Cats: The Jellicle Ball opened officially at the Broadhurst Theatre on April 7, and the reviews that arrived Wednesday morning make a case that was not obvious three years ago, when the production was first announced: that Andrew Lloyd Webber's most ridiculed show might contain, inside its T.S. Eliot poems and memories of old fur, the raw material for something genuinely new. [1]

Directors Zhailon Levingston and Bill Rauch, with choreography by Arturo Lyons, reimagined the show through the lens of ballroom culture — the underground world of competitive performance that produced voguing, walk categories, and the houses (Blahnik, Mugler, LaBeija) that gave queer Black and Latinx performers a theater within a theater. The cats are now competing in a ball. Memory is sung by a figure representing a house mother who has aged out of competition. The Rum Tum Tugger becomes a superstar who built an empire and then lost the room. [2]

It works, mostly, because ballroom has its own mythology of belonging and displacement that maps onto T.S. Eliot's Jellicle poems without strain. Both systems ask: who gets to be seen? Who gets chosen? Who gets to go to the Heaviside Layer? The original answer was: the most special cat. The new answer is: the most authentic competitor. [3]

USA Today said the show would "convert even the biggest Cats haters." BroadwayWorld called it a Critic's Pick. The Variety review described the show as "free to be the most uninhibited version of itself." The dissents were quieter: Hollywood Reporter noted the production "trades sharpness for sweetness" in its final act, and some critics found the running time — two hours and 35 minutes — longer than the concept required. [4]

André De Shields, 80, performs as Old Deuteronomy. He is the production's moral authority and its most unambiguous source of the emotion that the original show often fumbled toward without finding. His Memory, in the final sequence, is the performance the revival needed to work. It works. [1]

-- CAMILLE BEAUMONT, Los Angeles