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The Drag-Ball Cats Is Good
Well, now, how about that!
Unlike, say, Samuel Beckett, who was relentlessly litigious over productions that diverged from his vision (“Anybody who cares for the work couldn’t fail to be disgusted by this,” he wrote about JoAnne Akalaitis’s set-in-an-abandoned-subway-station Endgame at ART in 1984), Lloyd Webber, at age 76, seems basically up for anything when it comes to new takes on his splashy musical blockbusters. And the cat world’s reverence for its elders needs no translation, as Junior LaBeija—a member of the House of LaBeija who appeared in Paris Is Burning —brings a kind of floating, self-possessed opulence to Gus, the grand old “theatre cat.” More majestic still, the 78-year-old powerhouse André De Shields threatens to cause a riot with his entrance as Old Deuteronomy. A pointed-ears cap on Tumblebrutus (the elastic-limbed Primo), an incredible tiger-striped fall of a wig on Skimbleshanks the “railway cat” (Emma Sofia, making an MTA uniform hotter than it has any right to be), leopard print deployed in ways both impish and entirely credible, fur everywhere — it all does the trick with full exuberance and without cringe.
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