail coat and spats by Christopher Howell. With what tremendous distaste are we told of a bad day's eating for him: "If he looks full of gloom then he's lunched at the Tomb on cabbage, rice pudding and mutton." (Ugh, ugh and again ugh!) Retired anorak that I am, I was likewise enchanted by Skimbleshanks, The Railway Cat, as shown us by John McManus. With an umbrella, sheets of material and a few old wheels, we are even given a puffing locomotive to stir our nostalgia.

And then there is Gus the Theatre Cat (Christopher Howell, again), the prototype for a thousand old thesps with their well-embroidered tales of great days on the boards. Though his references to Irving, Tree and East Lynne will mean little or nothing to most members of the New Theatre audience, they will surely be in no doubt exactly where he is coming from.

As I hope I have indicated, this is a show not to be missed. If you are especially lucky - with the modicum of audience participation that occurs - you might find yourself accorded an honour only rarely bestowed by these most independent of creatures. I mean you'll have a cat curled up on your lap.