The Jellicle Ball’ Is the Real Thing

“It’s not a takeoff or a satire,” the drag queen Dorian Corey famously said to describe the concept of “realness” in Paris Is Burning. “No, it’s actually being able to be this thing.” The same may be said of The Jellicle Ball, Zhailon Levingston and Bill Rauch’s ballroom take on Andrew Lloyd Webber’s endlessly sticky and deeply mockable musical Cats. The Jellicle Ball isn’t a satire, which would be an easy take on the material, nor is it really a gut renovation. The production makes a thrilling number of choices to update and revise and comment on the bizarre musical entity borne of a posh Brit’s love of T.S. Eliot’s poems for children, but it retains the basic load-bearing elements of the original show. There are cats — portrayed air-quotes style by actors as ballroom performers. They are gathering for their ball, and they sing all the songs you know. And yet, in placing new context and bodies inside the suit of ’80s excess, The Jellicle Ball reinvents it. Arriving on Broadway, The Jellicle Ball proves itself to be more than a fluke or a flight of fancy. It’s spectacular.

That’s a relief, if not an unexpected one if you’re up to date on your Jellicle news. When this version of Cats premiered in the summer of 2024 at the Perelman Performing Arts Center downtown, there was a feeling of shock and awe to its reception: Wait, Cats can be good? Cats can be this good? And it’d be reasonable to wonder if it’s possible to replicate the same lightning-in-a-bottle effect in the harsher climate of Broadway.

As much as I enjoyed my trip to The Jellicle Ball the first time around, I felt myself tensing upon return, worried it wouldn’t be able to deliver once again. For one, there are the physical limitations of an uptown space. At PAC, the production’s scenic designer Rachel Hauck transformed the entire space into a runway. At the Broadhurst, where Cats has now built its lair, Hauck has brought the runway back and provided some onstage seating to replicate the audience’s proximity to the action. But that runway occupies a more cramped space owing to the need for clear sight lines for the bulk of the audience, and it leaves the performers less room to strut. That, in turn, condenses the storytelling, making it less democratic. At PAC, Rauch and Levingston could scatter the Jellicles across a long rectangular space, unspooling gleeful chaos in the group numbers; here, the sense of dramatic priority always falls on whoever’s at center. A Broadway theater, as it turns out, is architecturally a star vehicle. That sacrifices a certain sense of community but emphasizes the musical’s solos. Diva worship is what this venue was built for.

We could quibble further about what’s gained and lost in the transfer. What powers The Jellicle Ball, in either instance, is the intuition that cultural products of opposite edges of 1980s New York City — the megamusical and the drag ball — can speak to each other. On Broadway, the show occupies the home turf of one form (though it really is too bad that the Winter Garden is taken), so that dynamic is supercharged. The co-directors have said they arrived at the idea for The Jellicle Ball instinctively, pursuing Rauch’s impulse to relate the musical to the queer community, and so, fittingly, the production unfolds through a kind of dream logic, or what could be mistaken as “yes, and” improvisation if Qween Jean’s costumes weren’t so pleasurably detailed, glamorous, and tearaway-ready. (My God, the giant leopard purse.) A DJ scrounges through vinyls, pulling out the Cats cast recording, and those cascading gothic opening chords of Lloyd Webber’s score accompany scenes of our cats primping for their big event — now, of course, a kind of ball that is a competition. Throw in a few heavier beats, credited to arranger/producer Trevor Holder, and we’re off to the races.

The production wears its metaphors lightly with a wink and a purr. The songs, which in the original serve to introduce each cat’s personality, now operate as loose accompaniments to various categories at the ball. The strutting Bustopher Jones (Nora Schell) is a high Britannia drag king showing off a luscious body; the fussy Jennyanydots (Xavier Reyes) is a drag mother to her own kin; the curious and dangerous Rum Tum Tugger (Sydney James Harcourt) is here to flex his masc realness and his butt in a jockstrap. The production knows it can be loose in structure — the audience need not care who exactly wins what category — as long as it’s faithful to the logic of showmanship. (True of the original too, which would never have run for so long if it didn’t have the sexually charged lure of dancers in bodysuits.)

I’d run out of time listing the names and personalities of each cat (that’s basically what Cats itself is), but it’s crucial that every Jellicle member gets applause for their day in the sun. Omari Wiles and Arturo Lyons, Jellicle Ball’s pair of choreographers who hail from the ballroom scene, are working with a hand-tailored sense of spectacle, variety, and — though it may seem at odds with the show’s ethos — occasional restraint. They know a stunt move from Macavity (Leiomy, a newcomer in the transfer, bringing lithe pizzazz to her cat burglar) will thrill the crowd but that a single magisterial hand gesture from Old Deuteronomy (André De Shields) will be just as effective when properly deployed.

There are new guest judges at the ball every night, but the 80-year-old De Shields gets to be its grand dame no matter what, providing The Jellicle Ball with authority and history. Much of the show is a heart-on-its-paw tribute to New York itself; they revise a few proper nouns here and there to get us across the pond from London (Mungojerrie and Rumpleteaser now hail from Victoria Grove, New Jersey, and have the accents to match), and sometimes go for wholesale New Yahk–icana. A highlight of the night comes when Emma Sofia’s Skimbleshanks, the Railway Cat, shows up dressed as an MTA employee with a showstopping hip-length wig (Nikiya Mathis did the hair) and sings some of her verses in Spanish. It’s a few feet past the line of indulgent but served with such skill and delight that it can’t be anything but winning.

The presence of true New York legends like De Shields and Junior LaBeija, who plays the nostalgic Gus, the Theater Cat, gives The Jellicle Ball inherent cred. LaBeija is a hallowed ballroom MC, featured in Paris Is Burning, and as his Gus reminisces about his catlike glory days on the stage playing “Firefrorefiddle, the Fiend of the Fell,” we see him page through a binder of Playbills that includes, touchingly, The Wiz (which starred De Shields). Amid Eliot’s doggerel, we turn to think about LaBeija’s and De Shields’s disparate histories as queer Black performers in New York — LeBeija has said he couldn’t afford to see De Shields in The Wiz when it was running — becoming entwined years later. The Jellicle Ball doesn’t spend much time explaining what the “Jellicle Choice,” the pseudo-sacrificial moment at the end of the show, is. But we understand how pain and death might surround these figures. Another link between Cats and ballroom: AIDS ravaged both.

The Jellicle Ball is most dramatically effective when it turns its gaze to the past, anchoring a narrative that’s at minimum fuzzy by nature. Cats itself barely has a plot, but that show’s second act does include an injection of drama via the devious Macavity, who here has stolen some high-fashion clothing. Rauch and Levingston have the police interrupt the ball to try to catch her in a sequence that may be well-intentionally designed to underline the notion that this queer ecosystem lives with the threat of state violence, though that’s a subject the production doesn’t have the means to properly metabolize. (Lloyd Webber’s little experiments with time signatures are not going to help you much there.) And it’s where I felt the biggest change of tone between the Broadway and Off Broadway runs. At the Broadhurst, the return of Old Deuteronomy from captivity, effected through the magic-trick contortions of Mister Mistoffelees (Rober “Silk” Mason), is less spectacular than I remembered it being. Is it because Silk is just so tall that the shorter runway is an extra disservice to them? Or that The Jellicle Ball doesn’t linger as long in the scene’s dread for fear of turning off its crowd? Were the lights down for longer back then, or was my sight line simply better? Did they downplay a romance between Tugger and Mistoffelees? Was that a concession to tourists? For much of The Jellicle Ball, ballroom exists within Broadway in miraculous harmony, but you can sometimes feel the cold hand of the latter constrict the former.

There’s tension between celebrating a marginalized art form and capitalizing on it, and it bubbles throughout The Jellicle Ball. Lloyd Webber’s score is a natural fit for this interpretation because of his magpie instincts. He writes like he’s strolled into the “music genre” store and said, “I’ll take one of everything”: some Puccini, some psychedelic rock, and some Gilbert and Sullivan. That, reframed as the tastes of characters putting together a hardscrabble show, looks innovative, like they are breaking into a Prada and trying its labels on for size. But you can’t banish the sense that this is all paid for with Lloyd Weber’s black card — the Lord himself had to okay the production, and this is one of several reinterpretations of his catalog he has green-lit. The house always wins, even (or especially) with progressive branding.

But to The Jellicle Ball’s credit, that tension is also fundamentally what the show is about, more so than just singing cats. And that is a great subject for a musical. As in the original, we spend much of the production watching the fate of Grizabella, the once-fabulous Glamour Cat now sidelined and made to pace the side of the stage. Here, played by “Tempress” Chasity Moore, initially with a busted face of makeup, Grizabella is a former house mother whom the other cats offer passing respect and pity but are unable to give much help. That is, however, until she is recognized by a newbie and given her chance to return to the stage, delivering The Jellicle Ball’s most extravagant ballroom-plus-Broadway moment as she belts “Memory” full-out: key change! Costume change! A fusillade of spotlights! The gesture is sentimental, showy, and, in all its glitz, moving in a way that haunts me. The terms may be compromised, and the moment may be brief. But given any kind of stage, some talent, and enough attitude, a person can transform into whatever real thing they want to be.

Cats: The Jellicle Ball is at the Broadhurst Theatre.