One criticism lobbied on the 2019 movie model of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical Cats was that it tried to decorate the present up in an excessive amount of further stuff. Garish CGI and inelegant units distracted from what is supposed to be the core mission of Cats: to observe gifted performers sing and dance as cats. The trick is to maintain the present – which is generally only a track cycle cataloging varied felines as described in whimsical poems by TS Eliot – as streamlined as attainable, highlighting highly effective voices a’blare and lithe our bodies in movement. Realism and narrative shouldn’t be of chief concern.
But what if there was one other solution to current Cats that also honored the principle ideas of the piece whereas including additional context, even additional which means? That is the feat pulled off by administrators Zhailon Livingston and Bill Rauch with Cats: The Jellicle Ball, a brilliant and winsome reimagining of Webber’s 45-year-old musical. First premiering in a downtown area, the Jellicle Ball has now transferred to Broadway, inviting a wider viewers into its celebration of queer ball tradition.
The ball scene roughly started in Harlem a long time in the past as a refuge for Black and brown queer individuals to strut, pose, dance and stunt in methods not favored by the white-dominated homosexual pageant world of the mid-Twentieth century. Over the years, the argot and strategy of ball performers has entered the mainstream; Madonna borrowed (generously talking) its voguing, RuPaul’s Drag Race popularized its demise drops and duck walks. And now the dynamism and spirit of ball has been grafted on to Cats, an ingenious melding of two seemingly disparate entities that, it seems, match reasonably nicely collectively.
One might make an argument that Cats, with its oddball mythology concerning the internal lives and goals of largely disregarded creatures, is a glimpse at a type of subculture, scrappy and resilient within the margins. Livingston and Rauch see an apparent connection there, linking ball’s ceremony and ritual to that of Eliot’s, nicely, cats. The Jellicle Ball doesn’t pressure too onerous to make that analogy, although; the present wears the comparability loosely, with a witty, genial acknowledgment that not all of it scans completely. There is a seriousness of objective right here, to pay homage to a selected tradition by displaying how adaptable and broadly interesting it may be. But largely, the present needs to have time, to usher its viewers into a celebration that’s already been raging for greater than 50 years.
When the present begins, a flat-topped DJ sifts via vinyl information – Diana Ross and Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter – earlier than deciding on the unique solid recording of Cats. Thus the ball begins, with members of Jennyanydots’s House of Dots preening and strutting whereas the night’s commanding MC, Munkustrap (Dudney Joseph Jr), orients the viewers, a few of whom are seated on the stage. There is, in these opening minutes, a slight whiff of letdown: “Oh, they’re really just doing Cats,” I discovered myself considering because the early strains of Webber’s high-sugar, ear-wormy rating roared out of the orchestra pit. The altered setting and eclectic costuming are enjoyable and completely different, however maybe one can’t escape the inherent confines of the present’s Cats-ness.
As Livingston and Rauch’s night features momentum, although, the ball of all of it mightily asserts itself, bursting forth with the infectious power of its younger performers. Scanning via Playbill bios, one sees a number of mentions of LaGuardia highschool (the town’s premier public performing arts academy), of Suny Purchase and Juilliard coaching, of assorted ball homes to which a few of the actors have pledged allegiance. Many of them are making their Broadway debut. It’s a really New York ensemble, homegrown in dance studios and on ball runways earlier than this wild alternative introduced itself. That is a selected, if uncommon, Broadway thrill, to see first-timers seize one of many metropolis’s largest phases with such confidence and brio.
Every performer will get a second to shine, and it feels just a little unfair to single anybody out and thus omit others. But, if I need to, I’ll say that ball icon “Tempress” Chasity Moore sings a commanding Memory; Dava Huesca and Jonathan Burke are an electrical hoot as Rumpleteazer and Mungojerrie; Emma Sofia does a sparkplug Skimbleshanks; Nora Schell brings old school theatrical aptitude (blended with one thing new) to Bustopher Jones. And then there may be the hanging presence of two elder-statesmen legends, one, André De Shields (Old Deuteronomy), from the world of the theater, the opposite, Junior Labeija (Gus the Theatre Cat), a fixture of the ball scene (who’s closely featured within the seminal 1990 documentary Paris Is Burning). The theater children combine in seamlessly with the ball folks, a grand coming collectively that produces stirring moments of Broadway shine proper alongside the type of beguiling thumping and thrashing that one may see in a corridor uptown.
Because that is nonetheless Cats, there’s a corniness to the piece that typically dilutes the present’s revolutionary verve. A bassline is added to a couple songs to make them higher match their new milieu, however a lot of the time we’re served easy variations of Webber’s stickily sonorous compositions. I might need appreciated just a little extra innovation there, inside no matter constraints the Webber camp has agreed upon. For essentially the most half, although, this equally beloved and maligned Eighties curio (dreadfully immortalized on movie) feels totally reborn.
It was my viewing accomplice’s first time seeing any model of the present, and it sits completely nicely with me that the Jellicle Ball will ceaselessly be his Cats. It is a mighty testomony to what’s attainable when producers look previous the standard scope of Broadway and usher in contemporary expertise to widen the aperture of economic theater’s gaze. What these outsiders have achieved with The Jellicle Ball is a revival within the fullest sense of the phrase. It may appear unusual that one thing from Webber, whose work appears so frozen in amber, can be ripe for adaptation. But lately, Sunset Boulevard was changed into an avant garde video manufacturing, Phantom of the Opera turned an immersive interactive expertise, and Cats is now a riotous drag ball. Which leads one to hope that possibly, simply possibly, some enterprising artists on the market are about to strap on some rollerskates and do one thing great with Starlight Express.
