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Broadway review by Adam Feldman
Rating: ★★★★★ (five stars)
A revival of Cats, at least in theory, might well give you paws. After a then-record 18-year run on Broadway—with a tagline, “NOW AND FOREVER,” that began to sound a bit like a threat—Andrew Lloyd Webber's synthtastic 1980s musical finally hung up its leotards and yak-hair wigs in 2000. Its comeback efforts since then have been less than overwhelming: a taxidermic 2016 revival, a widely mocked 2019 film. It seemed as though the show had been condemned to obsolescence, humbled and disavowed like its own once-grand Grizabella the Glamour Cat. But now along comes a thrilling reconception that not only rescues Cats from the oversize junkyard but lifts it, like Grizabella herself, to unexpected heights. After an already-legendary Off Broadway debut at the Perelman Arts Center in 2024, this production—under the chosen name Cats: The Jellicle Ball–has now re-inhabited Broadway, where it remains a categorical triumph.
Is Cats good or bad? That’s a question without an answer. Cats is beyond good and bad. Cats is Cats. Cats is about cats competing to be sent into the ionosphere. Cats is about cats who sing light verse from T.S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, an exercise in high silliness that sits at the classy end of an anthropomorphic-cat comedy genre that includes, at lower stations, New Yorker cartoons and I Can Has Cheezburger? memes. Cats is about Andrew Lloyd Webber writing a lot more melodies than he often does (to fit the requirements of Eliot’s meter) and producing many bangers right out of his hat. Cats is about human dancers performing feline, weirdly sexy moves. At its best, it’s ridiculous and kind of magical. At its worst, it’s just ridiculous.
The co-directors of Cats: The Jellicle Ball, Zhailon Levingston and Bill Rauch, embrace the musical’s inherent strangeness by absorbing it into queerness. What could have been kitsch becomes celebratory camp: The show’s secret ball for cats is now a ballroom runway competition of the kind recently visited by TV’s Pose and Legendary, presided over by éminence lavande Old Deuteronomy (a regal André De Shields, maned in gray curls and decked out in purple splendor) and emceed by Munkustrap (Dudney Joseph Jr.). This concept—let’s call it Paris Is Purring—is ideal for the musical’s essentially revue-like structure, and its open embrace of artifice allows the production to sidestep the trap of trying to look like, or move in ways that suggest, actual cats. Instead of feline imitation, it is serving pussy realness, honey—always with an underlying understanding, as at the balls themselves, that realness is itself a kind of performance.
RELATED: Buy tickets to Cats: The Jellicle Ball
The cats who figure most prominently are contestants for the night’s biggest trophy. They include the ripped and strutting Rum Tum Tugger (a prepossessing Sydney James Harcourt); the Magical Mr. Mistoffelees (the elegant Robert "Silk" Mason, in hair worthy of Solid Gold’s Darcel Wynne); the nostalgic old theater cat Gus (ballroom legend Junior LaBeija) and his doting caretaker, Jellylorum (Bryson Battle); the attitudinal Latina MTA worker Skimbleshanks (a hilarious Emma Sofia); the swelled-up swell Bustopher Jones (Nora Schell); the kittenish stripper-blonde Victoria (Baby Byrne); the troublemakers Mungojerrie (Jonathan Burke) and Rumpleteazer (Dava Huesca); and, of course, Grizabella (“Tempress” Chasity Moore), who begins the show as a has-been but gets to sing the unforgettable “Memory.” Some of the Jellicles have new twists: Jennyanydots (Xavier Reyes) is now the drag mother of the House of Dots; the wicked Macavity (ballroom mistress Leiomy, in bright red hair and sleek animal print) is now a mastermind of mopping, prone to stealing costumes but no longer the demonic threat of the original. (That function has been doled out to others in the production’s most pointed departure from the original.)
Cats: The Jellicle Ball delivers everything you want from Cats in a completely fresh way that also does justice to the history of the Broadway and ballroom worlds it represents. The smallish orchestra, conducted by music director William Waldrop, sounds a good deal fuller than one might expect. Occasionally ornamented with modern beats, Lloyd Webber’s melodies come through clearly and alarmingly contagiously; the show’s opening number, “Jellicle Songs for Jellicle Cats,” will stick in your head whether you want it to or not. (Hint: You won’t!) Omari Wiles and Arturo Lyons’s vogue-heavy choreography—compressed and reimagined from its PAC days—is a consistent delight, and the excellent ensemble cast, whose performers fall on wide spectrums of gender presentation, radiates brash and mischievous exuberance. Rachel Hauck’s set, lit by Adam Honoré, retains a hint of PAC’s immersive staging by seating some of the audience onstage. (Conversely, some of the cats sneak into the audience.) Kai Harada’s sound is the cat’s meow. And Qween Jean’s costumes and Nikiya Mathis’s wigs, which were extravagantly creative Off Broadway, are now superlatively so. On the night I attended, one particularly breathtaking creation, with descending wings of gold, earned a partial standing ovation from the gobsmacked crowd.
RELATED: Watch our YouTube interview with director Zhailon Levingston and Bill Rauch
What’s most impressive about this production, however, is how well the concept complements the musical. Levingston and Rauch’s vision fits Cats like a long sequined glove. No chance is missed to tease out potential queer meanings—when the cats sing “Jellicle cats come out tonight,” some of them carry signs that say “COME OUT”—and at times, the matches are almost eerily perfect: in the show’s sense of a hidden community, for example, or in its emphasis on respecting the names the cats have chosen for themselves. In many ways, this version of Cats is arguably superior to the standard one. Thanks to the ballroom-competition set-up, the show’s wispy storytelling is clearer than it has ever been, as are individual strands of the story—such as the role of Munkustrap in the proceedings, or the arc of Grizabella’s biggest fan, Sillabub (the sweet-voiced Teddy Wilson Jr., in a floral crown). And the audience responds ecstatically. At a time when queer and especially trans representation feel inherently political, the performers of Cats: the Jellicle Ball land on their feet and meet the moment with contagious joy. Long, if not forever, may their turn on the catwalk last.
Cats: The Jellicle Ball. Broadhurst Theatre (Broadway). Music by Andrew Lloyd Webber. Book by T.S. Eliot. Directed by Zhailon Levingston and Bill Rauch. With André De Shields, “Tempress” Chasity Moore, Junior LaBeija, Sydney James Harcourt, Dudney Joseph Jr., Robert "Silk" Mason, Emma Sofia, Teddy Wilson Jr. Running time: 2hrs 35mins. One intermission.
Buy tickets to Cats: The Jellicle Ball: Broadway.com
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