Before anyone steps onto the catwalk in “Cats: The Jellicle Ball,” the wildly popular reimagining of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Cats” at the Perelman Performing Arts Center, a dancer’s silhouette appears at the back of the stage, darting across a row of windows. At first, his movement recalls the limber ballet-jazz of the original 1982 Broadway production, accented with tricks like a split leap and a back walkover. He has two little ears, a tail. He could be prowling on a rooftop at night.
But then something shifts. The silhouetted dancer strips away his tail, and vintage musical theater gives way to elements of vogue: the circling wrists of hand performance; the crouched legs and flashing arms of a duckwalk; the whirl and dramatic fall of a spin and dip.
“It’s arguably one of the most important moments in the show,” said the dancer Primo, to whom the silhouette belongs. “All of that represents exactly what you’re about to see: the marriage of the old with the now.”
This wordless overture, choreographed by Ousmane Omari Wiles, introduces the seemingly incongruous and yet surprisingly seamless collision of worlds at the heart of “Cats: The Jellicle Ball.” Extended three times since its premiere in June, and now running through Sept. 8, the show reinvents the classic musical in the context of queer ballroom culture, replacing cats with people who have come together to walk a ball, battling for trophies on a nightclub runway.
From that shadowy first solo to the euphoria of the final bows, dance is essential to the storytelling and world-building of “The Jellicle Ball,” which is directed by Bill Rauch and Zhailon Levingston and choreographed by Wiles and Arturo Lyons. Not limited to the catwalk stage, the movement often spills into the audience, with performers buzzing among the front rows and cocktail tables that flank the runway. The ornate, extravagant costumes by Qween Jean create physical possibilities, too, becoming playful extensions of the choreography.
And while the show includes plenty of voguing — the dance form that evolved out of New York’s underground ball scene of the 1970s and 1980s — Wiles and Lyons drew from a range of dance genres and influences, highlighting connections to the Black and Latino, gay and transgender communities where ballroom was born and continues to thrive.
Wiles, who is from Senegal and grew up in New York, said that early in the creative process, he “came into the idea of wanting to celebrate queer club culture itself and all the dance styles we embody within that.” As the characters compete in categories like Virgin Vogue, Tag Team and so many more, the three major forms of vogue — Old Way, New Way, Vogue Femme — interweave with moments of jazz funk, hip-hop and Latin and West African dance.
While departing from the source material in some ways, “The Jellicle Ball” keeps the original score largely intact. Wiles and Lyons said the tracks that accompany voguing are typically slower than the songs in “Cats,” which presented some choreographic challenges.
“There’s a statement in ballroom that if you can vogue, you can vogue to anything,” Lyons said. “We took that and ran with it. It was a true test to see how creative we were.”
The cast members’ backgrounds also reflect the show’s union of musical theater and ballroom; most of the performers, who all sing and dance, came to the project steeped in one of those worlds. Baby Byrne, who plays the role of Victoria and serves as the dance captain, said that meshing the two required “a lot of listening from both sides.”
In shaping how the show would move, the choreographers “wanted the energy to feel in unison,” Wiles said. But they also gave the dancers space to be themselves and emphasize their strengths. Four performers with ballroom backgrounds spoke about embodying their characters through movement and how their paths led them to the Jellicle Ball.
Baby Byrne
With her voluminous blond wig and knee-high white boots, Byrne, as Victoria, introduces her character with a languid, sultry solo near the start of the show. “Victoria is a character that dances between the lines of sensuality and power,” she said, not unlike Byrne herself.
“That’s the kind of performer I am,” she said. “A mix of dramatic, soft, powerful, sensual. All of those things.”
Byrne, who grew up doing community theater in Rockaway Beach, Queens, first encountered voguing as a student at Purchase College, in a workshop taught by the dancer Jason A. Rodriguez, known for his role on the FX series “Pose.” She trained in commercial dance styles in Los Angeles and New York, joining Wiles’s House of Oricci for four years; she now belongs to the House of Juicy Couture. (Houses are the chosen families of ballroom, whose members practice and compete together.)
As the dance captain, Byrne helped to contextualize ballroom during rehearsals, for members of the cast and creative team who were newer to that world. “You’re bringing an entire culture to a musical theater space, and that comes with a lot of learning,” she said.
A freestyle dancer outside the theater, Byrne relishes the parts of the show that leave room for improvisation, like Tag Team, a boisterous battle between two duos (Victoria and Tumblebrutus against Mungojerrie and Rumpleteazer). And she doesn’t mind when things go a little awry.
“As much as the show is set, I live for moments where we’re able to turn mistakes into comedy,” she said. “There’s a lot of space for that in this show, and that just makes it super ballroom.”
Robert Mason, or Silk
At 6-foot-4, Robert Mason, also known as Silk, is unmissable as Mistoffelees, the character whose magic touch brings Old Deuteronomy, a beloved elder, back to the ball. Helped, not hindered, by the additional height of six-inch heels, Mason reliably wows the audience with ultrahigh extensions and plummeting splits, honed through years of training in ballet, jazz, majorette dancing and other styles.
Mason found ballroom shortly after moving to New York from South Carolina to attend the Juilliard School, when they were invited to a Halloween ball in the Bronx. “I see people dancing and I’m like, ‘I could do that,’” Mason said. Before long, they were out on the floor voguing. (They now lead their own house, the International Royal Haus of Silk, in what’s known as the kiki scene, where younger people can get their start in ballroom.)
Mason brings a similar I-can-do-that confidence, but also a warmth, to Mistoffelees, describing the character as both a caretaker and “the one with the most tricks and the most antics.”
In addition to flashy moves like jumping up and landing in a straddle, Mason flaunts the subtler art of the runway walk in a kind of duet with their costume: a floor-skimming fur coat, a long black wig and a towering, tiaralike crown. “Everything about my outfit, my hair, my body — everything takes up space,” they said.
Striding down the runway, they exude a can’t-be-bothered attitude, while keeping an eye on their community at the ball. “If something goes wrong,” they said, “Mistoffelees has to be there to make it right.”
Dava Huesca
Witnessing Dava Huesca in the triple-threat role of Rumpleteazer, you can hardly believe she had no professional singing experience before “The Jellicle Ball.”
“I was afraid of singing,” she said. “I was like, ‘I’m a dancer. That’s all I do.’ But I wanted to be in ‘Cats’ so bad.” After not making the cut at several auditions, she signed herself up for vocal lessons, and soon she was hired.
Huesca, a graduate of the Conservatory of Dance at Purchase College and a member of the Haus of Telfar, already knew Lyons from taking his weekly vogue classes at Ripley-Grier Studios. “I really connected to his musicality,” she said. “He’s so good at finding all the little accents within any type of music.”
Landing a role with notable solo singing moments — in the comedic number “Mungojerrie & Rumpleteazer,” she and Jonathan Burke come out belting in New Jersey accents — Huesca has had to develop a whole new skill set for singing and voguing at the same time.
“The breathwork for dancing is second nature to me,” she said. But it doesn’t always align with the breathwork for singing. “It’s like choreographing a new way to breathe and generate sound, without sounding bad.” (She also sings through a virtuosic onstage costume change that she nails in 35 seconds.)
Huesca has picked up new voguing skills, too, performing the linear, militant Old Way style for the first time. With some coaching from Byrne, she figured out how to feel more like herself in movement that felt foreign at first. “That’s another reason I like voguing,” she said. “You have this outline, but you’re not supposed to look like every other person.”
Primo
Known as “the human tornado,” Primo, a member of the House of Donyale Luna, has earned a reputation in ballroom circles for his exhilarating spins and dips. He seems to defy the laws of physics as he whips his body around — multiple times, or with one leg lifted — and drops straight to the floor, landing with his spine arched and limbs stretched or bent to extremes.
He connects these abilities to his years of ballet training, which he began at 14 at the School for Creative and Performing Arts in Cincinnati. “A lot of dramatic vogue coincided with the tricks I used to do in men’s technique,” he said, referring to ballet’s athletic jumps and turns. But having the right mind-set matters, too. “You have to want to do it, and you can’t be afraid,” he said.
As Tumblebrutus — a character he describes as “a fun person” and “most definitely shady” — Primo lets his signature spins and dips fly. But he shines in other movement, too, like in a buoyant West African dance phrase in “Song of the Jellicles and the Jellicle Ball.”
Performed with dancers who were his rivals just a few numbers before, this celebratory section suggests they can still have fun together, he said: “It’s one of those moments of camaraderie and community, where we come together and we’re like: ‘Girl, let’s dance. Let’s have a little fab moment. Let’s kiki.’”
Both onstage and off, through photographs displayed during the show and outside the theater, “The Jellicle Ball” makes an effort to honor…
