In case you haven’t been paying attention, Cats: The Jellicle Ball is not the Cats you think you know—the one set in a junkyard that played for 18 years on Broadway and then was made into a bafflingly bad movie. (Or so I’ve heard. I haven’t made it past the trailer.)
No, this Cats has been mashed up with New York’s queer ballroom scene, with its houses and competitive dance categories. If none of this means anything to you, stop reading now and go watch Paris Is Burning, the classic documentary from 1990.
It’s not that T. S. Eliot was queer, or that Andrew Lloyd Webber’s original production of Cats envisioned such a reading. But what’s remarkable is how natural the fit is between the Eliot/Lloyd Webber creation and queer ballroom culture.
Start at the beginning: “The Naming of Cats” tells us that cats have three names. There’s the everyday name, of course, presumably given by the cat’s family. The second name, though, is unique and gives the cat weight. And then, a third name, unknowable to anyone but the cat itself.
This third name can suggest the hidden self of someone in the gay/trans community, someone who may have rejected or been rejected by the family that gave them their everyday name. But it’s the second name that reveals what’s distinctive in ballroom culture. The legends of the ballroom scene, such as Angie Xtravaganza, Willi Ninja, Paris Dupree, invented themselves along with their unique names. These chosen names lend them precisely the dignity Eliot observes in his poem, allowing them to “cherish [their] pride.”
These extravagant names are acts of artifice, as are the houses they represent and the dance categories—Virgin Vogue, Tag Team, Realness, among many—that form the competition. And it’s this competitive dancing that raises the stakes of this version of the show. It’s not that I cared which dancers won the trophies stacked up behind Old Deuteronomy (the exquisite André De Shields). It’s that these dancers are showing off who they truly are, and what they are is magnificent.
I could probably analyze the subtext of this show until the cows come home. But what matters is that it’s fun, it’s joyous, it’s an act of celebration. I don’t know when I have felt such communal euphoria in a Broadway house—or anywhere, for that matter.
Part of that joy comes from watching spectacular young performers from both Broadway and ballroom tradition coming together. What makes that joy even deeper and more meaningful is to see these young performers alongside the Broadway legend André De Shields and Junior LaBeija, a much-loved elder of the ballroom scene.
De Shields, now 80 years old and magnificently bewigged and bepurpled, plays Old Deuteronomy, father of all the cats. Younger dancers gently hold his hand while he descends the stairs. But is that solicitude necessary? De Shields can still dance!
And Junior LaBeija, one of just three surviving cast members from Paris is Burning, is gently escorted onto the stage where he performs Gus the theater cat’s number. But even before he comes on stage to portray an aged performer remembering his prime, I found myself watching him seated in a box above the stage moving his hands to the music—a gentle dance of the elderly, but also a kind of benediction.
A third elder, “Tempress” Chasity Moore, plays Grizabella. Her performance of Memory and ascent to the Heaviside Layer is undoubtedly moving, though I couldn’t help but feel that this part of the original show was an awkward fit for the new conception. Watching the tenderness of the entire cast toward De Shields and LaBeija left me feeling that their rejection of the aged Grizabella ran counter to the whole moral center of the show. In this production, age itself has become something to honor rather than exile, and that leaves Grizabella’s ostracism feeling imported from another, more traditional, conception of Cats.
Honor for the elders becomes explicit at the top of Act II, when photographs of ball legends and icons flash on a sheet held up behind De Shields. With my limited knowledge of the culture, I recognized only Willi Ninja, one of the more charismatic figures in Paris Is Burning. But it was clear that many in the audience knew and loved these people, many of whom were lost to AIDS, violence, or addiction.
So the joy is tinged with melancholy, as perhaps it always has been in ballroom culture.
But what’s truly sad—deplorable even—is that the show is closing next week after a run of barely five months. Is this what Broadway has come to? The safe shows continue, new experiments fall by the wayside. I think of that comic scene in Angels in America, where Roy Cohn, juggling multiple phone calls, bestows popular Broadway tickets on a conservative client. “Cats! It’s about cats … singing cats. You’ll love it!”
I loved it. The audience loved it. Somehow that wasn’t enough.
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