Sunday afternoon at Yountville’s Lincoln Theater, we Napans were treated to a performance of “Cats,” directed and choreographed by Richard Stafford and featuring 29 talented dancers and singers bringing Andrew Lloyd Webber’s classic to life for the 25th anniversary Broadway tour.

When you think about what Webber created, you just shake your head in wonder. Based on T.S. Eliot’s poetry anthology, “Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats,” the project absolutely “took off.”

“Cats” opened in London in May 1981 and by its closing in May 2002 totaled almost 9,000 performances; the Broadway production ran from October 1982 to September 2000, chalking up more than 7,000 New York performances, the longest running show in the history of old Broadway. Since then the beat goes on with touring companies introducing “Cats” all over the world.

So this weekend, locals and others enjoyed the music, the special effects, the colorful feline costumes and, most of all, the gifted dancers and singers who pump life into a theater legend.

To really enjoy “Cats” you have to throw convention to the wind. Discard your everyday problems and sit back and enjoy the music and marvelous dancing as you find yourself suddenly in a huge junkyard with a special breed known as Jellicle cats.

The most special thing about Jellicle cats is that they have the opportunity to be reborn — which is the reason they gather together once a year for the Jellicle Ball where old Deuteronomy, the eldest Jellicle cat, selects the one special cat to be reborn.

Get that down pat and the rest is easy, allowing you to enjoy the music and dancing as the contest begins.

Top entrants in the contest for a second life are worthy contenders. There’s Jennyanydots, the old Gumbie cat; the Rum Tum Tugger, a suave cat; and Bustopher Jones, the aging, sophisticated cat about town.

As the music played and the marvelous cat dancing and preening went on, enter Grizabella, an outcast who had seen better days and was shunned and threatened as an unwanted and fallen feline by all the other cats. Grizabella, who lived a rather loose life, begins to sing the story of her life in Webber’s musical centerpiece, “Memory,” and the cats’ leader Old Deuteronomy knows what he has to do.

It all boils down to redemption, which is the moral of this story. The cat elder escorts Grizabella on a flying tire up to the Heaviside Layer past the Jellicle Moon and Russell Hotel where Grizabella will be reborn.

Standing applause that lasted at least five minutes and a half dozen curtain calls rewarded a wonderful troupe who had rewarded a grateful audience with a slice of theater history.

I learned last Sunday after the performance that “Cats” will never die — approximately 4,000 tickets were sold for the three-day, four-show engagement in the tiny town of Yountville.