It started, as the best things in ballroom do, with a video.

In May 2024, a rehearsal clip of the company performing Jellicle Songs for Jellicle Cats began circulating online - full voguing, full house energy, full commitment. Nobody had seen CATS move like this before. Within weeks, the internet had decided: this was happening, and everyone wanted in.

What they were reacting to was a genuine reimagining. Directors Zhailon Levingston and Bill Rauch, working with choreographers Arturo Lyons and Omari Wiles, hadn't restaged CATS so much as discovered what had always been sitting inside it. The Jellicle Ball, a gathering where outsiders present themselves for the chance to be reborn, is, when you look at it, a ballroom. So they built one: real categories, real runway, real house music, and a company drawn from both Broadway and the ballroom scene itself, several making their stage debuts alongside seasoned Tony nominees.

The show opened at Perelman Performing Arts Center that June, extended its run three times, and closed its Off-Broadway premiere that September, having answered the only question that mattered: not whether audiences would accept a radically reconceived CATS, but how fast they'd fall for it.

Broadway was always going to come next. CATS: The Jellicle Ball began previews at the Broadhurst Theatre in March 2026 and opened that April, with the original creative team and much of the original company intact - a rare thing for a transfer, and a sign of how tightly this production held together. It arrived into a moment when Andrew Lloyd Webber's work was everywhere on stage again, alongside Nicole Scherzinger's Sunset Blvd and Rachel Zegler's Evita - but The Jellicle Ball stood apart. It was revival as argument: that a forty-year-old show about outsiders finding each other could still say something urgent, if you let it speak in its own true language.

The Tony voters agreed. Nine nominations, including Best Revival of a Musical - and three wins: Best Direction of a Musical for Levingston and Rauch, Best Choreography for Lyons and Wiles, and Best Costume Design for Qween Jean. Backstage at Radio City, Lyons offered the ballroom community a thank-you that doubled as a mission statement.

And what a company that carried it there. André De Shields brought a lifetime of stage command to Old Deuteronomy. Junior LaBeija - a ballroom legend before he was ever a Broadway one - gave Gus a history that felt genuinely lived-in. Tempress Chasity Moore's Grizabella turned Memory into something rawer and stranger than the song has ever been asked to be. Sydney James Harcourt, Jonathan Burke, Dava Huesca, Dudney Joseph Jr, Baby Byrne… night after night, eight shows a week, they built a room where transformation wasn't a plot device. It was the whole point.

The Jellicle Ball played its final Broadway performance on August 8, 2026. Closing a hit is never simple, but there was a rightness to how this one ended: not a show quietly winding down, but a company taking its final bow exactly as full-throated as its first.

A cast recording is on its way, carrying the score back out into the world in the voices that made it new. And somewhere, always, the Jellicle Ball will still be ringing out.