The team behind Cats: The Jellicle Ball was photographed April 23 in front of the Broadhurst Theatre in New York City. Several of the ballroom veterans behind Cats: The Jellicle Ball (from left) Leiomy, Primo Thee Ballerino, Wiles and Junior LaBeija. Photographed by Amy Lombard Walking into the Broadhust Theatre, the first sound that hits you is the percussive clacking of the hand fans.
Audience members, adorned with sequins and cat ears, briefly pause their fans and sit up as the voice of Junior LaBeija, an iconic emcee in the New York ballroom culture, introduces the events of the evening and encourages those who don’t know his name to google him.
“O-P-U-L-E-N-C-E. Opulence! You own everything. Everything is yours,” LaBeija booms.
A silhouetted figure begins performing the balletic choreography associated with the original Cats musical. But then a heavy beat drops, and the figure crouches down into a duckwalk, moving across the walkway in a low bounce before springing up with the circling arm movements of voguing. It’s just a taste of what’s to come, because as LaBeija said, “This is a ball, darling.”
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Ballroom has arrived on Broadway in the form of Cats: The Jellicle Ball, where every “cat” is now a human competitor on the runway. Emerging out of Harlem in the 1970s, balls offered Black and Latino members of the queer community a chance to freely express themselves as they faced off in vogue battles, competing in categories across beauty, fashion and “realness,” meaning the ability to blend into straight society.
Since then, the ballroom scene has grown, becoming more competitive, and even entering the mainstream — somewhat controversially, for those who cherished it as an insular safe space — in TV shows, music videos and more.
There was some initial hesitation at the thought of bringing ballroom to a wide audience on Broadway. But with the cast, creative team and even crewmembers coming from the ballroom community, the musical has proved an unlikely and effective vehicle to showcase the history of the movement and its enduring vibrancy.
Another upside: The show’s fantastical plot, in which the cats each introduce themselves until one is chosen to be reincarnated into a new life, has arguably never made more sense than in this iteration, presented as a competition in which contestants vie for that honor at a ball.
Andrew Lloyd Webber, the original musical’s creator, has embraced the radical transformation. He’s been one of several celebrity guest judges to appear onstage for The Jellicle Ball in addition to Ayo Edebiri and Lin-Manuel Miranda since previews began in March. The show has enraptured New York, drawing rave reviews, nine Tony nominations, including best revival of a musical, and starry attendees, including Zendaya, Ian McKellen and Hugh Jackman.
A photograph from Cats: The Jellicle Ball. Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman for MurphyMade ***
The idea for the production originated with Bill Rauch, the artistic director of the off-Broadway theater PAC NYC who had been brainstorming a queer take on the musical, and Broadway director Zhailon Levingston, who was looking for a new way to revive the show.
The two teamed up and brought on ballroom veterans and choreographers Omari Wiles and Arturo Lyons to help combine the worlds of musical theater and ballroom. The first challenge was finding ways to vogue to the Broadway score, which doesn’t have the same rhythms as ballroom. “As professionals that we are, we realized that we can vogue to anything,” Lyons quips.
Wiles found it surprisingly easy to integrate the categories of a ball with the Cats narrative. The Pretty Boy Realness category was a shoo-in for the traditionally handsome Rum Tum Tugger, who here appears in black pants and little else, and Labels seemed made for Macavity, who has a propensity for stealing goods and here sports a Telfar bag. As in ballroom, a fast-talking emcee is used to offer a percussive play-by-play of the action, as contestants compete in the categories, setting up a circle of winners vying for the ultimate prize.
Prominent ballroom figures like LaBeija and Leiomy, known as “The Wonder Woman of Vogue,” joined the cast, with “Tempress” Chasity Moore taking on the star role of Grizabella and giving the character new meaning as she’s imagined as an outcast competitor. Overall, the cast is a mix of ballroom and Broadway, with Tony Award winner André De Shields in the role of Old Deuteronomy, the final judge of the ball. The revival opened its off-Broadway run in 2024.
Ballroom culture infuses all aspects of the show, including a parade of costumes, ranging from contemporary neon getups to sumptuous evening gowns and glittering headdresses. The cast was also able to bring in their own experience. As Tumblebrutus, Primo Thee Ballerino walks a category called School Boy Realness, in which contestants are judged on their ability to be straight-passing while dressed in the style of a student, and faces off in a synchronized tag-team voguing performance. “My character is almost parallel to who I am in ballroom,” says Primo, a competitive dancer who moved to New York in 2021 for ballroom.
Leiomy, who learned about ballroom at age 15 after receiving a voguing tape from a mentor, similarly identified with her character, Macavity, who has to source stolen goods for the competition, something Leiomy witnessed when she entered the scene.
“I lived that in a sense,” she says. “I was the child of someone who would have to go out to the stores and, you know, get certain things for me to be able to compete at balls and make money to eat. Ballroom was a survival thing for me in so many different ways.”
Junior LaBeija Photographed by Amy Lombard ***
The birth of modern ballroom can be traced back to Crystal LaBeija, a Black trans woman who fought against the racism of white-run drag pageants by forging her own path. In 1972, Crystal and her friend Lottie LaBeija held a ball for minority drag queens, marketed under the banner of the House of LaBeija, thus establishing the first house of ballroom. From there, more houses sprang up, becoming surrogate families for the trans women, gay men and queer people of color who joined the scene. Those members would then compete at balls on behalf of their houses. The balls provided a rare opportunity for competitors to express themselves outside of the confines of a prejudiced society and later offered education and testing as the community battled HIV/AIDS.
These origins are celebrated in the production, with a slideshow of joyous photos at historic balls and the early mothers of ballroom — Dorian Corey, Paris Dupree, Avis Pendavis, Angie Xtravaganza, Duchess La Wong and Pepper LaBeija, culminating with a photo of Crystal. This segues into a song by Junior LaBeija, a descendant of that original house who presided over balls in that era.
“It’s ancestral because they fought, they lived, so that I could tell their story,” LaBeija says.
LaBeija, who uses all pronouns, begins their number as Gus the Theater Cat, who recounts the exploits of Gus’ youth. In so doing, LaBeija draws from their own ballroom adventures. They entered the scene at age 14, coming from an unsafe and unaccepting home environment. LaBeija became a legendary emcee, coining such memorable ballroom catchphrases as “The Category Is” and “Tens Across the Board.” Their ability to command a room is still evident decades later, as the cast sits onstage listening, and much of the audience is in tears by the end of the number.
“I have been in ballroom for 55 years,” LaBeija says. “I have had all of the experiences. I have the wisdom. I have the knowledge. I have the ingenuity to know what it is like to overcome struggles. I know what it is like to be Black, old, male, gay, senior citizen, abandoned, refused, confused, misused, but I also know what it is to be loved, adored, worshiped.”
The house system is well-represented within the cast today, with Primo helping mentor and support family members as a prince of the House of Donyale Luna, Lyons representing his house internationally as an icon in the House of Miyake-Mugler and Wiles competing and supporting members at balls as a founding father of the House of Nina Oricci, among others. Backstage at Cats has also become a sort of family, in which cast members share their experiences from different eras and help the theater actors find their ballroom personas.
“It takes a village to raise a child. It takes cats to raise kittens,” LaBeija remarked.
Some of the traditional theater actors in the show have since expressed an interest in joining the ballroom scene in earnest. Primo notes that finding their personas first in the welcoming theater world, before going to a ball, has its advantages. “You go to a ball to get judged. So if you are not used to being judged, it can be pretty tough,” Primo says.
Primo Thee Ballerino Photographed by Amy Lombard Co-choreographer Omari Wiles Photographed by Amy Lombard ***
The ballroom world has changed dramatically in recent years now that videos from competitions can appear on social media and YouTube, giving participants a wider reach. Prize money has also gone up, which makes the experience more competitive. And balls have gone international.
The increased visibility of an art form that emerged as a creative outlet for marginalized performers has left some of its practitioners conflicted.
“It has a bigger opportunity to be seen and to be recognized,” Wiles says. “But it has raised the stakes a lot more versus the fun of it all.”
Meanwhile, ballroom has crossed over into popular culture, appearing in TV shows like Ryan Murphy’s Pose, the reality competition Legendary (which Leiomy, Wiles and Lyons took part in) and Beyoncé’s Renaissance album, among other commercial projects. Seeing ballroom be recognized so prominently has been a source of pride, but also trepidation that the wider audiences now being exposed to ballroom may not appreciate the nuances of the culture.
There have also been broader concerns about exploitation and appropriation, with projects having gone forward without involvement from the ballroom community. (RuPaul’s Drag Race, for instance, borrows ballroom moves and vocabulary without giving credit to the community and has also drawn pushback for merging drag culture and ballroom.)
Cats: The Jellicle Ball provided an opportunity to correct the record. “I think if celebrities and music artists are taking the culture and trying to pass it off as their own, it’s time that we get in the limelight and take it back for ourselves and show them that this is actually where it comes from,” Lyons says.
Leiomy Photographed by Amy Lombard But there were still some mixed feelings about bringing the culture to Broadway. “It’s not my first choice,” Primo concedes. “Would never be my first choice to put ballroom on a big, broad level because ballroom was started and created off exclusivity and [being] the safe space from everyone else that wasn’t us.” But, he adds that he has “no complaints” about this production because of how many members of ballroom served as collaborators as well as the way the show honors the roots of ballroom.
LaBeija has previously raised issues with commercial ballroom projects, including Paris Is Burning, a documentary in which they were heavily featured but for which they felt they were not offered fair compensation. They see the musical as a vector to broaden understanding among audience members and to portray Black history onstage.
“The reason why I was happy and ecstatic and that this was epic is because we are in a social climate right now, a political climate that there are various views about people that exist, such as the transpeople of experience,” LaBeija notes. “We are now seeing that they are no longer invisible.”
Another upside of ballroom going mainstream is that more of its practitioners are able to make a career out of it. Leiomy first shot to fame voguing on YouTube and made history as part of the first vogue dance team on America’s Next Best Dance Crew. She has since appeared with artists like Willow Smith, worked as a choreographer on Pose and is now able to travel the world teaching voguing. “The world is starting to realize how much ballroom has inspired the world,” says Leiomy, who says she views Cats: The Jellicle Ball as “an education.”
The success of Cats may lead to even more opportunities for the cast, though LaBeija, a retired social worker, says that Broadway was never the goal but a “gift that I happen to enjoy as a senior citizen.”
The hope is that voguing remains exclusive to the members of the community. But with the attention on the space, Primo also sees this as another foundational moment for ballroom. “I see ballroom creating generational wealth for those who get to participate in it,” he says. “And it’s because of the Black trans women who put the groundwork in all those years ago and continue to put the groundwork in, so that we can have thoughts of the future in this way.”
This story appeared in the May 6 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
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