Broadway Needs More “Jellicle Balls”

Chloe Wintersteen, managing editor of San Francisco Classical Voice, uses the closing of "CATS: The Jellicle Ball" on August 8 to look at a larger problem on Broadway. The production, which she calls the best and most innovative show of the season, regularly filled more than 90 percent of its seats and grossed close to a million dollars a week, yet it closed after 164 performances. Her diagnosis is direct: the problem is not audience interest but the exorbitant cost of keeping a show running, a cost controlled by private theater owners. In a country that neither treats artmaking as an essential service nor subsidizes the arts, she writes, there is no other outcome. The result is fewer bold, homegrown productions on Broadway. "Jellicle Ball" reimagines Andrew Lloyd Webber's "Cats" through ballroom, a historically underground subculture of the LGBTQ+ community in which chosen families gather under Mothers, in Houses, and dance and walk for trophies and clout. Wintersteen has always found "Cats" a show without story or meaning, and argues this production finally delivered on the original's intention of embracing those society discarded. The ensemble sings that Jellicle cats come out tonight while holding signs reading "Come out." One example says it best: in a competition the audience expects the loser to throw a fit, and instead he congratulates the winner and the two vogue together. The top of Act 2 is given over to an in-memoriam for real ballroom pioneers. The essay then turns to three other productions. "Masquerade," billed as the first immersive musical, moves audiences of about forty through the rooms of a Manhattan building and stages "The Phantom of the Opera" so that the Phantom's behavior no longer reads as romantic. "Schmigadoon," winner of the 2026 Tony for Best New Musical, both honors and mocks the Golden Age musical. And "La Cage aux Folles," written in 1983 by Jerry Herman and Harvey Fierstein, was revived with an all-Black cast starring Billy Porter, a show that Wintersteen says laid the foundation on which "Jellicle Ball" became possible.