Get the latest gossip
How ‘Cats: The Jellicle Ball’ Married the Music of Andrew Lloyd Webber to the Ferocity of Ball Culture
'Cats: The Jellicle Ball' combined ballroom with Andrew Lloyd Webber and created a new classic.
Lloyd Webber’s playful, hummable score is mostly unchanged, but the milieu of the musical has become the fertile, fresh and fierce world of ballroom culture (if that means nothing to you, watch the 1990 documentary Paris Is Burning or TV series Pose stat). So a big shout out to how relentless our casting directors were to keeping our feet to the fire in terms of when sh-t got hard, never giving upon the thing that was the integrity of the piece: making sure that we’re always centering ballroom and doing it in a way that doesn’t sacrifice the material of Cats. And to hear these Black and brown artists [of the] cis and trans and queer experience being past your expectation of what certain voices should be able to do with a score that is extremely difficult and athletic – while also infused with contemporary touches of ballroom — that would just be an amazing thing to be able to hold on to.
Or read this on Billboard
