Who composed the music for Cats: The Jellicle Ball's source musical Cats?

Andrew Lloyd Webber composed the music for Cats, the source musical behind Cats: The Jellicle Ball.

Cats is based on T. S. Eliot's 1939 poetry collection Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats. Lloyd Webber transformed Eliot's character poems and feline imagery into a sung-through stage musical, with additional lyrics and adaptation work by Trevor Nunn and Richard Stilgoe. The score includes “Memory,” “The Jellicle Ball,” and “Mr. Mistoffelees.”

The original Cats premiered in London's West End in 1981 and opened on Broadway in 1982. Its world is built around the Jellicle cats' annual gathering, where Old Deuteronomy chooses one cat to ascend to the Heaviside Layer and be reborn.

Cats: The Jellicle Ball keeps Lloyd Webber's music while placing the material in a contemporary ballroom-culture setting. Alan Menken, Claude-Michel Schönberg, and Stephen Sondheim are also renowned musical-theatre composers, but none composed Cats.