“Cats: The Jellicle Ball” Lands on Its Feet

When I was little, five or six, I was taken to Andrew Lloyd Webber’s long-running juggernaut musical “Cats.” My parents knew that I was already a big fan of cats (the species), and they had strategically hyped Lloyd Webber’s source material, T. S. Eliot’s “Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats.” What they didn’t know was that I was extremely nearsighted—I had never thought to mention it, but I couldn’t see anything more than three inches from my face. I remember my blurry toddler life before “Cats” (and glasses) as a mist, out of which books and snacks gently materialized. But in the night-black New London Theatre, during a bit of “fun,” fourth-wall-breaking crowd work, a spandex-clad dancer in leg warmers with a glowing cat-eye light on her head pounced onto my lap. Was theatre supposed to be this terrifying? I immediately started sobbing. Some forty years later, screaming and, indeed, discreet sobbing are actually the appropriate reactions to the ecstatic, quasi-immersive production of “Cats: The Jellicle Ball,” at PAC NYC . The directors Zhailon Levingston and Bill Rauch have reënvisioned Lloyd Webber’s cheese-tastic musical as an event on the queer, largely Black and Latinx ballroom circuit, the once underground drag milieu introduced to the mainstream in works such as the 1990 documentary “Paris Is Burning” and the TV show “Pose.” This type of ballroom features voguing dance battles and catwalk strut-offs, and so the directors have deliberately orchestrated a raucous crowd response. When André De Shields, a Broadway icon, appears as the kinglike Old Deuteronomy, in a purple suit (designed by Qween Jean) and a white-and-purple ombré lion’s mane, the audience’s din of approval becomes his royal fanfare. And the longer the contestants sashay the more the room urges them to greatness. “Deliver! Deliver! ” one theatregoer next to me shouted. Given “Cats” ’s dominance—it ran on Broadway for eighteen years—it’s difficult to remember that, in 1981, Lloyd Webber’s synthesizer-forward musical interpretation of Eliot’s whimsical poems seemed like a sure loser. Eliot’s verses have no connecting narrative, so Lloyd Webber and his director, Trevor Nunn, corralled them into a […]

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