Cats is an award-winning musical composed by Andrew Lloyd Webber and built around the characters and lyrics from T. S. Eliot's book of poems Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats. The show opened in London's West End in 1981 and ran at Broadway's Winter Garden Theater from 1982 to 2000, at one point becoming the longest-running Broadway musical in history, a record which was later broken by Webber's own The Phantom of the Opera.