Cats: The Jellicle Ball Brings Queer Ballroom to Broadway
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- Cats: The Jellicle Ball transferred to Broadway from a 2024 downtown run, reframing the Andrew Lloyd Webber–T.S. Eliot musical inside Harlem's Black and Latino queer ballroom culture — the scene of the documentary "Paris Is Burning" and TV's "Pose."
- André De Shields, 80, anchors the cast as Old Deuteronomy alongside Dudney Joseph Jr. as Munkustrap, Sydney James Harcourt as Rum Tum Tugger, and transgender ballroom mother "Tempress" Chasity Moore as a reimagined Grizabella.
- Co-directors Zhailon Levingston and Bill Rauch stage the production, with choreography by Arturo Lyons and Omari Wiles, Qween Jean's costumes, Nikiya Mathis's wigs, and Rachel Hauck's set featuring a catwalk extending from center stage into the orchestra.
- The score has been rearranged to reflect the percussive, synthesized heart of house music, with orchestrations credited to Lloyd Webber and David Wilson under music supervisor William Waldrop.
- Junior LaBeija plays Gus the theater cat — a ballroom icon from "Paris Is Burning" — and his appearance is paired with a second-act slide show tribute to the founders of the era's drag houses.
- The source underscores that the queer predecessors of these characters survived the HIV/AIDS epidemic amid racism, poverty, and violence, with drag houses providing safety, acceptance and glamour — a subtext the reviewer says elevates the production beyond the 1982 original's feline conceit.
Why it matters: The Broadway transfer gives a 1982 musical a culturally specific, historically grounded reframing — bringing ballroom elders like Junior LaBeija and an 80-year-old De Shields to a commercial stage that has rarely centered Black and Latino queer lineage. By rebuilding the score around house music and rooting the spectacle in a real community's survival story, the production repositions "Cats" from a dated revue into a tribute with potential national touring reach.
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