Inside the Raucous Opening Night of Cats: The Jellicle Ball

“Whatever the other failings and excesses, even banalities, of Cats, it believes in purely theatrical magic, and on that faith it unquestionably delivers,” Frank Rich wrote in 1982, when Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cats premiered at the Winter Garden Theatre in New York. His review proved somewhat prophetic: Cats would become both one of the longest-running shows in the history of Broadway—finding fervent fans in curious theater kids the world over—and one of the most maligned.

In the boldly inventive revival that opened on Tuesday at the Broadhurst Theatre, however, the failings, excesses, and banalities of the original run fall away, leaving the audience with pure—or, dare I say it, prrr—magic. Cats: The Jellicle Ball makes meaning where there was once very little, setting the show’s action in the dazzling world of ballroom, where artifice and improvisation are part of what makes a performance work. Suddenly the lyrics “Jellicle cats, come one, come all…. Jellicles come to a Jellicle Ball” are more than a frivolous witticism; they’re a revelation, an invitation to an underworld that has influenced culture from the margins for the last 50 years. At its star-studded opening night—followed by an after-party at Chelsea’s Pier 60—legends of New York’s ballroom and theater scenes celebrated side by side in a crackling reverie.

On the yellow carpet before the show—its coloring inspired by the animated eyes of the original Cats poster—the category was fierce. “Can we just say—the best-dressed Broadway cast I have ever seen in my life?” Zhailon Levingston, who codirects the show with Bill Rauch, enthused to Vogue. Decked out in a suit jacket covered in red and gold sequins, Levingston added that the show has been “the biggest test of both my imagination and leadership. It’s a marriage of the two, to bring these cultures together…. It’s been unbelievably thrilling and rigorous and complicated and hard and rewarding, and ultimately it’s proven to me that the ‘we’ is always greater than the individual.”

That’s the ethos of the Jellicle Ball more broadly, where the cats from T.S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats now exist in ballroom-style families (see: House of Dots, House of Macavity) to compete for both a trophy and ascension to the Heaviside Layer. But the same is true of the deeply collaborative production team, from the codirectors to the co-choreographers, Omari Wiles and Arturo Lyons, longtime friends who brought each cat into ecstatic motion.

“First it was the story,” said Wiles. “Who are we representing? That was the first thing, creatively, we had to figure out, before we could say ‘5, 6, 7, 8.’”

“Ballroom is the inspiration,” Lyons added. “For us, being in ballroom for 30 years combined, we wanted to make sure it was represented the correct way.”

Fortunately, their work had masterful interpreters in other ballroom veterans. Chasity “Tempress” Moore, who plays Grizabella the Glamour Cat, was among them, endowing her “Memory” with the heartbreaking loneliness and nostalgia of an old queen pushing a grocery cart, looking back on the faded days of her youth. Then there’s Junior LaBeija, of the Royal House of LaBeija. In Jellicle Ball, they play Gus the Theatre Cat, emerging onstage draped in velvet shawls and chunky beads and declaring, with a flick of their opulent, manicured nails: “With an hour of rehearsal / I never could fail.”