Cats returns to Sydney’s Theatre Royal this weekend, 40 years since it introduced the mega-musical as a mainstay of entertainment budgets, and the investors making it possible have been together almost as long.

Putting up half of the $4.5 million it has taken to get Andrew Lloyd Webber’s feline fantasy to the stage is John Frost, with the rest coming from a handful of characters who’ve been backing the chief executive of Crossroads Live Australia since as far back as the 1980s.