Andrew Lloyd Webber's Cats opens tomorrow night at the Broadhurst Theatre — not as the feline fantasy that Hollywood turned into a $373 million disaster in 2019, but as a Black underground ballroom competition, vivid, queer, and formally precise. Opening night is April 7. The production has been in previews since March 18, and the reviews that have trickled out ahead of the official opening are the best the Cats brand has received in decades. [1]

The production is called Cats: The Jellicle Ball. The concept is disarmingly simple and, in retrospect, obvious. Ballroom culture — the underground Black and Latino LGBTQ+ art form that produced the Harlem ball scene of the 1970s, the documentary Paris Is Burning, and eventually FX's Pose — operates on a competitive structure nearly identical to the original show's premise. Cats presents a tribe of "Jellicle cats" who gather annually to compete for the right to be reborn into a new life. Ballroom presents houses of chosen family who compete for trophies in categories that express identity, artistry, and survival. The overlap is not metaphorical. It is structural. [2]

Directors Bill Rauch and Zhailon Levingston began from that structural parallel and built outward. The junkyard is gone. The warehouse is a makeshift ballroom. The Jellicle cats are now a chosen family of queer people of color. Each cat's character corresponds to a specific ballroom category — Mr. Mistoffelees as a runway walker, the runway as his element, the choreography as a Southern queer ballroom vocabulary rather than the ballet-influenced original. Choreographers Omari Wiles and Arturo Lyons built the movement vocabulary from the ground up, replacing white European concert dance with something rooted in the bodies and traditions of the communities the show now celebrates. [3]

At the center of this is André De Shields as Old Deuteronomy, the elder who presides over the competition and ultimately makes the Jellicle choice. De Shields is 80 years old. He won a Tony Award for playing Hermes in Hadestown, a role he inhabited with a showman's authority that made him the animating intelligence of that production's mythology. Here he does something structurally similar — Old Deuteronomy is the emcee, the house father, the keeper of tradition — but the emotional register is different. Where Hermes was a trickster narrator, De Shields's Deuteronomy is a witness, carrying the weight of a community's history. Preview audiences have responded to the performance as the anchor the show needs. [4]

The Off-Broadway run at the Perelman Performing Arts Center in summer 2024 generated intense word-of-mouth. The Broadway transfer has been scheduled and anticipated for over a year. What the transfer adds is the Broadhurst itself — a house with a capacity that allows the ballroom configuration to achieve the intimacy the concept demands. The audience does not simply watch the ball. It attends the ball. Seating has been reconfigured to create the runway at the center.

The production also introduces Junior LaBeija, a living ballroom legend, in a role that collapses the distance between the theatrical representation of ballroom culture and its actual practitioners. This is not a show about ballroom culture performed by people who researched it. It is a show that includes the culture's own. [5]

The timing is not incidental. Ballroom culture has spent decades moving from underground to overground — Paris Is Burning in 1990, RuPaul's Drag Race for the past fifteen years, Pose from 2018 to 2021 — but it has moved through documentary and television, not through Broadway. The Jellicle Ball is the genre's first Broadway landing on its own terms, not as subject matter but as form. The show is structured as a ball. The audience watches a ball. The performers compete as ballroom competitors. Andrew Lloyd Webber's score, which has always been somewhat abstract in its theatrical function, discovers new purpose inside a competitive form that gives every number a reason to exist.

Critics previewing the production have reached for superlatives unusual in a season where Broadway has offered both the Nathan Lane revival of Death of a Salesman and the Thundercat album cycle. The New York Times gave it a critics' pick. The Chicago Tribune said the production "has so much love, it gives you hope." [1]

Broadway's most mocked property. Redeemed by the people it should have been about all along.

-- CAMILLE BEAUMONT, Los Angeles