At the age of 17, Drew McOnie was so determined to be in the musical Cats that he snuck out of school to audition. Four days later, he was on a flight to Germany to join the international production. (Luckily, he was at a performing arts school and they forgave him.) It was a life-changing moment: at that point, McOnie’s stellar career as a dancer, Olivier award-winning choreographer and director began – and, 23 years later, it’s all about to come full circle. McOnie has created his own version of the musical he’s been obsessed with since childhood.

For any dancer growing up in the 1980s and 90s, Cats was the musical: dance wasn’t just an accompaniment, but instrumental to the show. Gillian Lynne’s original choreography is iconic – much copied by local dance schools and student shows of the era. Lynne was a force of nature, still doing the splits at 88, four years before she died in 2018. For McOnie, artistic director at Regent’s Park Open Air theatre and famed for his blazing choreography in Jesus Christ Superstar, it takes some nerve to remake it.

“I don’t think I’ve ever felt so scared,” he says. Not because he doesn’t think he can do it, but “because I was in the original and I adore Gillian Lynne. The challenge is to honour her with the amount of rigour she put in – to match that ferocity of spirit, that ambition.”

The energy is buzzing … McOnie and cast in rehearsals. Photograph: Mark Senior

We might now think of Cats as a “glorious celebration of the 80s”, says McOnie, but we shouldn’t forget how original and contemporary it was when it first came out. He wants his version to feel the same to audiences today. That means movement that brings in current influences from street and commercial dance, as well as jazz and classical, “while also staying within that world of being a cat”.

As I enter Studio 1 at Regent’s Park, the energy’s buzzing, the moves are sensual, low slung and slinky, earthier than the original, but with bursts of wild, joyful energy. Then the dancers suddenly go full pelt. It’s more feral than you might expect. “I don’t think many of our cats are house cats,” says McOnie.

Because his youthful experience on Cats was so formative, McOnie deliberately went in search of standout student dancers to add to the mix. “There are a lot of kittens in the cast,” he says. The young dancers are so effortlessly cool, he tells me, not like Tiggerish McOnie was at their age, bouncing off the walls. But in rehearsals, he started digging beneath their inscrutable exteriors, letting them loose in solos. “One lad just completely lit up and I was like, ‘OK, there’s the teenager.’ I said, ‘I like the version of you bounding about with your eyes on fire.’ My task is to make each one of them light up.”

Cats isn’t known as a particularly “cool” show, but McOnie thinks we forget how impressively out-there Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musicals can be. “They’re extraordinarily off the wall, completely form-busting and brave,” he says. He has nothing but praise for Lloyd Webber. “Honestly, my time with Andrew over the last year, with the combination of Jesus Christ Superstar and Cats, has been utterly thrilling. He’s incredibly funny. He’s very witty, he’s very sharp, and he’s really, really rigorous.” McOnie is awed by Lloyd Webber’s ability to see the big picture. “He’s like a musical architect,” says McOnie, able to glean how every detail fits into the larger show. “There’s definitely a magic about what he can hear.”

Wonder and joy … Gary Wilmot as Gus the Theatre Cat. Photograph: Mark Senior

McOnie does admit Cats is a bit weird, though. Based on the TS Eliot poems in Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, with portraits of Mungojerrie and Rumpleteazer, Macavity and Skimbleshanks, it doesn’t exactly have a strong narrative. “It sort of levitates somewhere between a choreo-poem, a ballet, a song cycle, a piece of vaudeville and a kind of pagan ritual,” he says.

What it isn’t is a bunch of cute talking animals. In this production, the costumes won’t be fully formed cats, and they’re not masked. McOnie sees it as “a ritual that endows the performer with an animal form through which they can express deeply human emotion”. There’ll still be some “great glittery numbers” though, don’t worry. “Its core themes are wonder and joy.”

I have to ask McOnie briefly about the much-maligned Cats film. It turns out he loved a lot of things about it but thinks it was doomed from the start. “It just isn’t a filmic idea,” he says. “Cats is one of the most extraordinary expressions of theatricality of all time,” he says. “Capital-T theatre – because so much of it hangs in the imagination. You have this mass of bodies giving all of their soul to that music, with that exchange of energy live in the room.”

It all comes back to Gillian Lynne’s legacy. She trusted dancers and the power of what they could do. McOnie has exactly the same animal instinct.