Cats is slinking its way back onto Broadway in a ravishing reimagining.
When Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cats was on Broadway, from 1982 to 2000, it was a cultural phenomenon. Based on T. S. Eliot’s 1939 poetry collection Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, the musical put on over 7,000 performances and generated over $388 million in ticket sales — putting it squarely in the top 10 highest-grossing Broadway shows of all time. Though it had a revival in the 2010s, the production is now making its long-awaited return to the Great White Way in the form of a glittery reconceiving, Cats: The Jellicle Ball.
In this new interpretation, the show’s premise remains the same: A group of Jellicle cats shows off their personalities to the Old Deuteronomy, who selects one lucky feline to be reborn into a new Jellicle life. However, there aren’t any cat ears, cat makeup, or even tails. The cats are people showing off their skills at a ball — voguing up and down the runway and wowing the audience with gorgeous costumes, jaw-dropping dance moves, and off-the-charts energy. It’s one of the most exciting shows opening this season on Broadway — and undoubtedly the gayest. Not to mention, the show has a stacked cast of Black and brown queer and trans people from the ballroom community.
Jonathan Burke as Mungojerrie in 'Cats: The Jellicle Ball'Kanya Iwana
Cats: The Jellicle Ball debuted at the Perelman Performing Arts Center in Lower Manhattan in June 2024. It was extended twice due to popular demand, leading to a transfer to Broadway, confirmed by Webber himself last August. Webber is in something of a renaissance; the British composer also has a reimagining of The Phantom of the Opera, currently running off-Broadway, called Masquerade. But for now, the cultural focus is on the boisterous, unapologetically queer rendition of one of his tentpole projects, which is set to be bigger and gayer on Broadway.
Zhailon Levingston — the show’s co-director, who in 2021 became the youngest Black director to ever helm a Broadway show with Chicken & Biscuits — has been a fan of Cats since he was in second grade. After falling in love with the show, he watched a recording of it every day for three years — so he’s familiar with the text inside and out. A few years ago, Levingston was talking with friends about Cats and wondering what a production would be like if the characters didn’t have cat ears or costumes. One friend mentioned that Bill Rauch, director of the Tony-winning All the Way in 2014 and its 2019 sequel, The Great Society, was developing a version of the play with human characters and helped set up a meeting. “Two hours later, we left that Zoom call as co-directors” of Cats: The Jellicle Ball, Levingston recalls.
“What mainly drew both of us to work on this together was just a similar ethos about what the rehearsal room could be,” Levingston says. “And an interest in creating spaces that had never existed before, and creating rigorous, challenging, kind of socially centered creative spaces.”
This production melds two disparate worlds together, ballroom and Broadway. Icons from the ballroom scene are finding their way through the process of creating a show, and Broadway icons are learning about ballroom culture for the first time, but both are doing so with open hearts.
André De Shields as Old Deuteronomy in 'Cats: The Jellicle Ball'Kanya Iwana
In the early days of workshops for the off-Broadway production, Levingston said a typical Broadway music-learning schedule was established, and rehearsal began moving at a rapid pace. He could tell that some cast members without formal musical theater training were starting to get uncomfortable — a sentiment crystallized during one session, when one of the artists from the ballroom world raised their hand and spoke up for the people who felt they were falling behind. This player made clear that the rehearsals were moving too fast, some actors had never read sheet music before, and the schedule was becoming overwhelming.
The group took a 10-minute break. When the performers reconvened, they sat in a circle and discussed what could be done to improve this process. “It gave both ballroom people and musical theater people a space to communicate across differences,” the co-director says. “There were things that the musical theater people were feeling uncomfortable with in terms of what ballroom culture is, and there were things that the ballroom folks were feeling uncomfortable in terms of the musical theater culture.”
In the off-Broadway production, Tony winner André De Shields took on the role of Old Deuteronomy, who in this iteration is the founding mother of the House of Maison Margiela. Chasity “Tempress” Moore brought down the house eight shows a week as Grizabella, and Junior LaBeija, the legendary ballroom icon who is known for being the master of ceremonies in Paris Is Burning, played Gus. All three of these icons are taking the stage at the Broadhurst Theatre, along with Ken Ard, who starred in the original Broadway production of Cats and is returning to the stage as DJ Griddlebone, and Leiomy Maldonado, the “Wonder Woman of Vogue,” who will take on the role Ard originated, Macavity, in the queer reimagining of the show.
De Shields, a Broadway legend who is an Oscar shy of an EGOT, says Livingston approached him in 2023 and asked him to be in Cats: The Jellicle Ball. “I thought, and I shared with him at the time, ‘If this can really happen, it’s going to be revolutionary,’” De Shields says. “I went on to say to him, ‘There is a change of the paradigm just sitting on the horizon, but it’s not going to come and grab us. It’s waiting for us to wake up, to become exquisitely awake, which in political terms is woke, and see what’s waiting for us on the horizon.’”
While doing eight shows a week in Death of a Salesman, the now 80-year-old actor would drop by rehearsals for Cats in the morning before heading to perform at night. During the early stages of the production, he says, there was an ambassador for Andre Lloyd Webber’s production company, Really Useful Group (now LW Entertainment), who was recording what the cast was experimenting with and relaying information back to “The Great One,” as De Shields calls Webber. They’d get either a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down on different parts they were rehearsing. If they got a thumbs-up, they could continue.
Chasity 'Tempress' Moore as Grizabella in 'Cats: The Jellicle Ball'Kanya Iwana
Webber wasn’t the only person to give the production a thumbs-up. The show “exploded like a joy bomb,” the Hadestown actor says. People who were part of the show in the 1980s told the cast it was amazing, and word of mouth drew crowds rushing to the production to catch the exciting theatrical experience. One major part of the show’s success was Moore’s portrayal of the one cat who is chosen to be reborn into a Jellicle life: Grizabella. Her rendition of “Memory” moves audiences to tears; in addition to delivering stunning vocals, Moore brings deep feeling to the melancholic ballad.
Moore says she didn’t know much about the story of Cats, especially Grizabella, before starting the show. But the more she researched, the more she realized how similar her story was to the character’s. “It spoke to a lot of the trans women from ballroom like Octvaia St. Laurent, who said she wanted to be a household name, and they didn’t get to live in their fullness or be the artist they wanted to be because of transphobia and homophobia,” she explains.
Moore drew parallels to her trans identity because, like the outsider Grizabella, she felt like she didn’t fit into society, and that took her away from her craft; she started making life choices she wasn’t happy about. “I was no longer on the stage — and Grizabella coming back to her community, that felt like my story,” she says. “When I was younger, you couldn’t tell me I wasn’t going to be a singer, so now getting the opportunity to represent my community, the ballroom community, that I basically grew up in, it was a no-brainer.”
Art has always been an act of resistance. As the Trump administration continues to attack the rights of queer and trans people, there are big, bright, beautiful lights such as the “joy bomb” that is Cats: The Jellicle Ball; Levingston says that, in this day and age, the show is a “war cry.”
“Broadway is a really, really difficult thing to get right,” Levingston says. “There are lots of things that won’t be in our control. There are compromises all the time. But I think what makes commercial theater actually relevant in a fascist time is that we can’t be censored. No institution owns us and how we express what we have to say.”
This article is part of OUT’s Mar-Apr 2026 print issue, which hits newsstands March 24. Support queer media and subscribe — or download the issue through Apple News+, Zinio, Nook, or PressReader.
