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The creators of “Cats: The Jellicle Ball” are certain their hit show will have a future life — they just don’t yet know what that future life looks like.
Listen to this week’s “Stagecraft” podcast below:
Now playing in an extended run at the Perelman Performing Arts Center in downtown Manhattan, “Cats: The Jellicle Ball” mashes up Andrew Lloyd Webber‘s long-running 1982 musical with the colorful and very queer ballroom culture seen in “Paris is Burning” and “Pose.” Audiences and critics alike have fallen for the unexpected pairing, turning the show into one of the breakout hits of summer theater season. As the production wraps up its second extension (ending Aug. 11), three members of the creative team — co-directors Zhailon Levingston and Bill Rauch and dramaturg/gender consultant Josephine Kearns — appeared on “Stagecraft,” Variety‘s theater podcast, to talk through the origins of the production and what the next step might be.
“We’re all committed to it having a longer life, and there are so many possibilities,” Rauch said on “Stagecraft.” “In terms of what shape that takes, that will be a collaboration with [Lloyd Webber’s] Really Useful Group, because it’s their intellectual property. We want to treat it with the respect that it deserves as we figure out how more people can experience it — because we certainly want more people, especially queer young people, and their allies to experience this project.”
Rauch was the originator of the idea, which stemmed from a 20-year-old impulse he had about an older gay man singing “Memory.” But the concept really took shape in collaboration with Kearns, Levingston, co-choreographer Omari Wiles and others, and as the production’s ballroom setting developed, the creative team did everything they could to ensure authenticity.
“One of the things that was really important from the beginning was that we didn’t sacrifice ballroom for musical theater, and we didn’t sacrifice musical theater for ballroom,” said Levingston (“Chicken and Biscuits,” the upcoming “Table 17”). During the long casting process, the collaborators sought out performers from both backgrounds — and putting them all together into a single cast meant adjustments for everyone.
For Kearns the juxtaposition was exemplified during the first days of an early workshop of the production. “During breaks between rehearsal time, a lot of the ballroom folks would get up and vogue, just move, just have fun together,” she said. “A lot of the musical theater folks were sitting on the sidelines like, ‘I don’t know if I can do that!’ And then we would get into music rehearsals and the musical theater folks are in their elements and a lot of the ballroom folks are very wide-eyed in a moment of: ‘What is this?’”
“Really what you’re watching on stage is the product of people fighting through their fears,” Levingston echoed. “So many people on our team were so game for the learning curve of what it would mean to put these two cultures in a room together.”
Also on the new episode of “Stagecraft,” Kearns, Levingston and Rauch discussed the show’s surprisingly faithful musical orchestrations, the process of matching individual “Cats” songs to “cat-egories” of ballroom competition, and a recent visit to the production from Lloyd Webber himself.
To hear the entire conversation, listen at the link above or download and subscribe to “Stagecraft” on podcast platforms including Apple Podcasts, Spotify and the Broadway Podcast Network. New episodes of “Stagecraft” are released every other week.
