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Is the Cats in the fabulous hats coming back?
Last year's Ballroom-culture revival of Andrew Llloyd Webber's fanciful musical Cats, adapted from lightly comic poems by T.S. Eliot, was one of the happiest theater surprises in recent memory. The original Broadway production ran for a then-record 18 years, but a taxidermic 2016 revival and a widely derided 2019 film dampened whatever enthusiasm was left for the property—until directors Zhailon Levingston and Bill Rauch found a way to make the old engine purr again. "It seemed as though the show had been condemned to obsolescence, humbled and disavowed like its own once-grand Grizabella the Glamour Cat," I wrote in my review of the 2024 production. "But now along comes a thrilling reconception at the Perelman Performing Arts Center that not only rescues Cats from the oversize junkyard but lifts it, like Grizabella herself, to unexpected heights."
Reader, I bought merch.
Cats: The Jellicle Ball, as the fur-and-whisker-free revival was titled, became the talk of the town, and when its PAC run came to an end there was much speculation about whether and when it would transfer to Broadway. Since the production is staged in the round, the natural choice for a venue would be Circle in the Square, but it's a small house—which makes profitability hard for a show as big as Cats—and it was already booked for the fall; and completely redesigning the seating of a regular venue, as was done for Here Lies Love and the latest Cabaret, is an expensive and dicey proposition. Moreover, the 2024–25 Broadway season already included another extensively reimagined Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, Sunset Blvd., and Lloyd Webber may not have been eager to compete against himself.
But it's starting to look like Cats has more than one life after all. As Playbill reported yesterday, Cats: The Jellicle Ball has just launched a website and an Instagram account that promise more information to come, which strongly suggests that a production is on the horizon.
Does that mean that Cats will soon join the list of upcoming Broadway shows? It ain't, alas, necessarily so. The barrier of finding an appropriate long-term venue still remains, and yet another radically reimagined Lloyd Webber show is set to open Off Broadway next season: an immersive, environmental reworking of The Phantom of the Opera, which replaced Cats as the longest-running show in Broadway history before giving up the ghost in 2023. And Lloyd Webber himself told London's The Times last year that, in light of the production's success, he was hoping to bring it back…to London.
So if I were a betting man, I would say that the impending return of Cats: The Jellicle Ball will not be in New York City, at least for now, but in the West End or a comparably large London space. But I'm not a betting man; I'm a hoping man. This mostly Black Cats has crossed our path once already. Here's hoping we get lucky and see it again.
