Cats: The Jellicle Ball (Play)

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    Best Theater of 2024

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    Broadway roared back, but the kitties were downtown and the prayer service was in Brooklyn.Broadway always looks its healthiest around the holidays, and indeed, right now, most of its 41 theaters are lit, with the rest soon set to load in new tenants. Box office grosses, if not quite back to prepandemic levels, seem likely to meet or exceed last year’s $1.6 billion. But the real health of the commercial theater, for me, is demonstrated by how much it offers its audiences, not its investors. That’s why, most years, my list of best shows is top-heavy with the provocative work being brewed Off Broadway. If my latest list tilts the other way, perhaps that reflects Broadway’s liberal borrowings from the noncommercial sector — borrowings and often improvements. My Top 10, listed chronologically and covering the period from December 2023 through the end of November, are therefore mostly shows that, wherever they started and wherever they wind up, put a premium on provocation, sure, but also entertainment. That’s what I call healthy.‘Appropriate’ by Branden Jacobs-JenkinsSarah Paulson, center, in her Tony Award-winning performance in “Appropriate.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesMost plays about racism dramatize the damage done to its victims. But “Appropriate,” which opened last December in a Second Stage Theater production, looks instead at the sickening effects that hatred can have on its perpetrators — and their heirs. On the surface a “dividing the estate” play, with the children of a good ol’ boy squabbling over their inherited real and unreal estate, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s uproarious tale of family guilt (directed by Lila Neugebauer and with a blistering, Tony-winning performance by Sarah Paulson) was in effect a corroded mirror reflecting America’s worst (and worst-kept) secrets. (Read our review of “Appropriate” and our profile of Paulson.)‘Terce: A Practical Breviary’ by Heather ChristianThe new year brought with it a new prayer, if you were willing to go to a former Sunday school in Brooklyn to find it. At the Irondale Center in Fort Greene, a large cast of “caregivers and makers” offered an unusual liturgy, performing Heather Christian’s ritual of praise for “the divine feminine.” The visionary composer’s typically catholic musical references — plainsong, gospel, electronica, soul and New Orleans funk — short-circuited rational analysis, inviting transcendence in much the way the rituals of the established church do. But this time, in Keenan Tyler Oliphant’s richly welcoming staging, the transcendence was for everyone, of any faith or none. (Read our review of “Terce.”)‘Dead Outlaw’ by David Yazbek, Erik Della Penna and Itamar MosesAndrew Durand, in the coffin, as the title character in the Off Broadway musical “Dead Outlaw.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe afterlife of a mummy sounds more like an “I dare you” literary project than a hook for a good-time musical. But the mostly true story of Elmer McCurdy — wastrel, roustabout, schnook and sideshow attraction — got a brilliant coda in this Off Broadway show at the Minetta Lane Theater. The lovingly serious direction by David Cromer tempered the absurdity of the tale with sweetness and humor, and the cast, let by Andrew Durand as McCurdy, responded to the tumbleweed of a score with gorgeous singing. It’s the kind of musical you’d never find on Broadway — except that you might, next year. (Read our review of “Dead Outlaw” and the story behind the show.)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Stuff They Strut on the Jellicle Catwalk

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      From the first solo to the euphoric final bows, dance is essential to the world-building of “Cats: The Jellicle Ball.” Watch four standout dancers from the reinvented classic.Before anyone steps onto the catwalk in “Cats: The Jellicle Ball,” the wildly popular reimagining of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Cats” at the Perelman Performing Arts Center, a dancer’s silhouette appears at the back of the stage, darting across a row of windows. At first, his movement recalls the limber ballet-jazz of the original 1982 Broadway production, accented with tricks like a split leap and a back walkover. He has two little ears, a tail. He could be prowling on a rooftop at night.But then something shifts. The silhouetted dancer strips away his tail, and vintage musical theater gives way to elements of vogue: the circling wrists of hand performance; the crouched legs and flashing arms of a duckwalk; the whirl and dramatic fall of a spin and dip.“It’s arguably one of the most important moments in the show,” said the dancer Primo, to whom the silhouette belongs. “All of that represents exactly what you’re about to see: the marriage of the old with the now.”This wordless overture, choreographed by Ousmane Omari Wiles, introduces the seemingly incongruous and yet surprisingly seamless collision of worlds at the heart of “Cats: The Jellicle Ball.” Extended three times since its premiere in June, and now running through Sept. 8, the show reinvents the classic musical in the context of queer ballroom culture, replacing cats with people who have come together to walk a ball, battling for trophies on a nightclub runway.Ousmane Omari Wiles, left, and Arturo Lyons, the choreographers of “Cats: The Jellicle Ball.” Wiles said he wanted “to celebrate queer club culture itself and all the dance styles we embody within that.” From that shadowy first solo to the euphoria of the final bows, dance is essential to the storytelling and world-building of “The Jellicle Ball,” which is directed by Bill Rauch and Zhailon Levingston and choreographed by Wiles and Arturo Lyons. Not limited to the catwalk stage, the movement often spills into the audience, with performers buzzing among the front rows and cocktail tables that flank the runway. The ornate, extravagant costumes by Qween Jean create physical possibilities, too, becoming playful extensions of the choreography.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      How a Ballroom ‘Cats,’ a Gay Kiss and a Black Marine Reclaimed Old Musicals

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      How a Black lieutenant, a gay kiss and a catless ballroom are helping reclaim Broadway classics.Ten years ago, I cringed through an Encores! performance of one of the most odious musicals I’d ever seen. That’s not to throw shade on Encores!, the concert series that dredges up both diamonds and dirt from the musical theater dustbin. But “Irma La Douce,” a 1960 Broadway hit about jolly prostitutes and the men who keep them, was perhaps a dredge too far. Did I mention that it involved penguins?In a way, it was a relief that the show was so bad: There was nothing to regret in consigning it to my personal catalog of cancellation.Most of the most offensive musicals of the past are like that, providing their own incontrovertible arguments against revival, except as carefully labeled historical exhibits in some deep-future Encores! season.On the other hand, the best vintage musicals need no excuses. They should be performed as long as enough people want to see them, and perhaps even longer, until the time is right again.But between the disposables and the treasurables lies a range of works, middling to excellent, that can still be powerful despite certain problems. Often the problems arise from ways of looking at race and gender that, however progressive in their day, do not meet contemporary expectations. Who, if anyone, has the right perspective to address such works most authentically?A good answer might start with artists who represent the group that’s objectionably depicted (or gratuitously ignored) in the show itself. And though I’m not a proponent of narrow identity matching, which can shrink a capacious story to a hall of mirrors with just one person inside, I’ve seen several examples recently in which the story is instead expanded. This happens when directors and performers from the communities in question thoughtfully reappropriate material that was once appropriated from them.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Review: A 10th Life for Those Jellicle ‘Cats,’ Now in Drag

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      Resetting the “Memory” musical in the world of ballroom competitions makes for a joyful reincarnation.A D.J. pawing through a carton of old LPs — Natalie Cole, Angela Bofill — comes upon a curiosity: the original cast album of “Cats.” When he opens the gatefold, glittery spangles fly everywhere.That’s how “Cats: The Jellicle Ball” begins, and it’s basically what the Perelman Performing Arts Center’s drag remake of the Broadway behemoth does to the drab original. It sets the joy free.Whether upper- or lowercase, cats never previously offered me much pleasure. The underlying T.S. Eliot poems, ad libbed for his godchildren, are agreeable piffle, hardly up there with “Prufrock” as fodder for the ages. The musical, instead of honoring the material’s delicacy, stomped all over it, leaving heavy mud prints. Andrew Lloyd Webber’s score, and especially the rigged-up story and original staging by Trevor Nunn, tried so hard to make big statements from little ditties and kitties that it wound up a perfect example of camp.Camp, cleverly, is the new version’s base line, neutralizing that criticism. It turns out that the show once advertised vaguely (and threateningly) as “now and forever” — it ran on Broadway from 1982 to 2000 — works far better in a specific past.That past is the world of drag balls, which at the time of the original “Cats” was beginning to achieve mainstream awareness. Madonna’s appropriation of the participants’ style and dance moves in her videos and concerts, as well as Jennie Livingston’s celebration of them in her documentary “Paris Is Burning,” helped pave the way for the supremacy of RuPaul and dragmania today. But beneath that triumph lay a darker truth: that the thrill of ball culture depended on its drawing extravagance from destitution, meeting prejudice with bravery, and staring down death with style.The key insight of this “Jellicle Ball,” which opened on Thursday at the new downtown arts cube, is that at least some of those themes could resonate with Eliot’s subtext and Lloyd Webber’s score. The directors Zhailon Levingston and Bill Rauch have thus transported Grizabella, Skimbleshanks, Rum Tum Tugger and the rest from a metaphysical junkyard to a hotel ballroom for a vogueing competition, accompanied by new versions of the songs that go heavier on the synthesizers, turn some lyrics into raps and add a distinctive house beat.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More