Cats: The Jellicle Ball
Opening Night: April 7, 2026
Theater: Broadhurst Theatre
Website: catsthejellicleball.com
COME ONE, COME ALL – The Jellicle Cats are having a BALL. Based on T.S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s worldwide phenomenon CATS is reimagined in a production that smashed records, won awards and left New York City purring. And now CATS: The Jellicle Ball ascends to Broadway in a kaleidoscope of glittering spectacle, iconic music and electrifying ballroom choreography.
BUY TICKETSREAD THE REVIEWS:
April 7, 2026
If you’re lucky enough to have a knowledgeable and prepared audience around you, the atmosphere at the ball crackles — literally. Those sitting close, at the set’s little bar tables, egg on the performers; theatergoers snap huge fans, which creates a kind of thundering paper applause. I too felt like clapping for hour after hour.
READ THE REVIEW
April 7, 2026
It works. It works because the ballroom setting lends weight and specificity to a narrative world that previously felt airless, abstract to the point of nothingness. It works because Webber’s songs translate easily to ballroom categories. Most of all, it works because it’s a hell of a lot of fun. And on Broadway, it somehow works even better. I did worry that something might get lost in the tighter confines of the Broadhurst—a flexible space at PAC had allowed for both a long runway on stage, and bustling actions on all sides. Could the magic survive the transfer? I needn’t have fretted. On Broadway, Cats: The Jellicle Ball has both sharpened in its staging and deepened in its significance.
READ THE REVIEW
April 7, 2026
This is a culture steeped in tradition and history. The chosen family is its bedrock, and elders hold a place of high esteem, though there are too few. This is not the story about queer people our detractors want told, but it is the truth and it’s live on Broadway eight times a week. This is how you do a revival.
READ THE REVIEW
April 7, 2026
What wasn’t preordained is just how beautifully executed the entire venture turns out to be. You’d have to be a real stickler for tradition to begrudge Jellicle Ball its innovations, and one suspects even the stickliest will find joy in the tunes and story that remain in this show’s DNA. It’s all still here, fueling yet another life, familiar as an old tabby yet fresh as a kitten.
READ THE REVIEW
April 7, 2026
Broadway is burning — and that’s something to celebrate. “Cats: The Jellicle Ball,” a refreshed version of the downtown 2024 hit, blazes anew, having made the trek uptown with its extravagance, pride and sense of joy intact.
READ THE REVIEW
April 7, 2026
The production makes a thrilling number of choices to update and revise and comment on the bizarre musical entity borne of a posh Brit’s love of T.S. Eliot’s poems for children, but it retains the basic load-bearing elements of the original show. There are cats — portrayed air-quotes style by actors as ballroom performers. They are gathering for their ball, and they sing all the songs you know. And yet, in placing new context and bodies inside the suit of ’80s excess, The Jellicle Ball reinvents it. Arriving on Broadway, The Jellicle Ball proves itself to be more than a fluke or a flight of fancy. It’s spectacular.
READ THE REVIEWApril 7, 2026
Through it all, there’s a euphoric energy pulsing through the theater, manifesting in several moving ways. Quiet weeping, dropped jaws, fervent applause and the occasional attendee literally vibrating with excitement. Obviously, everyone sporting cat ears to the show knows they’re in for a treat — but you need not come with the score already memorized. The spectacle of Jellicle Ball is intoxicating for all who enter and give themselves over to the glamor.
READ THE REVIEWApril 7, 2026
“Cats: The Jellicle Ball” is overflowing with so much unbridled joy that you may sometimes catch yourself shedding tears, for no other reason than you simply don’t want it to end. It’s a transcendent, glitter-drenched revival that breaks all the rules of what Broadway can be – and in turn, creates something that is utterly extraordinary.
READ THE REVIEW
April 7, 2026
Without fail, the best Broadway shows are the off-the-charts inventive ones that could not have possibly originated anywhere else but the five boroughs. This season, that’s “The Jellicle Ball.” Only in New York, kittens. Only in New York.
READ THE REVIEWApril 7, 2026
It was my viewing partner’s first time seeing any version of the show, and it sits perfectly well with me that the Jellicle Ball will forever be his Cats. It is a mighty testament to what is possible when producers look past the traditional scope of Broadway and bring in fresh talent to widen the aperture of commercial theater’s gaze. What those outsiders have achieved with The Jellicle Ball is a revival in the fullest sense of the word.
READ THE REVIEWApril 7, 2026
Faaaaabulous is too drab a word, really, to describe the mad, kaleidoscopic experience that awaits at Cats: The Jellicle Ball. Opening on Tuesday at the Broadhurst Theatre, following extended prowls downtown at PAC NYC, which developed this spectacle, Cats: The Jellicle Ball is an audacious reimagining of the 1981 Andrew Lloyd Webber-T.S. Eliot musical salute to cute kitties.
READ THE REVIEWApril 7, 2026
If Broadway was a ballroom competition, Cats: The Jellicle Ball would sashay away with the grand-prize trophy. Because there’s simply no topping the sheer euphoria onstage at the Broadhurst Theatre. It’s an open-invitation, come-as-you-are party—in the seats, in the aisles, and on West 44th Street afterward. And who couldn’t use a party right now?
READ THE REVIEWApril 7, 2026
There are solid reasons to celebrate the arrival on Broadway of this striking production, which recasts Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical as a Ballroom competition, with a cast of fabulously coiffured and coutured queer characters of color replacing the infamous felines in leotards and whiskers. Politically, their voluminous presence in such a mainstream entertainment feels almost like an act of resistance, given the current federal administration’s official bigotry. Artistically, the fresh interpretation not only offers the possibility of a renewed life and a new audience for this overly familiar 45-year-old show; it suggests how the art form as a whole can be reinvigorated.
READ THE REVIEWApril 7, 2026
They’re unleashing quite the Broadway bacchanal in a space that provides a warmer and, surprisingly, far more intimate setting for their Jellicle Ball, now amped up, tuned up and ready to give queer ballroom fans their summer in the sun. At the same time, this wildly entertaining show is skillfully and inclusively calibrated so as to offer Mr. and Ms. America a just-edgy-enough experience while sweetly comforting them with every last note of those catchy Lloyd-Webber tunes from, gulp, 45 years ago.
READ THE REVIEWApril 7, 2026
Cats: The Jellicle Ball’s nervy fun, total sincerity, and embrace of over-the-top theatricality are already reason enough for the curious cat to check it out. But that it turns Cats into an electrifying community that audiences get to join makes The Jellicle Ball the must-see show of this or any season, and the bar against which revivals of canon shows should be measured against.
READ THE REVIEW
April 7, 2026
I’ll get to “Memory” in a moment, but every other song in “Cats” is rinky-tink to the extreme. Only when William Waldrop’s orchestrations riff by imposing a bump, stomp and grind rhythm to the original score does this “Cats” spring alive to grow painted claws. When there’s dancing, the musical soars. When there’s singing, the musical shows it age. Fortunately, the cast really knows how to wear clothes and strut, with Omari Wiles and Arturo Lyons’ choreography giving the dancers ample room to show off their incredible extension and flexibility.
READ THE REVIEW