Cats is back in Oxford after a gap of three years, and has turned up as fresh and entertaining as ever. As you probably know, the musical is about the annual reunion of the tribe of Jellicle cats. We meet them at midnight as they slink through the darkness to a huge rubbish dump - a huge cooker, an enormous tyre, everything enlarged so that the human cats look cat-sized in comparison. Throughout the production they flit here and there over the piles of refuse, almost invisible when the lighting is low, and introducing themselves in a series of numbers which put over their various personalities and their past exploits.

In its early days the musical featured a series of big stars like Elaine Paige and Wayne Sleep, but a cast of lesser names prove that you don't need stars to make this ensemble piece work. Trevor Schoonraad is a fine Mr Mistoffelees; he may be a spin or two short of Wayne's virtuoso antics, but he acts and sings excellently, looks good, and - a former soloist with English National Ballet - does justice to every bit of the choreography. Similarly, Diane Pilkington makes a great Grizabella, a heartbreakingly lonely and appealing figure. There are plenty of performers who can sing at least as well as Elaine Paige, and she is certainly one of them. Grizabella is a glamorous cat who left the tribe many years ago to explore the world and seek fame, and is spurned by the other cats now that she wants to return. She it is who sings the show's best known number Memory in a memorable performance. At the end of the show one cat can be reborn into another of its nine lives, and it's Grizabella who mounts a spangled ladder up into the heavens at the end of the evening.

Throughout the show there are excellent performances, with Rachel Ensor quite outstanding as Victoria the white cat. She has the advantage of drawing your eye because of the brightness of her costume, but she's certainly worth watching, working her cat character faultlessly, and dancing very well indeed.

Other cat characters who are particularly appealing include Jennyanydots, who sleeps and lounges all day long, Gus, the theatre cat, who has worked with all the stars of his day and tells us about his triumphs, even re-enacting one or two of his supreme moments on the stage. Then there's the baddie cat, the villainous Macavity, who kidnaps the leader of the tribe, Old Deuteronomy. And it's Old Deuteronomy who brings this terrific show to a close with a short lecture to us on how to behave towards cats if you want to win their approval. "For all their differences" he says, "they're very like you."