Cats, Finally

Photo by Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman

The signs say come out. Not come one, come all — come out. Cast members carry them through the house and the audience doesn't applaud so much as erupt. We’ve arrived in Zhailon Levingston and Bill Rauch’s Cats: The Jellicle Ball.

The concept sounds like it was dreamed up at a very good dinner party: take Cats, the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical that ran on Broadway for eighteen years and spawned one of the worst movies ever made, and set it in the world of New York City ballroom. And somehow — somehow — it's the most obvious idea anyone has ever had. Of course these are ballroom cats. They were always ballroom cats. Levingston and Rauch just had the nerve and genius to say so.

Ballroom gives (almost) every number a reason to exist — there are stakes, there is competition, there is something to prove — and the cast delivers like their lives depend on winning. Sit on the stage if at all possible. Risers have been built up there and rush tickets on Telecharge can get you in. The show plays differently from a distance. Up close it's electric in a way that doesn't translate to the back of the house — the details, the asides, the moments where a cast member catches your eye and you become briefly, thrillingly implicated in whatever they're doing.

Emma Sofia as Skimbleshanks is the MTA conductor of this city's dreams, which is objectively a ridiculous sentence about a character named Skimbleshanks, and also completely accurate. "Tempress" Chasity Moore sings Memory and the tears are cued. The song has been performed ten thousand times, but it doesn't sound like it tonight.

This is the best version of Cats that has ever existed, which is either a modest claim or an enormous one depending on your history with the material. Either way, go.