National Tour of Cats closes for good today.

The longest running tour in musical theater history comes to an end today!

Today, the national tour ends. Troika will not be sending it out again anytime soon in the near future.

Despite those who are not fans of the show, the tour exposed so many people around North and South America to theater and employed so many performers, musicians and crew for over 30 years.

There's rumors of Cameron Mackintosh planning a 35th anniversary tour in the UK and US for 2016.

Technically, tours of Cats have been ongoing in the U.S. since shortly after the Broadway premiere but as far as a single tour running continuously since so that it's the longest running tour in history, I'm not so sure.

I'm not a Cats expert, so please correct me if I'm wrong. But I know there were 4 official, equity national U.S. tours of the show. The longest continuously running among them was the 4th national tour, which I saw twice--once in 1994 and again the following year. I think it played for another several years and then closed.

I'm likely wrong, but the Troika tour is non-equity and not directly produced by Cammack, so it can't be counted as an official 5th national tour but more as an independent tour licensed through uncle Mack. I remember first hearing about it around 2003 or so, so that wouldn't make it the longest running tour in history.

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Just found out the nat'l tour ended a month early before doing it's Grand Rapids stop, and that was re-schedule for Octoer but cancelled again. Just an update.

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I saw the Troika tour a few years ago in Boston. Overall, it was okay. I liked it better than I expected. I never saw it on Broadway so I couldn't really compare the two productions to know how much the non-Equity tour was scaled back.

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Why would it have been used specially by Gammage in Tempe AZ when use had been discontinued every where else?

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Probably so the new production can start its own national tour

Me too! I was like, wait, there's a national tour of Cats?