‘Cats’ Returning to Broadway with Reimagined ‘Jellicle Ball’ Revival

Cats will no longer be just a memory on Broadway!

Andrew Lloyd Webber’s classic musical, once a staple in New York City, will return to the boards this season in a bold new revival that reimagines the feline characters taken from T.S. Eliot’s collection of whimsical poems as members of the Ballroom scene — the vibrant underground LGBTQ subculture created by Black and Latinx queer and trans people that rose to popularity in the 1980s.

Titled CATS: The Jellicle Ball, the musical will begin preview performances on Wednesday, March 18, 2026 at the Broadhurst Theatre, ahead of an opening night on Tuesday, April 7.

It comes to Broadway on the heels of a resurgence of sorts for Lloyd Webber. The Nicole Scherzinger-led revival of Sunset Blvd. was a Tony Award-winning hit on Broadway last season, a revival of Evita led by Rachel Zegler was a sold out smash over the summer in the West End and The Phantom of the Opera is now back in New York City, in an immersive production called Masquerade.

This production of Cats had an acclaimed run Off-Broadway at the Perelman Performing Arts Center in 2024. Co-directors Zhailon Levingston (Chicken & Biscuits) and Bill Rauch (PAC NYC Artistic Director) helmed the revival, with choreography by Legendary season 2 winner Arturo Lyons and acclaimed vogue dancer Omari Wile.

A mix of theater actors and ballroom giants made up Cats‘ cast, all of whom will return for Broadway.

That includes Tony and Grammy winner André De Shields as Old Deuteronomy, as well as Jonathan Burke as Mungojerrie, Baby Byas as Victoria, Tara Lashan Clinkscales, Sydney James Harcourt as Rum Tum Tugger, Dava Huesca as Rumpleteazer, Dudney Joseph Jr. as Munkustrap, Junior LaBeija as Gus, Robert “Silk” Mason as Magical Mister Mistoffelees, “Tempress” Chasity Moore as Grizabella, Primo Thee Ballerino as Tumblebrutus, Xavier Reyes as Jennyanydots, Nora Schell as Bustopher Jones, Bebe Nicole Simpson as Demeter, Emma Sofia as Cassandra’/’Skimbleshanks, Garnet Williams as Bombalurina, and Teddy Wilson, Jr. as Sillabub.

Additional casting will be announced at a later date.

Cats is one of the most groundbreaking — if not, odd — musicals in theater history.

The show, based on Elliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, follows a tribe of felines (known as Jellicles) as they gather on one magical night for their annual Jellicle Ball, where one is chosen to ascend to the Heaviside Layer and be reborn.

Directed by Trevor Nunn and featuring iconic choreography by Gillian Lynne, the original Broadway production opened in 1982, a year after it debuted in London’s West End. It was an immediate smash, earning critical acclaim, breaking box office records and winning 7 Tony Awards including Best Musical.

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Lloyd Webber’s score — with lyrics by Eliot, Trevor Nunn and Richard Stilgoe — quickly became one of musical theatre’s most treasured compositions. At the center of it, the showstopping ballad “Memory,” which was sung in the West End by Elaine Paige and on Broadway by Betty Buckley. It’s since been covered by everyone from Barbra Streisand to Barry Manilow.

Cats‘ success changed the business of theater in the long run, proving that a plot-light, dance-heavy spectacle could dominate the box office and become a brand unto itself. Cats ran for an astounding 18 years and more than 7,400 performances, closing in 2000 as the longest-running musical in history at the time and sparking a 2016 revival.

It also helped usher in the era of the British “mega-musical,” paving the way for blockbuster hits like The Phantom of the Opera and Les Misérables.

But beyond the sales, few musicals have left as indelible a (paw)print on pop culture as Cats. Its eccentric visual style — marked by the fact that its actors crawled around in elaborate feline makeup with costumes made of leotards and leg warmers — made the original production ripe for parody, with everyone from The Simpsons to Saturday Night Live to Caroline In the City mocking it.

The jokes continued with the 2019 feature film adaptation. Directed by Oscar winner Tom Hooper and starring an A-list cast (including Jennifer Hudson, Idris Elba, Judi Dench, Rebel Wilson, Jason Derulo and Taylor Swift), the film seemingly had everything going for it. But it bombed at the box office and was ridiculed online, thanks to its use of “digital fur technology,” which attempted to blend human actors with CGI feline features.

Still, even in flop form, Cats once again proved its cultural staying power, this time as a camp classic. Once again, even when not being taken seriously, the musical was impossible to ignore.

CATS: The Jelicle Ball leaves all that in the rear-view, however. The immersive production ditches the cat costumes, instead centering the action around what De Sheilds calls “radical courage, radical resilience and radical joy.”

“There’s no whiskers, there’s no fur, there’s no tails, but there’s a lot of mythology about how you can get along by not judging and allowing people to be who they say they are and how authentic they want to be,” he told CBS News New York in July 2024. “And as we say, we’re slaying it.”

Presale tickets for CATS: The Jellicle Ball are available to Audience Rewards members and fans from Tuesday, Oct. 14. Tickets for the general public go on sale Thursday, Oct. 16. Ticketing policies for “The Runway” will be announced in the Spring before the start of previews.