Give yourself over to the energy and spectacle of pure fantasy.
Jellicle Cats come out to-night
Jellicle Cats come one come all:
The Jellicle Moon is shining bright—
Jellicles come to the Jellicle Ball.
—T.S. Eliot, The Song of the Jellicles, 1939
In CATS: The Jellicle Ball, a bilingual Skimbleshanks: The Railway Cat with long, blond-and-black striped hair and thigh-high boots “saunters to the rear” of an MTA train with straphangers bouncing to the beat. The Rum Tum Tugger has six-pack abs—and dance moves—to die for. And the “notorious” Mungojerrie And Rumpelteazer, clad in neon colors, vogue and prance through their duet on the dance floor.
“I know some of you Broadway cats and kittens are used to sitting quietly, but here you can yell and cheer and dance in your seats,” Andre De Shields, as Old Deuteronomy, announces to the audience of Cats’ most recent revival, which opened on Broadway in April and won three Tonys (and was nominated for nine) at Sunday’s awards.
A tribute to the queer ballroom scene led by Black and Latinx queens in Harlem, this most recent revival is based in the ballroom world, from its Easter egg-infused costumes to its high-energy choreography. It’s big and bold and fun and you can stand up and dance in the rows.
CATS: The Jellicle Ball is a complete reimagining of Cats, the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical that ran throughout the 1980s and 1990s that people love to hate. At the same time, it’s a revival, so the music is exactly like the original. In both productions, almost all of the lyrics were lifted from a collection of poems for children published by T.S. Eliot in 1939, Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats. Webber was a fan of Eliot’s cat poems as a child, eventually putting them to music, creating what became one of the longest running musicals in history.
Somehow, the cat-sonas created by Eliot in that collection are still with us—now in their ninth decade. Eliot’s poems inspired everything from Webber’s Cats and its many revivals, including the ill-fated but star-studded film adaptation, to a 1982 illustrated version by Edward Gorey. It also inspired former-theater kids like me and my friends, who staged a cabaret puppet show as a fundraiser for the AIDS Walk in 2013.
Eliot’s Jellicle Cats allow for whimsy and flair while playing with ideas of chosen family and embracing the quirkiness of the feline personalities that often seem human. Directors Bill Rauch and Zhailon Levingston and choreographers Omari Wiles and Arturo Lyons saw Eliot’s creations through a queer lens, giving the Jellicles another chance to roam the stage and the audience an opportunity to see them with fresh eyes (and in fierce ’fits!).
“There’s so much creativity in reinventing an existing piece for a different time, audience, or venue,” said one of my Cats companions, John C. Hume, who is also a cabaret artist. “When something is quality, it can withstand that different treatment, takes its color on, and becomes a new thing. That can happen because there’s something inherently powerful about source materials.”
When the production first opened off-Broadway in 2024, I went with John, his husband, and another friend. We ran into a former colleague and his husband in the lobby and all of us hooted and hollered and, at some point, burst into tears witnessing the joy on stage. With the bitterness of the Biden-Trump election still playing out and in the face of what felt (and still feels) like ever-increasing racism, homophobia, transphobia, and division in the U.S., everything on that stage felt right.
Fast forward to this March. We get the original gang together—plus a few more—to see a preview of the Broadway production. Someone immediately gifts John one of the signature oversized fans emblazoned with the Cats logo, providing a new prop for the evening. We dance, flip the fan, and sing along; it’s just as amazing the second time.
Every kind of cat takes to the runway in this show: young and old, thicc and thin, blond and bald. Every race is represented and gender constructs are irrelevant. Gone are the unitards of the original musical—something people loved to hate. This is a fashion show! Cats are out in all their glory wearing sequined neon green matching sets, purple velvet suits, and fuzzy rainbow boots.
Qween Jean designed the show’s costumes and won the Tony for Best Costume Design of a Musical—the first trans person ever to get the award. Jean created a collection of 500 costumes embedded with references to the ballroom scene, artists like Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat, and tributes to gay and trans icons like Marsha P. (ay it no mind) Johnson. The cast includes ballroom icon Junior LaBeija who appears as Gus the Theater Cat; LaBeija was also in Paris Is Burning, the 1990 film about ballroom culture in Harlem, and is a long-time member of the House of LaBeija.
It’s a decidedly queer take, performed with both joy and reverence.
“The idea that your chosen family is not just accepted, but celebrated, is a specific idea Eliot played with,” John told me. “The way they were able to turn that 180 degrees to reinvent in a way that speaks to the queer community is remarkable.”
Back in the 1980s and ’90s—dark days before we had immediate access to cat videos—I read the poems from my copy of Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, illustrated by Gorey. I made up dances to the original Cats soundtrack in my mother’s crimson red dining room. She took me to see the play on tour in the 1990s; she complained the music was “piped in” and not live, but I loved the energy and spectacle of it.
Many years later, after college, I was living in New York and occasionally called upon by John to make puppets for the cabaret shows he produced and performed around Manhattan. Like you do. After a few years of taking requests—including a beloved crab puppet for a song about STDs—I had an idea of my own.
“Let’s do Cats,” I said to him in early 2013. My idea was a spoken word-meets-caberet performance: I’d read poems, we’d cast our friends as various cats, there would be puppets. We’d do it as a fundraiser for the AIDS Walk, but also just because I loved it and I wanted to.
John fell off his piano stool laughing. I kept going: “I’ll read ‘The Naming of Cats.’ Billy sings ‘Rum Tum Tugger.’ Allison and Miranda will do ‘Mungojerrie and Rumpelteazer.’ Jonah does ‘Skimbleshanks.’” The kicker: “You can sing ‘Memory.’”
Even if you don’t know Cats, you likely know “Memory.” All alone in the moonlight? I was beautiful then? Yeah, that one. Betty Buckley originated the role of Grizabella, the Glamour Cat, in New York, and, as it happens, won the Tony in 1983 for her performance. (Elaine Page was the first to sing it during the show’s London run, which opened in 1981.) “Memory” is also the only song in Cats that was not taken directly from Eliot; the lyrics are based on the poems, but they are not Eliot’s words.
“Memory” is a showstopper—one I knew John would love to sing. He agreed.
I stayed up nights papier-mâché-ing cat faces with wire whiskers and glinting glitter eyes and sewing plush cat puppet bodies. Macavity the Mystery Cat was adorned in gold lame; Jennyanydots wore one of my old polka dot dresses and carried hot pink knitting needles; and Rum Tum Tugger was fashioned from crushed velvet, his chest decorated with around 100 hand-sewn vintage buttons.
One May night at the Duplex in the West Village, a group of grown-ass adults performed John C. Hume and Friends Present Cats (as the producer, John’s name isn’t just above the title, it is the title). Song, dance, poetry, puppets, and a rousing rendition of “Memory,” all by our own chosen family. I changed into a leopard-print jumpsuit for the afterparty and we donated the proceeds to the GMHC, which hosts the AIDS Walk and supports people living with HIV/AIDS. A friend—who happens to be a dramaturge—said, “That is how you should see Cats.” I was honored. Now, of course, I disagree.
When the first (and straight) Cats revival opened on Broadway in 2016, I lauded my own prescience. It also brought the Cats haters to the forefront, and I wrote a “he-hates, she-loves” piece about it for The Wall Street Journal, where I was working.
Then, in 2019, the movie version was released. Despite a stacked cast—including Dame Judi Dench and Sir Ian McKellen, as well as Jennifer Hudson, Idris Elba, and Taylor Swift—the movie seemed campy and corny. It was almost making fun of itself instead of celebrating the diversity and opportunity in the worlds created by Eliot and Webber. These worlds were built on the page and brilliantly translated to the stage, but somehow did not work on the silver screen.
“The reason why people will hunger to see Cats is…simple and primal,” wrote Frank Rich in his 1982 New York Times review of the show. “It’s a musical that transports the audience into a complete fantasy world that could only exist in the theater and yet, these days, only rarely does.”
Cats haters always say there’s no plot. That aspect has made it the butt of many jokes over the decades. There is a plot, albeit a loose one, it’s just not really the point.
The personalities of each cat, their lives, and which feline will be chosen to ascend to the Heaviside Layer (spoiler alert: it’s Grizabella, who sings “Memory”)—those aspects are more relevant. But in this new incarnation, it’s a celebration of the journey from start to finish. It honors the past while being fully present in the moment. CATS: The Jellicle Ball celebrates the trans, queer, Black, and Latinx members of the ballroom community by projecting digital images of actual ballroom mothers and artists onto the set throughout the performance. At the same time, it does not gloss over the homophobia, racism, and police raids that simultaneously terrorized that community.
Recognizing and bringing joy to that journey is a tribute that I’d line up to witness—now and forever.
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by V.L. Hendrickson
Leslie Hendrickson is a freelance writer and editor based in New York City and Litchfield County, Connecticut. Her work has been published in The Wall Street Journal, The Hollywood Reporter, MarketWatch, The New York Times, Family Circle, ARTNews, and the late, great Jane magazine. A recent addition to the Jenny staff, Leslie serves on the steering committee of the Newburyport Literary Festival and is a graduate of Columbia’s J-School and St. John’s College in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She is also a puppet maker, an Agatha Christie aficionado, and has completed the New York City Triathlon—which includes a dip in the Hudson River—10 times.
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