“Cats: The Jellicle Ball” is not your grandfather’s “Cats.” As audiences discovered when this production debuted downtown at the Perelman Performing Arts Center in summer 2024, “Cats: The Jellicle Ball” reenvisions the musical as a ballroom competition. Instead of felines gesturing at proving themselves worthy of the Heaviside Layer and rebirth, official ballroom competitors walk the runway to win the grand prize. But the current revival of “Cats” includes more than one perspective shift in its storytelling of the Andrew Lloyd Webber and T.S. Eliot musical.
“What’s at the heart of this reimagining is the coming of the power of the feminine,” actor André De Shields, who plays Old Deuteronomy, told Broadway News. “We have been in the masculine power silo for so long that we don’t even remember when women were in control of the cosmos, if you will.”
“Cats: The Jellicle Ball” not only portrays the classical kitties as humans, not only sets “Cats” in the context of a ball, but in doing so stands in feminine power and expression.
“They say in the play that, as you have said, the patron of all the cats is Deuteronomy, but it’s not about immaculate conception. He’s father of all the cats. So who’s the mother of all the cats?” De Shields questioned. In this version, De Shields argued, she’s Gus. De Shields noted that in previous stagings of the musical, “There was no established relationship between Old Deuteronomy and Gus, the theater cat.” But in this mounting, there is.
