The idea of performing cats came to Mr. Kuklachev in 1971, he said, when he found a stray begging for food by performing on its hind legs and doing somersaults for onlookers. Mr. Kuklachev, the son of a truck driver and a factory worker, had attended clown school. He realized he and the cat might be able to do something together. He named her Strelka, and soon she was performing with him at the Moscow State Circus.

Mr. Kuklachev did an act which would become well known as "The Cat in the Pot." A cat would sit in a pot. He would take her out, and she would keep jumping back in again.

In 1988 Mr. Kuklachev left the Moscow circus, and in 1990 he founded the Cats Theater. It is very popular in Moscow, Mr. Kuklachev said, and over the years he has traveled to 80 countries and won many awards.

There are 120 cats altogether in the company. The other 94 are back in Moscow at the theater on Kutuzovsky Prospekt, where 10 caretakers and four veterinarians look after them. There, they live in the theater in glass-fronted spaces -- not cages, Mr. Kuklachev insists -- where they each have a bed and a chair to play on. They are allowed to roam but must enter and exit their rooms on his command, he said.

"We have no mice," Mr. Kuklachev noted.

Mr. Kuklachev's son Dmitri, 30, who is a member of the troupe, interjected: "A cat cannot live in a cage. If it lives in a cage it becomes wild, aggressive." Although Dmitri performs with the cats, he is allergic to them, he said; he controls his asthma through breathing exercises.

The cats are accomplished travelers, Mr. Kuklachev said. He did not sedate them for the trip on a Boeing 767, and they are not nervous about the location change. Translation: They still use the litter box.

For their visit to New York, a hotel was not really an option, so Mr. Kuklachev rented two apartments in Brighton Beach, where Russian speakers and Russian food are plentiful. The cats and the two dogs share one apartment with two caretakers that is directly underneath where the Kuklachevs stay, and they have free rein. It takes 55 cans of cat food every other day to feed them, with dry food and meat on alternate days.