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.
