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One criticism lobbied at the 2019 film version of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical Cats was that it tried to dress the show up in too much extra stuff. Garish CGI and inelegant sets distracted from what is meant to be the core mission of Cats: to watch talented performers sing and dance as cats. The trick is to keep the show – which is mostly just a song cycle cataloging various felines as described in whimsical poems by TS Eliot – as streamlined as possible, highlighting powerful voices a’blare and lithe bodies in motion. Realism and narrative should not be of chief concern.

But what if there was another way to present Cats that still honored the main principles of the piece while adding further context, even further meaning? That is the feat pulled off by directors Zhailon Livingston and Bill Rauch with Cats: The Jellicle Ball, a bright and winsome reimagining of Webber’s 45-year-old musical. First premiering in a downtown space, the Jellicle Ball has now transferred to Broadway, inviting a wider audience into its celebration of queer ball culture.

The ball scene roughly began in Harlem decades ago as a refuge for Black and brown queer people to strut, pose, dance and stunt in ways not favored by the white-dominated gay pageant world of the mid-20th century. Over the years, the argot and technique of ball performers has entered the mainstream; Madonna borrowed (generously speaking) its voguing, RuPaul’s Drag Race popularized its death drops and duck walks. And now the dynamism and spirit of ball has been grafted on to Cats, an inventive melding of two seemingly disparate entities that, it turns out, fit rather well together.

One could make an argument that Cats, with its oddball mythology about the inner lives and dreams of mostly disregarded creatures, is a glimpse at a kind of subculture, scrappy and resilient in the margins. Livingston and Rauch see an obvious connection there, linking ball’s rite and ritual to that of Eliot’s, well, cats. The Jellicle Ball doesn’t strain too hard to make that analogy, though; the show wears the comparison loosely, with a witty, genial acknowledgment that not all of it scans perfectly. There is a seriousness of purpose here, to pay homage to a specific culture by showing how adaptable and widely appealing it can be. But mostly, the show wants to have a good time, to usher its audience into a party that’s already been raging for more than 50 years.

When the show starts, a flat-topped DJ sifts through vinyl records – Diana Ross and Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter – before settling on the original cast recording of Cats. Thus the ball begins, with members of Jennyanydots’s House of Dots preening and strutting while the evening’s commanding MC, Munkustrap (Dudney Joseph Jr), orients the audience, some of whom are seated on the stage. There is, in those opening minutes, a slight whiff of letdown: “Oh, they’re really just doing Cats,” I found myself thinking as the early strains of Webber’s high-sugar, ear-wormy score roared out of the orchestra pit. The altered setting and eclectic costuming are fun and different, but perhaps one can’t escape the inherent confines of the show’s Cats-ness.

As Livingston and Rauch’s evening gains momentum, though, the ball of it all mightily asserts itself, bursting forth with the infectious energy of its young performers. Scanning through Playbill bios, one sees several mentions of LaGuardia high school (the city’s premier public performing arts academy), of Suny Purchase and Juilliard training, of various ball houses to which some of the actors have pledged allegiance. Many of them are making their Broadway debut. It’s a very New York ensemble, homegrown in dance studios and on ball runways before this wild opportunity presented itself. That is a particular, if rare, Broadway thrill, to see first-timers seize one of the city’s biggest stages with such confidence and brio.

Every performer gets a moment to shine, and it feels a little unfair to single anyone out and thus omit others. But, if I must, I’ll say that ball icon “Tempress” Chasity Moore sings a commanding Memory; Dava Huesca and Jonathan Burke are an electric hoot as Rumpleteazer and Mungojerrie; Emma Sofia does a sparkplug Skimbleshanks; Nora Schell brings old-fashioned theatrical flair (mixed with something new) to Bustopher Jones. And then there is the striking presence of two elder-statesmen legends, one, André De Shields (Old Deuteronomy), from the world of the theater, the other, Junior Labeija (Gus the Theatre Cat), a fixture of the ball scene (who is heavily featured in the seminal 1990 documentary Paris Is Burning). The theater kids mix in seamlessly with the ball folk, a grand coming together that produces stirring moments of Broadway shine right alongside the kind of beguiling thumping and thrashing that one might see in a hall uptown.

Because this is still Cats, there is a corniness to the piece that sometimes dilutes the show’s revolutionary verve. A bassline is added to a few songs to make them better fit their new milieu, but much of the time we are served straightforward versions of Webber’s stickily sonorous compositions. I might have liked a little more innovation there, within whatever constraints the Webber camp has agreed upon. For the most part, though, this equally beloved and maligned 1980s curio (dreadfully immortalized on film) feels utterly reborn.

It was my viewing partner’s first time seeing any version of the show, and it sits perfectly well with me that the Jellicle Ball will forever be his Cats. It is a mighty testament to what is possible when producers look past the traditional scope of Broadway and bring in fresh talent to widen the aperture of commercial theater’s gaze. What those outsiders have achieved with The Jellicle Ball is a revival in the fullest sense of the word. It might seem strange that something from Webber, whose work seems so frozen in amber, would be ripe for adaptation. But in recent years, Sunset Boulevard was turned into an avant garde video production, Phantom of the Opera became an immersive interactive experience, and Cats is now a riotous drag ball. Which leads one to hope that maybe, just maybe, some enterprising artists out there are about to strap on some rollerskates and do something wonderful with Starlight Express.