From Broadway to the silver screen and back to Broadway, Cats has a way of landing on its feet. But that doesn’t mean it hasn’t risked a few of those nine lives on its way to earning nine Tony Award nominations for its latest iteration, Cats: The Jellicle Ball.

A reimagining of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s groundbreaking Broadway musical Cats (which was adapted from a 1939 poetry collection called Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats by 20th century giant T.S. Eliot), Cats: The Jellicle Ball dispenses with the humans-as-cats makeup and rebuilds the musical within the fierce, feisty world of Harlem ballroom culture.

When Cats: The Jellicle Ball debuted off-Broadway at new Manhattan venue PAC NYC in 2024, Billboard spoke to Zhailon Levingston, its co-director alongside Bill Rauch, about his sincere hope that The Jellicle Ball would keep rolling after their production wrapped so it could reach a wider audience, particularly among young queer people.

Fast forward to 2026. Not only is Cats: The Jellicle Ball selling out shows at the Broadhurst Theatre on Broadway, but it’s up for a whopping nine Tonys, including best revival of a musical and best direction of a musical for Levingston and Rauch.

Rauch — for whom queer reimaginings of Broadway classics is a bit of a lifelong passion — spoke to Billboard about this production’s 25-year journey, hard-hat construction tours with Andrew Lloyd Webber and how a creative compromise became a “gift” for The Jellicle Ball.

What was your first exposure to Cats? Had you seen it on stage?

I heard about Cats for years, and the way in which it became such a part of popular culture. I finally saw the original production late in its run. I saw it sometime in the late ‘90s. After I saw it, I began to think about it in a queer context, and I began to think about Grizabella. What if Grizabella were an older gay man who was singing “Memory” in a bar. What would that be, just to have that song and the way in which youth and beauty are extolled, almost fetishized? It moved me to think about it in a queer context. And I thought, “Oh, but that will never happen, because you would never get the rights.”

I love that. I can imagine something like that happening at the Monster in Greenwich Village. So how did it actually come to be?

I had lived with that dream about Cats in a queer, human context longer than I realized. My husband and I had a disagreement because I said that I thought it was, like, 10 years earlier. And he said, “No, no, it’s been, like, 25 years or more.” Then a friend from L.A. came and saw it and said, “Oh, I’m so happy you’ve been able to do this because you’ve been talking about it for 25 years.” So yeah, my husband was right.

When I got this job at PAC NYC [Perelman Performing Arts Center NYC], I began to sketch what could be our inaugural season. When I showed a plan for the season, a board member said, “You’re missing two things: You’re missing something that you direct yourself, because you’re a director and you’re our new artistic director, and you’re missing a familiar title.” And I said, “Well, there is one project that I’ve always dreamed of that would address both those things, because it’s something I’d direct and it is definitely a familiar title.”

And so because of that prompt, I actually picked up Cats and read the libretto, which I had never done, and it was just lightning-bolt clarity: It’s not a bar, it’s a ball. It was so obvious. The text constantly referenced this competitive annual ball, and this tradition of a ball that recurs once a year. And so I started working with a gender consultant named Josie [Josephine] Kearns who is quite brilliant, and a ballroom icon, Omari Wiles. Josie ended up becoming the show’s dramaturg and gender consultant, and Omari became one of the show’s choreographers. The three of us during the pandemic just got together on Zoom once a week and just worked on it. It took many, many months, and by the end of all that, we had a deck that we had created about how Cats could work in a ballroom setting. And then it was a question of trying to get permission from Andrew and from Andrew’s team. That was a real journey.

I’m very curious how that happened.

Someone connected me with Fiona [McDougal], who is a vocal coach that Andrew works with. She said, “This sounds really interesting. I find it exciting. I don’t know if Andrew would go for it.” And she passed me to David Wilson, who’s the head of music at Lloyd Webber Entertainment. And he said, “Sounds really interesting. I don’t know if Andrew would go for this.” And that kept happening. It culminated in me giving a tour to Andrew of our construction site, because then PAC NYC was just the frame of a building, it wasn’t completed. We did the construction hard-hat tour together. And, obviously, he did say yes. It was a deep collaboration with his team. It was not a straightforward path at all, especially about the music. It was a very winding, long road in terms of what the music would be. We ended up doing, believe it or not, six workshops of the piece.

Really?

Two of them were each two-week long, full cast workshops. And then there were a couple of dance workshops and a couple of music workshops in the mix as well. Zhailon Levingston, the co-director, entered the picture pretty early on after we had permission. That was amazing. I had heard that Zhailon is somebody who really knew Cats, and that I should talk to Zhailon. And Zhailon had heard that there was somebody developing a production of Cats that didn’t involve cats. We had a Zoom, literally our first conversation, by the end of the first conversation, we had agreed to co-direct the show.

Amazing chemistry from the start. Was there ever a point where you flirted with using the O.G. cat makeup?

It was always about it being people, it being a queer context. Pretty early on, especially with the collaboration of Josie, our gender consultant, Grizabella shifted from being a gay man to a trans woman and that character choice, in terms of Grizabella being the heart of ballroom past, that locked it in.

How did you finally arrive at a musical collaboration with Andrew Lloyd Webber and his team? I know they’re pretty protective of his work.

Midstream in terms of all these workshops, we were trying to reorchestrate everything, be in more of a ballroom context, more of a Black music context, and that was definitely not flying with Lloyd Webber Entertainment and with Andrew himself. And so eventually I went to London and had a two-day focused retreat with members of his team. That’s where what’s now such a core principle of the show — and I think it’s a lot of why the show works — was [reached]. It was a compromise at the time: There’s no reason to change the music unless the characters are in competition down the runway. So we really looked at those beats coming in not as a constant diet of beats, but that the [original] music was the music introducing a character. But as soon as people were coming down that runway in a competitive category, [the beats] made sense. It was a major dramaturgical shift in terms of the story we’re telling. And it was a gift. It was one of the best things that could have happened to the production.

Sometimes what seems like a compromise can actually emerge as the best outcome, what it should have been from the start.

That’s exactly right. Great art always comes out of limitations. Just when a limitation is first revealed, it feels frustrating, but then it’s like, “No, the limitation is the gift, actually.”

I first saw Cats: The Jellicle Ball back when it was off-Broadway at PAC. I adored it and I’m glad it made the jump to Broadway. And successfully, too! But I gotta say, an unusual production like this didn’t seem like an obvious Broadway hit. How surprised are you that it successfully made the leap?

A lot of us who worked on it had a passion, after its success at PAC, about wanting it to have a longer life, so that queer young people and their allies could see it. We knew that if a Broadway iteration were possible, that would be one of the most effective ways to get it out into the world more. There’s such a tradition: If shows have had a life on Broadway, then you can tour them and really get into the world. It was thinking about queer youth in particular, that was our North Star. And we were told for a really long time that Broadway was not going to be an avenue as far as the Lloyd Webber folks were concerned, so we were looking at lots of other models. Do we bring it back to PAC NYC? Do we find a warehouse somewhere and just let it sit there? Does it do a tour of North America? But there was always that hope that if it could have a life on Broadway, it would lead to more exposure and more people getting to see it.

Then we extended three times downtown, which was amazing. We ran it three times longer than we had planned to originally, and it was really the closing weekend of our final extension, Michael Harrison, one of our lead producers, came to see it and saw the commercial potential in this production. Then that became a whole journey of, “Can we possibly tell the story in the context of a proscenium?” And our prompt was, “If a ballroom community took over a Broadway theater, what would they do?” Then it was finding the right theater and trying to find a design that really preserved the integrity of the show, but also allowed it to be a new thing, because The Jellicle Ball on Broadway is different from The Jellicle Ball at PAC NYC.

I suppose it helped that so many of the cast returned for the Broadway show.

Because 18 of the 23 cast members are the same as downtown, that was an incredible jump start, because there were so many existential questions about how Cats and ballroom fit together that we had wrestled with already. But I would say it was never easy. It was always a struggle, because we didn’t want it to feel like we had just stuck it into a new space. Everything had to make sense in that space.

Cats is such an unusual property, such an unusual musical piece of art. What’s the heart of it for you as a director?

Grizabella is the emotional heart. But I think that, for me, the thematic heart is there are two songs, one right near the top of the show and the very last song in the show, that deal with names. Munkustrap [the narrator] talks about the most important name that a cat has is their secret name that you’ll never know — it’s the most important. And then at the end Old Deuteronomy says the way you respect a cat is call him by his name. In obvious ways, in terms of the trans and nonbinary community, and in even a wider metaphorical sense, the idea is that we have the strongest community by respecting everybody’s individual sense of self-expression and everybody’s individual identity, which people can craft themselves, and must be given the support and the love to craft themselves. I feel like that’s the absolute thematic heart of the material. I’m always moved by those two bookends.

I love that. That’s a really lovely way of putting it. In a way, the text almost seems made for that interpretation.

It really does. T.S. Eliot wrote in 1939, “We’re queens of the night, come out tonight.” There’s so much queer-coded language that it is remarkable. This has also been a career-long obsession of mine. You know, I had done a production of Oklahoma! at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and Laurey and Curly were played by two women as a lesbian couple, and Ado Annie and Will were played by two men as a gay male couple, and Aunt Eller was a trans matriarch of the community. What it means to reclaim iconic classics through a queer lens just feels really important to me as an artist and as a citizen well.

One small thing I wanted to ask. At the start of the musical, we see one of the players flipping through vinyl: There’s Diana Ross’ Diana, Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter, the original Broadway Cats cast recording. If you personally were able to sneak a couple other titles in there, what would they be?

Oh, my God, that’s such a great question. The first thing that came to my brain was Dreamgirls. The original cast recording would be perfect. I would also have Tracy Chapman’s first album [her self-titled] in the crate, because it’s about revolution.

The Four Tops will be giving fans plenty of new projects — and possibly even new music — to reach out for in the near future. 

The venerable troupe was formed during 1953 in Detroit and, starting 10 years later, became one of Motown’s most prolific hitmakers, with hits such as “I Can’t Help Myself (Sugar Pie Honey Bunch),” “Reach Out I’ll Be There,” “It’s the Same Old Song,” “Bernadette” and more. It’s been inducted into the  Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, the Vocal Group Hall of Fame and the National Rhythm & Blues Hall of Fame.

The last of its original members, Abdul “Duke” Fakir, passed away during July of 2024, and since then the Four Tops front has been quiet save for continuing live performances by the current incarnation of the quartet — which includes founder’s son Lawrence Roquel Payton Jr. and longtime frontman Theo Peoples, a former Temptation. 

That starts changing this summer, however. 

A deluxe July 27 reissue of the 1966 concert album Four Tops Live! will begin an extensive campaign that will see more releases from the vault, a documentary, a stage musical and other endeavors tied to the group’s enormous heritage. “It’s really exciting,” Keith Hagan of Skylark Artist Management, who’s now working with the group, tells Billboard. “It was Duke’s wish for the Tops to continue; it was the wish of ALL of the original four for this to continue. There’s been some new organization, new restructuring as far as how do we honor the legacy of the original Tops but carry forward to what the current group is doing.

“We’re at the precipice of starting to do things. The live record is like the opening gun for us. You’re going to be hearing a lot more about the legacy and the future of the Four Tops. We’re looking at this as the first of many actionable items we’re hoping to take.”

Payton Jr. adds that, “I feel like we’re on the verge of taking the legacy to a whole other level. I really do. There’s a sense of renewal. We’ll always work in the spirit of what the Four Tops were, but we have talented people in the group — everybody writes, sings, plays a little bit. So what can we do to take this legacy into the future?”

Not The Same Old Song

Four Tops Live!, which was recorded during three 1966 performances on the Upper Deck of Detroit’s legendary Roostertail, hit No. 1 on Billboard’s R&B chart and No. 17 on the Billboard 200. The reissue was instigated by a discussion between Hagen and Universal Music Group, which owns the Motown catalog. The group was planning a special summer date (July 27) back at the venue — which hosted Motown Mondays performances back in the day — and thought it would be an appropriate time to revisit the album, which turns 60 in November.

“We discovered that Motown had recorded two and a half sets — on the first Motown Monday (Aug. 22) and then they went back and recorded on a Sunday three weeks later (Sept. 11) to fix some of the previous issues,” says reissue producer, Harry Weinger, a vice-president of A&R for Universal Music Enterprises. “What flowed out of that was setting up a spreadsheet to map out what was on the original album, what was worth keeping, what was only recorded once and had to be kept on the album, what else was there if we wanted to do an expanded version.”

The new Four Tops Live! — mixed and mastered by Drew Schultz, a former musical director and drummer for the Four Tops who’s now a Digital Media Curator for the Motown Museum in Detroit — features 22 tracks, including four previously unreleased songs. There’s also a bonus instrumental, “You Name It,” played by the Motown house band the Funk Brothers, who backed the Tops at these shows, along with alternate renditions from other performances. Fan will also get restored stage patter (name-checking other Motowners in attendance) by frontman Levi Stubbs and Scott Regen, a Detroit radio personality who hosted the Motown Mondays.

Regen wrote liner notes for both the original album as well as the upcoming reissue. Weinger penned extensive producer’s notes as well. Canned applause from the original release is replaced by actual reaction from the shows. 

Four Tops Live! will be released digitally by Ume and on vinyl by Barcelona’s Elemental Music. It includes all of the Top’ hits at the time — including the then-just released “Reach Out I’ll Be There” — and nods to its pre-Motown era with a show-opening rendition of George Gershwin’s “Fascinating Rhythm” and early mentor Billy Eckstine’s “I’m Falling For You.” The set also features the Tops covering the Supremes’ “You Can’t Hurry Love,” “The Girl From Ipanema,” the Beatles’ “Michelle,” The Sound of Music’s “Climb Ev’ry Mountain” and Tony Bennett’s “I Left My Heart in San Francisco.”

There`s also a vampy seven-and-a-half-minute rendition of the Pete Seeger/Lee Hays protest song “If I Had a Hammer,” during which Stubbs makes an unexplained mention of “a union problem here. These guys for some reason or other, they don’t like to play for colored performers” — likely making a joke about additional contract players on the gig. 

“What I hear incredible excitement,” Weinger says of the entire show. “You have these great artists at a real peak, and Scott Regen is really hyping everybody up. There’s just tremendous excitement.”

Payton Jr. was young and did not attend those 1966 concerts but remembers the group rehearsing for them at his family’s house, while the families of the Four Tops families and some of the other Motown artists had a special night at Detroit’s St. Regis hotel. “We were all running around the halls and stuff, but I remember it was a big thing … they were at the Roostertail recording,” he says. “I didn’t know until some months later they were actually making an album of it; that realization came to me was when (his father) brought the album home, and I looked at it and was like, ‘Oh, that’s the night we were at the St. Regis hotel!’”

Payton, who’s been part of the group since 2005, adds that the current Tops — which also includes Ronnie McNeir (since 1999) and Michael Brock (2024) as well as Peoples (1998) — plan to “do a couple special songs” drawn from the live album especially for the Roostertail return in July. The night will include a three-course dinner, VIP merchandise and a pop-up Four Tops museum on site. 

Headed Four (sic) The Future

Looking ahead, the Tops are planning a new greatest hits compilation that will include material from before and after the group’s tenure at Motown — including chart hits such as “Ain’t No Woman (Like the One I Got),” “Keeper of the Castle,” “Are You Man Enough” and “When She Was My Girl,” and possibly songs the later incarnation of the group worked on prior to Fakir’s passing. A stage musical that was also in motion at the time and is now being addressed again, along with a planned documentary. Hagan says the group is eyeballing potential producers and other creative partners for both projects, with no firm time frame in place yet. 

The Four Tops are also returning to Europe and the U.K. for shows during June and July, sandwiched by U.S. performances. (Dates available at fourtops.com.)

“Our goal here is to re-introduce and then introduce (the Tops) to a younger generation who maybe aren’t as familiar with the Tops’ monster hits as they should be,” he explains. “I feel very bullish that we can start to expand the Tops’ music and audience to a younger audience. The Beatles didn’t become the biggest band in the world by accident; there were people working behind the scenes (to produce) new documentaries, new release packages, to have things going on. We’re just trying to get some proper structure and solid ideas on the table.”

And Payton Jr says that the current Four Tops lineup is aiming to add to the catalog. 

“We are getting ready to make some” new music,” he confirms. “We have been in the studio … listening to other producers and songwriters and putting together some things now. It’s a pretty high bar to hit; what you do is just go in there and do the best you can, just like my father and them did. This is a new group here; we’re really just getting to know each other’s capabilities and what we can do carry the legacy forward and maybe grow it.”

Riley Green and Good Morning America‘s Lara Spencer will bring fans some of the best moments from this year’s CMA Fest in downtown Nashville, when they host the three-hour special “CMA Fest Presented By SoFi.”

The special will air on June 25 at 8 p.m. ET/7 p.m. CT on ABC and will stream the following day on Hulu. The concert event will feature many of country music’s top stars and rising artists, as well as surprise appearances and unique collaborations.

CMA Fest, which runs from June 4-7, will feature numerous artists performing on multiple stages throughout downtown Nashville, among them Nissan Stadium, Chevy Riverfront Stage, Dr Pepper Amp Stage, Chevy Vibes Stage, and the Wrangler Remix Stage. This year’s CMA Fest performers set to take the stage at Nashville’s Nissan Stadium include: Jason Aldean, Green, Ella Langley, Tim McGraw, HARDY, Cody Johnson, Blake Shelton, Zach Top, Keith Urban, Tucker Wetmore, Lainey Wilson and Bailey Zimmerman.

Green took home multiple CMA Awards in November including single, song and music video of the year for “You Look Like You Love Me” with Ella Langley. He has also earned two No. 1 Billboard Country Airplay hits, “Worst Way” and “Don’t Mind If I Do” (featuring Langley).

Green is also no stranger to television. He recently also made an appearance on the series Marshals, portraying a former Navy Seal. He is also set to join the talent competition The Voice later this year as a coach, alongside Kelly Clarkson, Adam Levine and Queen Latifah.

“CMA Fest presented by SoFi,” a production of the Country Music Association, is executive produced and written by Robert Deaton and directed by Alan Carter. With the 2026 airing, CMA will celebrate 23 consecutive years of producing a summer concert TV special. 

For the first half of the 2026 chart year, one woman was there each step of the way, playing one show after another — no sleep, bus, arena, another arena, stadium, plane, next place, etc. — until she came out on top. Lady Gaga leads the midyear Top Tours chart with record-breaking earnings for The Mayhem Ball.

According to figures reported to Billboard Boxscore, Gaga grossed $236.2 million and sold 1.2 million tickets during the midyear period, spanning Oct. 1, 2025, through March 31. That makes it the highest grossing tour of the six-month window, finishing 3% ahead of Bad Bunny. Further, it’s the biggest midyear gross in Boxscore history (dating to 1991), outpacing U2’s Sphere stint ($231.6 million) from two years ago.

U2 got there by brute force, charging an average of $368 per ticket for the venue’s inaugural residency. Gaga had a still high, but earthbound ticket price of $203.98, but won by persistence. She played 52 shows in six months, roughly double Bad Bunny’s count and more than any act in the top 50 other than Trans-Siberian Orchestra, with its dual ensembles touring the country at once, and comedian Nate Bargatze. That show count exceeds all the acts on last year’s midyear ranking too, again with the asterisk of TSO and stand-up comics.

Those 52 shows spanned the entirety of the midyear period, taking Gaga around the world and back. Her run during the period began on Oct. 2 at London’s O2 Arena and stretched through March 30 at Boston’s TD Garden. (The Mayhem Ball’s final five shows fell in early April, just outside of the midyear window.)

In between lengthy legs in European and North American arenas, Gaga played brief stadium runs in Australia (Dec. 5-13) and Japan (Jan. 21-30). She ranked among the top five on all six editions of Billboard’s monthly Top Tours chart, finally topping the list in March. The Mayhem Ball began last July with 29 shows in the 2025 tracking period — multi-night runs in nine North American markets, plus two late September shows in London — and extended into April with another five North American arena gigs that will further pad her year-end ’26 totals.

Gaga secured the No. 1 spot on Top Tours in a photo finish, only overtaking Bad Bunny in the final three days of the tracking period, distancing herself by less than $6 million, or 3%. The famous pals, fresh off a collaborative performance during Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime set, are the first duo to each gross more than $200 million during the same midyear period. Last year, no artist even cracked $150 million.

Including its earlier 2025 dates and final April shows, The Mayhem Ball grossed $362.9 million and sold 1.6 million tickets, making it one of the 10 highest grossing pop tours ever, and one of the 10 biggest tours by women. Including one-off promotional shows before the proper tour began, Gaga earned $419.5 million from 1.95 million tickets over the course of a year on tour.