How ‘Cats’ Got Queerer, Better & Stormed Broadway As ‘Cats: The Jellicle Ball’
Categoria: Musica
The scintillating production is up for nine Tonys, including best direction of a musical for Zhailon Levingston and Bill Rauch.
Por Billboard | 27/05/2026
From Broadway to the silver screen and back to Broadway, Cats has a way of landing on its feet. But that doesn’t mean it hasn’t risked a few of those nine lives on its way to earning nine Tony Award nominations for its latest iteration, Cats: The Jellicle Ball. A reimagining of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s groundbreaking Broadway musical Cats (which was adapted from a 1939 poetry collection called Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats by 20th century giant T.S. Eliot), Cats: The Jellicle Ball dispenses with the humans-as-cats makeup and rebuilds the musical within the fierce, feisty world of Harlem ballroom culture. When Cats: The Jellicle Ball debuted off-Broadway at new Manhattan venue PAC NYC in 2024, Billboard spoke to Zhailon Levingston, its co-director alongside Bill Rauch, about his sincere hope that The Jellicle Ball would keep rolling after their production wrapped so it could reach a wider audience, particularly among young queer people. Fast forward to 2026. Not only is Cats: The Jellicle Ball selling out shows at the Broadhurst Theatre on Broadway, but it’s up for a whopping nine Tonys, including best revival of a musical and best direction of a musical for Levingston and Rauch. Rauch — for whom queer reimaginings of Broadway classics is a bit of a lifelong passion — spoke to Billboard about this production’s 25-year journey, hard-hat construction tours with Andrew Lloyd Webber and how a creative compromise became a “gift” for The Jellicle Ball. What was your first exposure to Cats ? Had you seen it on stage? I heard about Cats for years, and the way in which it became such a part of popular culture. I finally saw the original production late in its run. I saw it sometime in the late ‘90s. After I saw it, I began to think about it in a queer context, and I began to think about Grizabella. What if Grizabella were an older gay man who was singing “Memory” in a bar. What would that be, just to have that song and the way in which youth and beauty are extolled, almost fetishized? It moved me to think about it in a queer context. And I thought, “Oh, but that will never happen, because you would never get the rights.” I love that. I can imagine something like that happening at the Monster in Greenwich Village. So how did it actually come to be? I had lived with that dream about Cats in a queer, human context longer than I realized. My husband and I had a disagreement because I said that I thought it was, like, 10 years earlier. And he said, “No, no, it’s been, like, 25 years or more.” Then a friend from L.A. came and saw it and said, “Oh, I’m so happy you’ve been able to do this because you’ve been talking about it for 25 years.” So yeah, my husband was right. When I got this job at PAC NYC [Perelman Performing Arts Center NYC], I began to sketch what could be our inaugural season. When I showed a plan for the season, a board member said, “You’re missing two things: You’re missing something that you direct yourself