When “Cats: The Jellicle Ball” premiered downtown at the Perelman Performing Arts Center (PAC), reviving the 1980s megahit musical but newly envisioning it as a competition in the underground queer ballroom scene, the general consensus of critics and audiences alike was that “Cats” and ballroom were a genius blend that seemed obvious in hindsight. The New Yorker called the combination “effortless”; TheaterMania said the concept felt “instantly natural”; and Exeunt described it as “a perfect fit.”
“I don’t really understand how some of it works so well,” co-director Zhailon Levingston confessed. “I don’t know why ballroom and ‘Cats’ [were] sitting there next to each other this close and this far away for so many years. That is still an unanswerable question.”
Co-director Bill Rauch (also PAC’s artistic director) was the one who first had, what he called, “a lucky hunch” that “looking at this musical through a queer lens would reveal something that was already there.” It was Rauch’s impulse to set “Cats” at a ball — a premise he’d begun to explore with casting director Victor Vazquez of X Casting. Simultaneously, Levingston was toying with the idea of “Cats” (initially as a joking proposition) without felines. While directing a show for Second Stage, Levingston shared his wild idea with some of the team, which included Vazquez. The casting director told Levingston to talk to Rauch. The two then joined forces to direct “Cats: The Jellicle Ball.”
After their “Cats” landed so successfully at PAC — in a semi-immersive space dominated by a 50-foot runway with audiences on three sides — the question arose of whether it could also work in a proscenium space on Broadway. After all, the runway (aka catwalk) felt core to the production, visually and emotionally, because of its ballroom roots. Levingston and Rauch took on the challenge, transferring the 2024 Off-Broadway mounting to the Main Stem’s Broadhurst Theatre in a revival that officially opened on April 7.
Just as the PAC mounting felt fitted to that specific space, the co-directors aimed to customize the Broadway version to its midtown home. “There are so many versions of what the show could have been based on what theater it could have been in versus eventually landing in the Broadhurst,” said Levingston. “The prompt that we all were working off of is not ‘how do we copy and paste downtown onto uptown,’ but ‘how do we make uptown its own dramaturgical experiment?’”
The Broadway iteration features a shorter, but also wider, runway (scenic design by Rachel Hauck). There are two audience sections onstage, on either side of the catwalk that cheat out to the traditional audience seating. Actors, aka cats, wander through the aisles and climb poles in box seats. There are video screens placed around the house with the same text that’s projected above the proscenium to accommodate different viewpoints. “So much of the design of this show is almost purely logistical, that is literally about how to get X amount of eyes to see X amount of information at the same time,” said Levingston. Rauch added, “There’s been a lot of discussion about the way in which the proscenium forces storytelling and narrative clarity because downtown, your eyes could roam all around this big space and action was happening everywhere. A Broadway theater is designed to have the focus be across the front of the proscenium and then in kind of a triangle moving up center.”
As for the catwalk: “When we step[ped] away from Off-Broadway thinking about Broadway, it’s like, ‘We have to have a runway, probably, but was it the 50-foot runway that made the show essential or was it something else happening?’”
