The producing team behind Cats: The Jellicle Ball keeps expanding, and the latest addition carries both cultural weight and serious Broadway credibility. John Legend and producer Mike Jackson have joined the production through their Get Lifted Film Co. banner, adding another prominent voice to a venture that has already drawn Cynthia Erivo and Lena Waithe to its ranks.
The show is set to begin previews at the Broadhurst Theatre on March 18, ahead of an April 7 opening night.
A reimagining built around ballroom culture
Cats: The Jellicle Ball is exactly what the name suggests and also something considerably more unexpected. The production takes Andrew Lloyd Webber’s long-running Broadway institution, itself based on T.S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, and sets it entirely within New York’s underground LGBTQ+ ballroom scene. The result, according to nearly everyone who has seen it, is a version of Cats that finally makes emotional sense to audiences who never fully connected with the original.
The show premiered at the Perelman Performing Arts Center in 2024 and was extended three times in response to audience demand, a rare sign of genuine cultural momentum. Zhailon Levingston and Bill Rauch direct the production, with choreography by Omari Wiles and Arturo Lyons, two figures whose deep roots in ballroom culture give the show an authenticity that could not be manufactured.
What Get Lifted brings to the table
Legend and Jackson’s involvement is not simply a celebrity endorsement. Get Lifted has accumulated a meaningful theater production resume, including the 2017 revival of August Wilson’s Jitney and the acclaimed Ain’t Too Proud: The Life and Times of The Temptations. The company is also developing a new stage adaptation of Imitation of Life, featuring music and lyrics by Legend alongside a book by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Lynn Nottage, set to premiere Off Broadway at The Shed.
Their decision to join Cats: The Jellicle Ball reflects a pattern of investing in productions that carry both artistic ambition and cultural specificity, projects that tend to find dedicated audiences precisely because they are not designed for everyone.
The producers who came before them
Erivo and Waithe joined the production two weeks prior to Legend’s announcement, each describing the show as a transformative experience. Erivo is currently starring in a one-woman West End production of Dracula, in which she portrays all 23 characters, running through May 31. She won the Tony Award in 2016 for her performance in the revival of The Color Purple and has also produced the Tony-nominated play Fat Ham.
Waithe, an Emmy-winning writer and producer, brought Jordan Cooper’s Tony-nominated play Ain’t No Mo’ to Broadway and recently made her stage debut as a playwright with trinity at Baltimore Center Stage. Both described being genuinely altered by their experience seeing the show before agreeing to invest in it, a response that has been common among those who have encountered the production.
A cast built for the moment
The Broadway production features a large ensemble that reflects the world the show inhabits, with performers drawn from both the theater world and ballroom culture, including Leiomy, a figure of considerable significance within that community. André De Shields, a Tony winner in his own right, also appears in the production.
The overall shape of the project, a classical text refracted through a marginalized community’s artistic tradition, backed by a producing team of Black artists and storytellers, represents something that Broadway has been moving toward for some time. Whether it arrives fully formed will be known by April.
