Cats: The Jellicle Ball

The Cat's Out of the Bag

Broadhurst Theatre — March 25, 2026, 2:00 PM

Let me tell you about my seat.

Far left orchestra. Very last row. Seat cushion in hand, optimistic as ever, courtesy of TDF. And yet there I sat, craning my neck around the heads of the audience in front of me, catching glimpses of what I am told is one of the most visually arresting productions currently on a New York stage. I wanted to love Cats: The Jellicle Ball. I really, genuinely wanted to love it. The fault, dear reader, is not in the show. It is in the seat.

So let me be honest about what I can and cannot tell you.

What I can tell you is that the concept is inspired. The Broadhurst has been transformed around a wide central runway, the Jellicle cats now convening not as a tribe of London strays but as competitors in a ballroom ball, vogueing and walking categories for the chance to be chosen by Old Deuteronomy and ascend to a new life. It sounds, on paper, like the kind of idea that could go very wrong. It does not go wrong. The marriage of ballroom culture and Lloyd Webber's sung-through score turns out to be not merely clever but almost inevitable, as if the two were waiting decades to find each other. Cats has always been a competition. It has always been about performance, spectacle, the hunger to be seen and chosen. The ballroom world runs on precisely those same terms.

Directors Zhailon Levingston and Bill Rauch, both Obie Award winners, and choreographers Omari Wiles and Arturo Lyons, genuine legends of the New York City ballroom scene, have built something that earned raves downtown and has lost none of its electricity on the Main Stem. The New York Times called it "a lightning strike that sets joy free." The Washington Post called it "the most exhilarating fun that can be had in the theater." I have no quarrel with either description, from what I could see of it.

André De Shields, as Old Deuteronomy, brings the full gravity and grandeur of his Tony-winning career to a role that asks him to preside over the proceedings like a high priest of fabulousness. He obliges magnificently. Chasity Moore as Grizabella carries "Memory" into the ballroom world with what I can only describe as earned devastation, the song's familiar heartbreak reframed as something lonelier and more specific: the former ball legend who has aged out of the scene, who comes back seeking the one thing the runway cannot give you forever. It is a smart piece of dramaturgy, and Moore delivers it.

The audience around me was electric. Several attendees had dressed for the occasion in sequins and cat ears, which tells you everything about the cult energy this production has already generated, barely a week into previews. It can only deepen as the season progresses.

And yet. I was not transported. I was informed. There is a difference, and I am fully prepared to lay that difference at the feet of orchestra left, last row, partial view.

The great cruelty of a runway production is that proximity is everything. The energy moves along that central aisle, bounces off the bodies closest to it, and radiates outward. From where I sat, I was catching the radiation secondhand, watching other people's joy instead of generating my own. A show this visceral, this built on spectacle and sweat and the live electricity of the ballroom, demands to be witnessed up close. I was not up close. I was orbiting.

I will go back. I will pay for a seat I can see from, because TDF has not been my friend this season, and this is a show that deserves better than my current vantage point. What I saw was the outline of something thrilling. I suspect the thing itself is even more so.

Cats: The Jellicle Ball is in previews at the Broadhurst Theatre, with an official opening night of April 7, 2026. Running time is approximately 2 hours and 25 minutes, including one intermission. Runway seating is also available for those who want to be truly inside the ball. I recommend you take it.