Photos and video courtesy of The Acro-Cats.

This weekend, the Art Theatre of Long Beach will host a circus that even PETA will love. From May 6 through May 8, The Acro-Cats will be entertaining audiences with matinee and evening performances that should delight cat-loving and open-to-cat-loving audiences of every age. The all-feline band, The Rock Cats, will give a musical performance, all without opposable thumbs.

The Rock-Cats: No hits, but wonders anyway.

You may not be able to herd cats, but you can apparently train them to perform and not fling themselves at one another with their claws out and emitting screeches that Google Translate would censor. Ask Samantha Martin, CEH (chief executive human) for the Acro-Cats, who is the cats’ personal trainer and the mentor that pulled them off the streets and out of obscurity.

“I’ve wanted to be an animal trainer since I was 7, and I’ve been training animals since I was 10,” Martin said.

Martin, who lives in Chicago and has a degree in animal services, began her project as a rescuer. Tuna, a big white cat with an attitude and a stare like Skye Ferreira’s, entered Martin’s life in 2002. Her mother had been abandoned in the neighborhood, and Martin took the entire family in. She noticed something special in the little snowflake.

“She was eager to learn—she had no fear,” Martin said. “So I started training her. I tried to get her some work as a model and at pet expos to follow up on her skill set. People were fascinated that you could even train a cat.”

Tuna, epitome of rock-star diva.

Tuna is, as Martin says, the cat-alyst for the Acro-Cats, which sprang onto the scene in 2005. She plays cowbell for the Rock Cats band as long as Martin honors the treat-guarantee provision of her contract.

Each of the performers is a rescue cat, like Ozwald, aka Oz, an Acro-Cat whose mother died from eating a poisoned rat. Martin took in Oz along with his littermates, and Oz made the cut, too. She’s taken entire litters from shelters where they would otherwise have been euthanized, and she bottle-feeds them, raises them up, spays or neuters each one, and then checks out which of them respond to the cat-tle call. She trains the obvious child stars from scratch and adopts out all the others. Since around 2008, she’s placed 178 cats and kittens into loving homes. Occasionally, a lucky family will wind up with a drama dropout who may have acquired a few skills. It’s sort of like getting a helper dog who didn’t quite make the grade.

The performers become part of Martin’s permanent family and learn a repertoire of stunts. A few of them have their own Facebook pages and Twitter accounts. They may be celebrities, but they aren’t performing poodles, and Martin is quick to note this.

“They’re my cats, and I extended my living room to the stage,” Martin said. “And the cats act like cats! They do tricks at their own pace—they stretch, they groom. People can relate—they can see the traits of their own cats.”

“Do I roll the ball, or lie down? Roll? Lie down.”

There’s no sense of preening or any synthetic prancing across the stage (although there’s plenty of that from the human assistants, the cats’ straight-women). Typical programs include jumping through doughnuts, an obstacle course, ball rolling and impromptu breaks to claw the carpet. And if you get what cats are, you will laugh your head off. As far as Long Beach’s moniker as the second-most diverse city in the country (LA was cited as first in 2015), the troupe also includes rats, a groundhog and a chicken. Martin also uses the stage as a platform to promote cat welfare and adoption.

But the cats are the stars of the show, and they were considered good enough to get spots on The Late Show with Steven Colbert  and CBS Sunday Morning . Friday night is the first performance. Buy a ticket and have a ball. Maybe even a fur ball.

Tickets are available at Brown Paper Tickets . Volunteers are also needed for several performances; click here for information.

Watch an interview and a video of the Acro-Cats and their band.