Around 130 kittens and 30 cats will be washing their whiskers on the Wyvern stage in the first full scale musical presented by the Tanwood Youth Theatre.

In the last few years Tanwood School of Performing Arts, based in Swindon, has developed a hardcore corps of drama and musical theatre students who have been doing well at competitions and last year performed a musical theatre concert.

Building on this success, the director of Tanwood, Pollyann Tanner, created the new youth theatre branch, for students aged nine to 21 years-old, which will now perform a musical each spring.

"If all goes to plan Swindon will not have seen anything like it,'' said Pollyann. "It is a first for the town using a professional approach.''

Pollyann bought the rights to Cats, the musical based on the poems of T S Eliot, two years ago believing it would be a great follow up to Tanwood's 70th anniversary.

The leading roles in Cats are not all taken by members of Tanwood, as Pollyann threw it open to Liberatus and drama students in the local area, catching in her net aspiring musical theatre actors from as far afield as Devizes and Marlborough.

Rehearsals have been going well, but the biggest challenge for Pollyann and her team was to make a show with 30 adults and 130 students all on one stage.

"I had to think of staging to make it work for us. I am dealing with my babies of two-year-old who are the little mice right up to adults in leading roles,'' she said.

The logistics of a large cast are nothing knew to Pollyann who each year takes part in a theatrical youth project in Birmingham involving hundreds of youngsters. She has called upon the services of Colin Wood, lighting designer, who works with her on professional shows, to join the Cats team.

Chris Newton, a professional musical director who has worked on numerous shows in the West End and directed Cats in Germany and Scandinavia, is also on board the Swindon show.

He will be guiding a live orchestra of 16, five from the West End musicals scene, and the rest made up of local musicians.

Students from New College are doing the exacting and creative make up and Pollyann has hired in professional sets and costumes.

"Although we are adding and adapting the set for the Wyvern stage, and the parents are all making extra costumes for our beetles, dogs and mice in the show. They are all being really creative,'' she said.

Cats runs from Thursday April 21 to Saturday April 23 at 7.30pm in Swindon's Wyvern Theatre. Tickets are £15 and £20 from 01793 524481. - Flicky Harrison