Music

Cats: The Jellicle Ball is a new stage production that reimagines Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cats within the world of Harlem ballroom. It sounds like a whimsical lark on paper, a novel concept that might wear thin fast – but in practice, it’s actually kind of genius. Think salty ice cream – sounds weird but try it once and you’re an instant convert.

Cats is a cultural touchstone that could use a win these days. The original Broadway production was a (litter) box office smash; Cats ran 18 years and still reigns as the fifth-longest-running Broadway show ever. The 2019 live-action film, however, did not land on its feet: critics scorned it, audiences avoided it and longtime haters licked their lips.

Which is why Cats: The Jellicle Ball – co-directed by Zhailon Levingston and Bill Rauch; choreographed by Arturo Lyons and Omari Wiles – is nothing short of a small miracle for a musical property that has burned through a few of its nine lives. Not only is it delighting the faithful, but it’s also bringing in new fans as it plays to sold-out crowds at new Manhattan venue PAC NYC.

Lloyd Webber’s playful, hummable score is mostly unchanged, but the milieu of the musical has become the fertile, fresh and fierce world of ballroom culture (if that means nothing to you, watch the 1990 documentary Paris Is Burning or TV series Pose stat). Ball culture — which has been forged over the decades by queer people of color — gives the often-scattershot narrative of Cats a throughline and (perhaps more importantly) provides each character with that elusive “why.” Why are they performing? Why are they vying for attention? Why are they in friendly competition? Because that’s what ball divas do, darling. And since many of the cast members hail from that world, the runway walks (and death drops) in this staging are the real deal.

Connecting Lloyd Webber’s Cats to ball culture also teases out the beautiful, bittersweet heart of the musical: one generation facing its irrelevance while another begins to experience the joys and jabs of life for the first time. “Everybody wants to leave something behind them, some impression, some mark on the world,” says drag performer Dorian Corey in Paris Is Burning. “[But when you’re older] you think you left a mark on the world if you just get through it and a few people remember your name.” It’s not hard to imagine “Memory” playing in the background of that scene.

That cross-generational connection has played out behind-the-scenes of Cats: The Jellicle Ball, too, thanks in part to two LGBTQ legends – Tony winner André De Shields and ball icon Junior Labeija – being part of the cast. “On a break [during rehearsals], you would see multiple people sometimes sitting around the feet of Junior and listening to him pontificate on stories of what was going on back when,” Levingston tells Billboard of having a “pillar of ballroom” in the theatrical space. “The [performers], especially those who are younger, are eager to hear [that queer history].”

During a recent phone call with Billboard, Levingston tells us about sinking his claws into Cats as a child, working with Andrew Lloyd Webber’s estate on this production and what he hopes is next for Cats: The Jellicle Ball.

What was your first exposure to Cats, the musical?

When I was a kid, like kindergarten or first grade, I would go to this daycare center after school, and they would put on the Barney movie. I was a big Barney kid — love Barney. And one of the trailers in the Barney movie was the 1998 recording of Cats [the stage musical]. At that age, I was not aware of my queerness; I was not aware of any of the reasons why I might be odd or different. And I didn’t have a strong vocabulary for theater, obviously, at all. I just saw this trailer and I didn’t really know the difference between what they were doing and what happens in a regular movie, but I felt things. Some things that were like, “These are exciting feelings that I have felt before” and some things I was like, “Ooh, I don’t even know if I’m supposed to feel this — what is this feeling?” I think that was the queer-coded-ness of the original production. This was around a time when Blockbuster was a thing, and so my single mother [and I] were at Blockbuster. I saw the two cat eyes from the box, and I was like, “I want to watch that! That’s the thing they play on the Barney movie!” And my mom, of course, was like, “You don’t know what that is. You don’t want to watch that.” And this is Blockbuster, so you actually have to watch the thing.

Right. It’s not like streaming, you can watch five minutes and then switch to something else.

Exactly. So I was like, “No, I promise, I’m gonna watch this.” So she got it for me. When she put it in, I sat inches away from the television and watched all two and a half hours of it without moving. Without asking for food, asking for water, using the restroom, I just stayed there. My mom was like, “we may have a situation.” I watched it every day for like two years and knew way too much about it as material. Then as I got older and learned more about theater and chose it as a profession, I think there’s this moment where you kind of diverge away from the things that you were attracted to as a kid. So then when the opportunity came to co-direct this, it was intersecting with a feeling that I was having of [being] a little paranoid to lose the things that activated me as a child. Even before I knew how we could make this work, I knew it spoke to a part of me that I felt like the larger industry wasn’t interested in. So the first big “yes” was about being able to play with that young person.

And what was your first exposure to ball culture?

It wasn’t until I moved to New York that I went to a ball for the first time. I definitely wouldn’t say that I was someone who was in the community — I was not. But in the way that a lot of young queer people, especially of color, intersect with ball culture, there are these points of intersection. Like a lot of people, my first time understanding it from a historical context was watching Paris Is Burning. I probably saw that when I was in college and had the same reaction that a lot of people have nowadays when they watch it — understanding how everything in pop culture that we say and do can be stemmed back to something that a queer person of color created.

It’s unreal how every quote from that movie has become part of culture. How did you approach the challenge of making sure this play felt authentic to ball culture?

The whole team is very much a mix of people who have worked in theater and people who work in ballroom. From the very beginning to me, I was like, “Oh, this is the event, this is what it is, it is about this culture clash specifically.” Both of our choreographers come from ballroom and are icons and legends within that community. We knew very, very early on that the cast had to be made up of people who came from ballroom and musical theater. So casting was really, really difficult. You’ve seen the show, and hopefully, there isn’t this drastic demarcation between people who are in musical theater and people who are in ballroom. Maybe you can tell a little bit, but the hope is that those two worlds are coming together to create this whole other new energy of expression that feels whole and complete. So a big shout out to how relentless our casting directors were to keeping our feet to the fire in terms of when sh-t got hard, never giving upon the thing that was the integrity of the piece: making sure that we’re always centering ballroom and doing it in a way that doesn’t sacrifice the material of Cats.

When you were giving feedback to the actors, did more of the notes have to do with acting or with ballroom?

It was a pretty fascinating balance of the things. The longer we developed the piece, the more we learned what can never be sacrificed in either one of those worlds and what is up for negotiation. People from the cast had the autonomy and the freedom to raise their hand and be like, “Okay, so connect what you just said back to ballroom. Where’s that in ballroom?” It wasn’t from a place of criticalness, it was a place of “that’s how I enter this space.” So every acting choice, or dramaturgical choice or staging choice had to be both about our interpretation of the poetry of Cats and also about ballroom itself. What’s been exciting is to watch people come multiple times to the show and get something new every time or something deeper every time. I don’t know if it makes more or less sense of Cats — because I think how people define that is different — but what I do think it does is excavates the poetry for today’s audience in a way that has many more entry points to it, other than “I’m watching a literal cat tell me this thought.”

Speaking of literal cats, how early in the process was the decision made that the actors would not be dressed as actual felines?

It was pretty immediate. My co-director, Bill Rauch, he talks about how even before this project, the inspiration for him was this image of an older queer man singing “Memory” at a gay bar. So that was the pop. And then very quickly, what we learned is that it wasn’t in a gay bar, it was in a ball. And it’s not just a runway, that’s a catwalk. They’re not literal cats, but they’re people who walk cat-egories. And there’s something fun about that kind of wordplay, to use “cat” as the kind of slang term in the way that it was used in the 20th century – “look at that cat over there, that’s a cool cat.” That that’s already in the lexicon. So it’s just about bringing all of those things into play. And then also the fact that so much of ballroom vocabulary centers the feline, centers the cat and centers other words that suggest the cat, if you know what I mean.

[laughs] How did you approach the music?

The thing that took us the longest time to negotiate was “how does the music fit into this world?” The music started as our first organizing principle around the adaption — we just assumed that you have to change all of this music. The happy accident that we learned through development is that by doing that, you don’t actually interpret what is really the script in Cats, which is the orchestrations. If we get rid of everything, I don’t actually know what Andrew Lloyd Webber was trying to say in the first place. But that is an idea that I can only articulate in hindsight. What that really looked like in process was having a dance lab, a choreo lab with the choreographers, and the challenge being, “what would happen if we put this vogue and ballroom vocabulary onto this orchestration without touching any of it?” And what happened pretty quickly is that it sparked joy. The choreographers had joy in discovery of this physical language being able to be married to this music in a way that actually didn’t take away from the authenticity of the movement. If anything, it helped us listen to the score better.

I wanted to touch on what you mentioned about queer elders, since the cast includes undeniable legends in both the theater and ballroom communities. Were they helping instill a sense of queer history, queer continuity, during rehearsals?

All the time. We are so lucky to have the legend that is André De Shields, this pillar of theater, and then the legend that is Junior Labeija, this pillar of ballroom, as fountains of resources in the room. The space became a space where at any moment if Junior needed to stop us and give us more nuanced context, or challenge something that was going on, [he would]. [He would] remind us that he has 50 years of ballroom, as he puts it. All of that we used, and I think all of that plays into his connection to Gus. The way his role is played in the show is someone that all the cats, especially those who are younger, are eager to hear from, to learn from, to see, and we didn’t really have to fake a lot of that, because that’s what was happening in the rehearsal all the time. On a break and you would see multiple people sometimes sitting around the feet of Junior and listening to him pontificate on stories of what was going on back when.

There’s really no way of doing ballroom without the audience being an active participant, which isn’t the norm for theater. This certainly wasn’t an issue when I saw it, but have you had any audiences who were a little more reticent to get involved?

From the first dress rehearsal it was a rowdy, enthusiastic audience. We don’t really have quiet audiences. What I’ve started to tell people is it feels much more like you’re going to a sporting event than you’re going to their typical piece of theatre. And that’s cool. I think that theater should be an event. We had no clue how audiences would respond even up until first dress rehearsal. And for about five or six performances, almost our entire preview process, I didn’t trust them. I just didn’t know that would sustain, so it’s been fascinating to see now, after weeks of being open, that that is just what happens in this room for this show. And I think it’s because there are so many different types of people it’s calling together and it’s touching them and gagging them in different ways. The ballroom community feels so seen because of how many ballroom folks we have in the show and their status within the community. It is multigenerational. We have people who’ve just started their own house. [Robert “Silk” Mason], the actor who plays Mr. Mistoffelees, is now the founding mother of the House of Silk, [so they’re] at the beginning of that journey, and you have someone like Junior and everyone in between. Obviously, we will always wish to have more representation than not, but I think that what we have heard from folks within ballroom is that it’s so rare that there’s any level of real authenticity with ballroom in popular culture. [Pop culture] takes from the community and wears it as opposed to making something new with the community. And I have been really pleasantly surprised by the fact that it’s not just the ballroom elements that they’re pleased with. It’s the power of the singing voices, it’s the music. We had a guest judge who was a ballroom legend and mother who was sitting at the judge’s table mouthing words to “The Rum Tum Tugger.” And I was like, “oh, yeah, this musical was once the longest running musical in history, parts of it have found their way into everyone probably in some way.” I think people from ballroom are really shocked about watching ballroom elements but with the rigor of people actually singing at the same time. That’s like, “What? What is going on?” And then I think people who are used to musicals are watching this material that they learned get completely reimagined. And they’re like, “What? How are they doing a drop and singing at the same time?” Those two general broad constituencies are meeting each other at the intersection of wonder. And then there’s all of these other people in between: there’s old people, young people, Black people, white people, gay people, straight people, people who love Cats, people who abhor Cats and people who have no clue what Cats or ballroom is. And somehow all of those people are finding a way to be together.

I know the run recently got extended into August. Do you have a sense of what might happen with it down the road? Might you film it or even tour it?

What I will say it that we on the creative team want more audiences to be able to have access to material. And you know, personally, I always want actors to have jobs. I feel proud of the work and want to keep sharing it and I want to keep actors employed. But ultimately, it’s up to Andrew Lloyd Webber. And luckily, we worked very closely with his estate on this adaption. And I think that’s important for people to know. Everyone in his estate has seen the show, given us feedback about the show, worked with us on tricky moments that we were trying to figure out musically within the show. His daughter has seen the show twice. Once he comes to see the show, it will be ultimately up to him in terms of where he thinks it should go next. [Ed. note: two days after this interview, Lloyd Webber attended Cats: The Jellicle Ball.]

What was the feedback you got from the estate, in terms of things they thought weren’t quite working?

One of the things they gave us really good, detailed touch notes on is even though all of our characters are people and not cats, they validated the kind of fun in the costume design of still seeing elements of the feline. That felt important to them. And I think ultimately, it’s successful in the show. Probably the biggest collaborative effort between the estate and us was once we committed to mostly working with the original score, we then had to figure out what is there to do about the ballroom beats, which are so essential. You can’t come to something called a ball and hear nothing of a ballroom beat. We have a ballroom DJ on the team and the consensus that came together is ultimately the reason why the show is working. When the score is happening, it’s Andrew Lloyd Webber’s score, but there could be beats inserted in between the score in moments of actual competition on the runway. That’s all we needed in order for people to be like, “yeah, I get it, I get the world, I get this authenticity.” And it helped establish the fact that this whole night isn’t exclusively about competition. There are other emotions, other nuances, other feelings. This is ballroom culture, not a documentary about a ball. There are things that are happening off the runway that are supported better with music that isn’t just the ballroom beats that one might be used to. It just creates a richer sonic landscape to put all of these emotions that people are feeling in a place that makes sense.

What was one of the hardest things to hammer out in this production?

If I’m talking about story points, it was probably the reimagining of Macavity. A super iconic role that took a long time to figure out. With Macavity we knew early on, after a while of developing but still towards the beginning of the process, that we wanted to reimagine him. We just knew it didn’t make sense for him to be a villain in the space. So who would Macavity be a villain to? Probably the cops would make him a villain, probably stealing sh-t and that was aligned with history in ballroom. And then how to make that make sense without changing any of the material. That just took a long time to develop and was also very collaborative with the actor [Antwayn Hopper]. A lot of these choices were very collaborative with the actors. The integrity of process is always the hardest thing.

Is there anything else you’d like to add?

I would say a selfish hope is that no matter where the show goes next — if it goes somewhere next — it would be amazing to be able to record a cast album of it. I feel so much [for] those kids that are so far away from Broadway or New York and need something to hold on to that connects them to the thing that is giving them life when they’re at home in Oklahoma or Louisiana or Nebraska or wherever they are. I was that kid. And to hear these Black and brown artists [of the] cis and trans and queer experience being past your expectation of what certain voices should be able to do with a score that is extremely difficult and athletic – while also infused with contemporary touches of ballroom — that would just be an amazing thing to be able to hold on to.