Picture: Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman
“It’s not a takeoff or a satire,” the drag queen Dorian Corey famously stated to explain the idea of “realness” in Paris Is Burning. “No, it’s really with the ability to be this factor.” The identical could also be stated of The Jellicle Ball, Zhailon Levingston and Invoice Rauch’s ballroom tackle Andrew Lloyd Webber’s endlessly sticky and deeply mockable musical Cats. The Jellicle Ball isn’t a satire, which might be a straightforward tackle the fabric, neither is it actually a intestine renovation. The manufacturing makes an exhilarating variety of decisions to replace and revise and touch upon the weird musical entity borne of a fancy Brit’s love of T.S. Eliot’s poems for youngsters, however it retains the fundamental load-bearing parts of the unique present. There are cats — portrayed air-quotes model by actors as ballroom performers. They’re gathering for his or her ball, they usually sing all of the songs you recognize. And but, in putting new context and our bodies contained in the swimsuit of ’80s extra, The Jellicle Ball reinvents it. Arriving on Broadway, The Jellicle Ball proves itself to be greater than a fluke or a flight of fancy. It’s spectacular.
That’s a reduction, if not an sudden one should you’re updated in your Jellicle information. When this model of Cats premiered in the summertime of 2024 on the Perelman Performing Arts Middle downtown, there was a sense of shock and awe to its reception: Wait, Cats will be good? Cats will be this good? And it’d be cheap to marvel if it’s doable to copy the identical lightning-in-a-bottle impact within the harsher local weather of Broadway.
As a lot as I loved my journey to The Jellicle Ball the primary time round, I felt myself tensing upon return, fearful it wouldn’t be capable of ship as soon as once more. For one, there are the bodily limitations of an uptown house. At PAC, the manufacturing’s scenic designer Rachel Hauck reworked your complete house right into a runway. On the Broadhurst, the place Cats has now constructed its lair, Hauck has introduced the runway again and supplied some onstage seating to copy the viewers’s proximity to the motion. However that runway occupies a extra cramped house owing to the necessity for clear sight traces for the majority of the viewers, and it leaves the performers much less room to strut. That, in flip, condenses the storytelling, making it much less democratic. At PAC, Rauch and Levingston may scatter the Jellicles throughout an extended rectangular house, unspooling gleeful chaos within the group numbers; right here, the sense of dramatic precedence at all times falls on whoever’s at middle. A Broadway theater, because it seems, is architecturally a star automobile. That sacrifices a sure sense of neighborhood however emphasizes the musical’s solos. Diva worship is what this venue was constructed for.
We may quibble additional about what’s gained and misplaced within the switch. What powers The Jellicle Ball, in both occasion, is the instinct that cultural merchandise of reverse edges of Nineteen Eighties New York Metropolis — the megamusical and the drag ball — can communicate to one another. On Broadway, the present occupies the house turf of 1 kind (although it actually is simply too unhealthy that the Winter Backyard is taken), in order that dynamic is supercharged. The co-directors have stated they arrived on the concept for The Jellicle Ball instinctively, pursuing Rauch’s impulse to narrate the musical to the queer neighborhood, and so, fittingly, the manufacturing unfolds by a sort of dream logic, or what may very well be mistaken as “sure, and” improvisation if Qween Jean’s costumes weren’t so pleasurably detailed, glamorous, and tearaway-ready. (My God, the large leopard purse.) A DJ scrounges by vinyls, pulling out the Cats forged recording, and people cascading gothic opening chords of Lloyd Webber’s rating accompany scenes of our cats primping for his or her massive occasion — now, after all, a sort of ball that could be a competitors. Throw in just a few heavier beats, credited to arranger/producer Trevor Holder, and we’re off to the races.
The manufacturing wears its metaphors calmly with a wink and a purr. The songs, which within the authentic serve to introduce every cat’s persona, now function as unfastened accompaniments to varied classes on the ball. The strutting Bustopher Jones (Nora Schell) is a excessive Britannia drag king displaying off a luscious physique; the fussy Jennyanydots (Xavier Reyes) is a drag mom to her personal kin; the curious and harmful Rum Tum Tugger (Sydney James Harcourt) is right here to flex his masc realness and his butt in a jockstrap. The manufacturing is aware of it may be unfastened in construction — the viewers needn’t care who precisely wins what class — so long as it’s devoted to the logic of showmanship. (True of the unique too, which might by no means have run for thus lengthy if it didn’t have the sexually charged lure of dancers in bodysuits.)
I’d run out of time itemizing the names and personalities of every cat (that’s mainly what Cats itself is), however it’s essential that each Jellicle member will get applause for his or her day within the solar. 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, selection, and — although it could appear at odds with the present’s ethos — occasional restraint. They know a stunt transfer from Macavity (Leiomy, a newcomer within the switch, bringing lithe pizzazz to her cat burglar) will thrill the gang however {that a} single magisterial hand gesture from Previous Deuteronomy (André De Shields) shall be simply as efficient when correctly deployed.
Picture: Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman
There are new visitor judges on the ball each evening, however the 80-year-old De Shields will get to be its grand dame it doesn’t matter what, offering The Jellicle Ball with authority and historical past. A lot of the present is a heart-on-its-paw tribute to New York itself; they revise just a few correct nouns right here and there to get us throughout the pond from London (Mungojerrie and Rumpleteaser now hail from Victoria Grove, New Jersey, and have the accents to match), and typically go for wholesale New Yahk–icana. A spotlight of the evening comes when Emma Sofia’s Skimbleshanks, the Railway Cat, reveals up dressed as an MTA worker with a showstopping hip-length wig (Nikiya Mathis did the hair) and sings a few of her verses in Spanish. It’s just a few ft previous the road of indulgent however served with such talent and delight that it may’t be something however profitable.
The presence of true New York legends like De Shields and Junior LaBeija, who performs the nostalgic Gus, the Theater Cat, provides 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 taking part in “Firefrorefiddle, the Fiend of the Fell,” we see him web page by a binder of Playbills that features, touchingly, The Wiz (which starred De Shields). Amid Eliot’s doggerel, we flip to consider LaBeija’s and De Shields’s disparate histories as queer Black performers in New York — LeBeija has stated he couldn’t afford to see De Shields in The Wiz when it was operating — turning into entwined years later. The Jellicle Ball doesn’t spend a lot time explaining what the “Jellicle Selection,” the pseudo-sacrificial second on the finish of the present, is. However we perceive how ache and demise may encompass these figures. One other hyperlink between Cats and ballroom: AIDS ravaged each.
The Jellicle Ball is most dramatically efficient when it turns its gaze to the previous, anchoring a story that’s at minimal fuzzy by nature. Cats itself barely has a plot, however that present’s second act does embrace an injection of drama by way of the devious Macavity, who right here has stolen some high-fashion clothes. Rauch and Levingston have the police interrupt the ball to attempt to catch her in a sequence which may be well-intentionally designed to underline the notion that this queer ecosystem lives with the specter of state violence, although that’s a topic the manufacturing doesn’t have the means to correctly metabolize. (Lloyd Webber’s little experiments with time signatures usually are not going that will help you a lot there.) And it’s the place I felt the most important change of tone between the Broadway and Off Broadway runs. On the Broadhurst, the return of Previous Deuteronomy from captivity, effected by the magic-trick contortions of Mister Mistoffelees (Rober “Silk” Mason), is much less spectacular than I remembered it being. Is it as a result of Silk is simply so tall that the shorter runway is an additional disservice to them? Or that The Jellicle Ball doesn’t linger as lengthy within the scene’s dread for worry of turning off its crowd? Have been the lights down for longer again then, or was my sight line merely higher? Did they downplay a romance between Tugger and Mistoffelees? Was {that a} concession to vacationers? For a lot of The Jellicle Ball, ballroom exists inside Broadway in miraculous concord, however you’ll be able to typically really feel the chilly hand of the latter constrict the previous.
There’s rigidity between celebrating a marginalized artwork kind and capitalizing on it, and it bubbles all through The Jellicle Ball. Lloyd Webber’s rating is a pure match for this interpretation due to his magpie instincts. He writes like he’s strolled into the “music style” retailer and stated, “I’ll take one among every part”: some Puccini, some psychedelic rock, and a few Gilbert and Sullivan. That, reframed because the tastes of characters placing collectively a hardscrabble present, appears revolutionary, like they’re breaking right into a Prada and making an attempt its labels on for dimension. However you’ll be able to’t banish the sense that that is all paid for with Lloyd Weber’s black card — the Lord himself needed to okay the manufacturing, and that is one among a number of reinterpretations of his catalog he has green-lit. The home at all times wins, even (or particularly) with progressive branding.
However to The Jellicle Ball’s credit score, that rigidity can also be essentially what the present is about, extra so than simply singing cats. And that could be a nice topic for a musical. As within the authentic, we spend a lot of the manufacturing watching the destiny of Grizabella, the once-fabulous Glamour Cat now sidelined and made to tempo the facet of the stage. Right here, performed by “Tempress” Chasity Moore, initially with a busted face of make-up, Grizabella is a former home mom whom the opposite cats provide passing respect and pity however are unable to offer a lot assist. That’s, nevertheless, till she is acknowledged by a beginner and given her likelihood to return to the stage, delivering The Jellicle Ball’s most extravagant ballroom-plus-Broadway second as she belts “Reminiscence” full-out: key change! Costume change! A fusillade of spotlights! The gesture is sentimental, showy, and, in all its glitz, shifting in a approach that haunts me. The phrases could also be compromised, and the second could also be transient. However given any sort of stage, some expertise, and sufficient perspective, an individual can rework into no matter actual factor they need to be.
Cats: The Jellicle Ball is on the Broadhurst Theatre.
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