Cats: The Jellicle Ball Review – Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Strangest Musical Gets Even Stranger
Andrew Lloyd Webber shows can very much be hit or miss. There was the 2013 Profumo affair musical Stephen Ward, complete with songs about hula hooping and of course the more recent reimagining of Cinderella (Bad Cinderella), which I saw seventeen times and which was plagued with problems from the start.
The 1981 London premiere of Cats, based on a book of T. S. Eliot’s poems, has always been a strange show. X Factor for cats. A competition in which felines battle it out so that one lucky winner can ascend to the Heaviside Layer.
If you thought Cats couldn’t get any weirder, this show will make you think again.
The cats are gone, replaced by ballroom-dancing drag queens in a RuPaul-esque battle-style show. And I’m not talking about the kind of ballroom dancing your nan does down the British Legion. I’m talking about the underground club movement of New York in the 1980s, which Madonna later brought mainstream with Vogue.
The Jellicle Ball is a tough show to judge. On one hand, it is an incredibly important exploration of queer joy and a reminder of a time when Black people and gay people were forced into secret worlds because above ground, they were not accepted. The show is incredibly brave to take such a well-loved and iconic musical and turn it completely on its head. But as if Cats could ever make any less sense, this production manages to lose any sense of story altogether. That, however, is not really the point of it.
As a piece of theatre, it is awfully loud, chaotic and senseless, with mediocre performances. But as an opportunity to take a well-known and well-loved musical and use it to bring audiences into a new world of discovery, it is genius.
Eighty-year-old André De Shields takes on the role of Old Deuteronomy, effectively wheeled out to wave at his adoring crowd. His role is an important one, again less to do with the story itself and more to do with his personal connection to the AIDS epidemic, something very much touched upon in this production.
Cats: The Jellicle Ball is a piece of New York history and one that will be remembered for many years to come.
Five stars for the sheer bravery of going so off-the-wall with the idea of adapting this musical in this way. It is queer joy and a celebration of a generation. Go for the sense of belonging and the euphoria, but don’t go expecting to see the musical you know and love, because this isn’t that, and it isn’t trying to be.
★★★★★
West End Wilma
Cats: The Jellicle Ball is playing at the Broadhurst Theatre on Broadway. Whether or not it will sweep the boards at this weekend’s Tony Awards remains to be seen.
