Anyone who has worked in the entertainment industry can recite the rule "Never work with animals or children." You could double that for cats, but luckily Samantha Martin, the driving force behind The Acro-Cats, didn't get the memo. Part of what makes the show so entertaining is that the cats try their best to give her that memo at every performance. She readily admits that the show is different every time, and the one thing guaranteed is that something will go wrong. "There is nothing so humbling as working with cats," she quips.

What makes The Acro-Cats more than a drawn-out clip of David Letterman's Stupid Pet Tricks is two-fold: First, host Samantha Martin shares with the audience how she trains her felines and enthusiastically encourages audience members to do the same at home. Second, she uses her show as a way to help cats in need of a home. At each stop on the tour, the show partners with a local shelter to bring foster kitties on stage as guest stars. These furry volunteers become part of a training demonstration, so that the audience can see how the training techniques work on newcomers. With luck, someone in the audience will fall in love with a guest star and offer it a forever home; if not, the foster kitty takes to the road with the Acro-Cats until a home is found in another city. A local Long Beach stray, for example, could end up settling down with a fan in Portland; or it could fullfill every understudy's dream and become such an instant star that it joins the regular cast.

The tricks are sometimes funny, sometimes impressive, and sometimes flat-out failures (there was one cat who evidently does something impressive that we never figured out). But, somehow, watching a human stranded on stage trying to coax a cat into doing something it doesn't feel like doing is also entertaining. Most tricks worked: there were cats who jumped through hoops, walked slacklines and balance beams, rang bells, balanced on balls, and all sorts of other impressive feats. There were also cats who wandered off the stage and walked around the audience doing whatever they fancied—and that was OK, too. This show is clearly run by the cats.

These cats travel in style...

The show does feature other stars, however. Never before had I seen a performing chicken, and the groundhog did a whole lot more than look at his shadow. These co-stars clearly know that when you're not the animal on top of the car, you'd better hit your mark every time, and they do.

The performance runs about an hour without intermission, is punctuated with many choruses of "Awwww," and does include an opportunity to pet some of the kitties. The climax features an act called the Rock-cats, in which almost every animal on the stage gets on a musical instrument and serenades the room. The cacophany that ensues can only be equated to herding cats.