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.
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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.
