Thirty-four days before previews, performing the opening number.
Photo: Balazs Gardi for New York Magazine
This reimagining of the Andrew Lloyd Webber classic de-literalizes the concept, taking the musical from a mythical cat community to the midst of the Harlem ballroom scene. There, the “Cats” compete in categories like “Hand Performance,” “Virgin Vogueing,” and “Butch Queen Realness.” In mashing musical theater and ballroom together, the show is neither your aunt from New Jersey’s Cats nor Crystal LaBeija’s ballroom scene. “I appreciate the idea of meeting in the middle,” co-director Zhailon Levingston says. “But we’re actually meeting each other on a planet neither one of us have been on before.”
The production began as the brainchild of Perelman Performing Arts Center artistic director Bill Rauch, who says he had an “impulse about Andrew Lloyd Weber’s Cats and the queer community.” When he realized that he actually wanted to set it at a ball, a friend connected him with Levingston (who made his Broadway debut in 2021 with Chicken & Biscuits) because he was a childhood Cats obsessive. The two developed it with their collaborators through what Rauch called “a slow iterative process.” But eventually, in 2024, the show played Off Broadway at PACNYC and became a New York sensation, extending three times.
While the combination of Cats and the ballroom scene can seem, on its face, a little absurd, it’s grounded in New York’s cultural legacy. The respective histories Cats and the ballroom scene tell parallel stories of New York art. Cats first came to Broadway in 1982 as a large-scale British import that sold itself on spectacle rather than artistry, setting the tone for musicals to come like Les Misérables and Phantom of the Opera. It pushed musical theater toward bombast just as AIDS was killing off some of the American art form’s greatest talents, including ’70s auteurs like Michael Bennett.
The same year that Cats debuted on Broadway, Willi Ninja, the so-called Grandfather of Voguing, created the ballroom house the “House of Ninja.” The house system, which was created by Crystal LaBeija in the ’70s, forms the basis of the ballroom community. The houses create supportive families for people who often don’t have that by blood and compete with other houses at the balls in both presentational and performance categories. In the ’80s, Ninja created the visual lexicon of vogue dance, propelling the art form to its largest stage yet in the documentary Paris Is Burning, in which he starred, and inspiring Madonna’s “Vogue.” Then, in 2006, he too died of AIDS.
To mash these two worlds together, Levingston and Rauch must find a seamless blend between the sometimes-soulless megamusical nature of Cats and the grit and community endemic to ballroom. In rehearsal, that means developing new patterns. The entire cast begins each one seated as a community, answering the question “What’s on your heart?” before getting to work. At the end, they do the same. The 80-year-old musical-theater legend André De Shields, who plays Old Deuteronomy, is an old cat learning new tricks. “I had to learn that bitch means ‘darling,’” he says. “At the first performance Off Broadway, I was making my entrance and an individual screamed out ‘Bitch, you ate!’ I went, ‘Do I have to go back to Baltimore and get in somebody’s face?’ ” Luckily for that audience member, the younger actor Sydney James Harcourt was there to explain.
André De Shields, 80, who plays Old Deuteronomy.
Photo: Balazs Gardi for New York Magazine
While both directors come from the theater world (Rauch is the former artistic director of the prestigious Oregon Shakespeare Festival), the show’s team included dyed-in-the-wool ballroom creators, too. Both choreographers, Omari Wiles and Arturo Lyons, are icons of the scene, as is one of the show’s new performers, Leiomy, who is joining the production as the villainous Macavity. Leiomy is one of the most prominent ballroom faces worldwide, especially after judging the HBO Max competition show Legendary. Explaining the difference between classical dance and ballroom, Leiomy calls ballroom “more 3D” because it pulls from a variety of vantage points. “You can see some hip-hop,” she says. “You’ll see some ballet, you’ll see ice-skating moves, you’ll see some karate.” Ballroom requires a scavenger mentality: Taking the gag-worthy parts from any discipline and throwing them together for maximum impact.
But that is not necessarily the mentality of the Really Useful Theatre Company — composer Andrew Lloyd Webber’s business that manages productions of his shows. They have had to approve this reinterpretation every step of the way. Before the production was confirmed, Rauch and Levingston began rehearsing it under an experimental contract, sending videos to the estate and learning, per De Shields, “what was kosher and what was not.” From there, they worked under a developmental contract doing the same thing. Then they finally got the greenlight to create an Off Broadway version.
A month after the show premiered to rave reviews at PACNYC, Lloyd Webber weighed in publicly on it for the first time. “I have rarely seen an audience respond with as much joy and love as I saw recently at Cats: The Jellicle Ball,” read his carefully composed statement. “The atmosphere was, quite simply, electric. Cats and Ballroom culture both emerged in the same era and I am delighted that, all these years later, they are intersecting once again. I want to congratulate the entire team behind this special show!”
Photo: Balazs Gardi for New York Magazine
Even now, after a successful run downtown, Rauch, Levingston, and the rest of the team are in constant conversation about the production’s many moving parts. “Just today we sent Andrew a musical demo of a musical choice for Broadway,” Rauch told me a matter of months before the production began performances. “So, it’s an ongoing relationship.”
There’s also the continuing relationship, within their own team, negotiating what it looks like for the show to play successfully to audiences familiar with musical theater and audiences familiar with ballroom. Since her casting, Leiomy has gotten messages from people saying they’ll be coming to The Jellicle Ball from all over the country, excited to experience either their first Broadway show or their first ball. “We say in the room that every choice we make has to stand up to ballroom and to musical theater,” Levingston says. “The great equalizer is that all parties are foresting together into an unknown space.”
Cats: The Jellicle Ball is in previews March 18 at Broadhurst Theatre.
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If you prefer to read in print, you can also find this article in the February 23, 2026, issue of
New York Magazine.
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If you prefer to read in print, you can also find this article in the February 23, 2026, issue of
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