The creators of “Cats: The Jellicle Ball” are confident that their hit show will have a future life — but they don't yet know what that future life looks like.
Listen to this week's Stagecraft podcast below:
Now at the Perelman Center for the Performing Arts in midtown Manhattan, “Cats: The Jellicle Ball” combines Andrew Lloyd Webber’s long-running 1982 musical with the colorful, wildly eccentric ballroom culture of “Paris is Burning” and “Pose.” Audiences and critics alike have been enamored by the unlikely pairing, turning the show into one of the hits of the summer theater season. As the show wraps up its second extension (which ends Aug. 11), three members of the creative team—co-directors Zhaylon Livingston and Bill Rauch and drama/gender consultant Josephine Kearns—are back at “Stagecraft,” diverseTheatre Podcast', to talk about the origins of the production and what might be next.
“We are all committed to making him live longer, and there are many possibilities,” Rauch said on Stagecraft. “In terms of what form that would take, it would be a collaboration with [Lloyd Webber’s] “The Really Useful Group is really helpful, because it’s their intellectual property. And we want to treat it with the respect it deserves as we figure out how to enable more people to experience this project — because we definitely want more people, especially young LGBT people, and their allies to experience this project.”
Rauch was the idea, which grew out of an impulse he had when he was 20 about an older gay man singing “Memory.” But the concept really took shape in collaboration with Kearns, Livingston, co-choreographer Omari Wiles and others, and as the ballroom scene evolved into the production, the creative team did everything it could to ensure authenticity.
“One of the things that was really important from the beginning was that we didn’t sacrifice ballroom dancing for musical theater, and we didn’t sacrifice musical theater for ballroom dancing,” said Livingston (Chicken and Biscuits, an upcoming film called Table 17). During the long casting process, the collaborators sought out performers from both backgrounds — and putting them all together on a cast meant making adjustments for everyone.
For Kearns, the contrast was evident during the early days of the production’s early workshop. “During the breaks between rehearsals, a lot of the dance floor people would be up and dancing, moving, having fun together,” she said. “A lot of the musical theater people would be sitting on the sidelines like, ‘I don’t know if I can do this!’ Then we’d go to the rehearsals and the musical theater people would be in their own environment and a lot of the dance floor people would be like, ‘What is this?’”
“What you see on stage is really the product of people struggling to overcome their fears,” Livingston said. “A lot of people on our team were really excited to learn what it meant to put these two cultures in one room.”
In the new episode of “Stagecraft,” Kearns, Livingston and Rauch discuss the show’s surprisingly faithful musical arrangements, the process of matching individual “Cats” songs to ballroom dance competition “categories,” and a recent visit to the production by Lloyd Webber himself.
To hear the full conversation, listen via the link above or download and subscribe to “Stagecraft” on podcast platforms including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Broadway Podcast Network. New episodes of “Stagecraft” are released every two weeks.
