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A D.J. pawing by a carton of outdated LPs — Natalie Cole, Angela Bofill — comes upon a curiosity: the unique solid album of “Cats.” When he opens the gatefold, glittery spangles fly in every single place.
That’s how “Cats: The Jellicle Ball” begins, and it’s principally what the Perelman Performing Arts Center’s drag remake of the Broadway behemoth does to the drab unique. It units the enjoyment free.
Whether upper- or lowercase, cats by no means beforehand supplied me a lot pleasure. The underlying T.S. Eliot poems, advert libbed for his godchildren, are agreeable piffle, hardly up there with “Prufrock” as fodder for the ages. The musical, as an alternative of honoring the fabric’s delicacy, stomped throughout it, leaving heavy mud prints. Andrew Lloyd Webber’s rating, and particularly the rigged-up story and unique staging by Trevor Nunn, tried so laborious to make large statements from little ditties and kitties that it wound up an ideal instance of camp.
Camp, cleverly, is the brand new model’s final analysis, neutralizing that criticism. It seems that the present as soon as marketed vaguely (and threateningly) as “now and perpetually” — it ran on Broadway from 1982 to 2000 — works much better in a selected previous.
That previous is the world of drag balls, which on the time of the unique “Cats” was starting to attain mainstream consciousness. Madonna’s appropriation of the contributors’ type and dance strikes in her movies and concert events, in addition to Jennie Livingston’s celebration of them in her documentary “Paris Is Burning,” helped pave the best way for the supremacy of RuPaul and dragmania right this moment. But beneath that triumph lay a darker fact: that the joys of ball tradition trusted its drawing extravagance from destitution, assembly prejudice with bravery, and staring down dying with type.
The key perception of this “Jellicle Ball,” which opened on Thursday on the new downtown arts dice, is that a minimum of a few of these themes may resonate with Eliot’s subtext and Lloyd Webber’s rating. The administrators Zhailon Levingston and Bill Rauch have thus transported Grizabella, Skimbleshanks, Rum Tum Tugger and the remaining from a metaphysical junkyard to a lodge ballroom for a vogueing competitors, accompanied by new variations of the songs that go heavier on the synthesizers, flip some lyrics into raps and add a particular home beat.
It’s typically match. The former felines — now fantastically attired people — compete in conventional classes, like Opulence and Hair Affair, which might be to some extent matched to Eliot’s descriptions. The tune “Mungojerrie and Rumpleteazer,” as an illustration, pits these two “knockabout clowns” towards the pairing of the balletic Victoria and the acrobatic Tumblebrutus in a showdown known as Tag Team Performance.
Not that it’s any simpler to maintain the cats straight simply because they’re queer. The construction of the present doesn’t permit it. Hemmed in by the Eliot property, Nunn couldn’t add dialogue, making it troublesome to flesh out any characters or encourage particular emotional funding. His resolution was a weird framing machine with late-Seventies woo-woo overtones: The clan meets annually on the night of the Jellicle moon in order that their chief, Old Deuteronomy, can select one fortunate cat to ascend to the Heaviside Layer and be reborn.
And if “Jellicle Ball” doesn’t fairly resolve that drawback, it succeeds in making it largely irrelevant. The new body means that you can really feel one thing for the characters, a minimum of as a gaggle, even whenever you don’t know what’s happening, which is usually. The design of the lengthy, slender room, with the viewers surrounding a runway on three sides, is awkward in the best way one imagines the balls had been: You can’t see every little thing, you’re continuously craning, the sound (by Kai Harada) is blurry and a few fuss or hilarity is at all times taking place someplace you missed.
Even so, we acknowledge Rum Tum Tugger (Sydney James Harcourt) much better now that he competes within the Realness and Body competitions. (He’s a easy playah.) Gus, the theater cat, is a extra immediately recognizable kind as carried out by Junior LaBeija, the M.C. of the “Paris Is Burning” ball, as a catty outdated queen who, although “not a terror” can nonetheless throw ample shade. And it takes little greater than the arrival of André De Shields, together with his unsurpassed capacity to freeze consideration onstage, to point out us that Old Deuteronomy is a Moses.
It helps, too, that he’s given a glowing Ten Commandments-like set of tablets, and that he’s dressed (by Qween Jean) in royal purple topped by a huge matching lion’s mane (by Nikiya Mathis). Indeed, the splendidly over-the-top design of the present is as essential because the idea itself in filling out the huge blanks of the characters as written. Enjoyable as that’s in itself, the chief good thing about the bodily staging (on units by Rachel Hauck, with lighting by Adam Honoré and projections by Brittany Bland) is that it grounds the performative mayhem on the runway in an actual surroundings that means the struggles of actual lives.
Among different issues, this rescues the nominal star position, Grizabella, from bathos. A pale “glamour cat” looking for the reincarnation nod, she has no different perform within the unique story, not even suspense. (We know she’s going to be chosen as a result of she retains popping as much as sing fragments of “Memory.”) But right here, in smeary make-up, a ratty fur and carrying a tarnished outdated trophy, scrambling concerning the outskirts of the motion, we see at a look the ache of an outsider now exiled from the place she’d as soon as been protected. Especially as performed by Chasity Moore, recognized within the ball world as Tempress, that ache feels genuine.
That is just not one thing that ever occurred to me in watching the old-school “Cats.” At greatest the Broadway present felt like a stoned oratorio about nothing, with a canine’s breakfast of tune types together with ear-wormy music corridor, grating electronica and the occasional Gilbert and Sullivan chorale. (The choral singing right here, beneath the path of William Waldrop, is beautiful.) Likewise, the unique choreography, by the Royal Ballet star Gillian Lynne, appeared completely random regardless of its supposedly catlike footwork. The athletic vogueing created for this manufacturing by Arturo Lyons and Omari Wiles, someday blended with throwbacks to Lynne’s classical type, is as an alternative completely tailor-made to its milieu, and thrilling moreover.
I ought to say at this level that, no, I haven’t became a fan of the present itself, the one you’ll be able to see at your group theater or license to your highschool. I don’t imagine musicals ought to want whisker consultants. But as occurs often, the proper thought can remodel the flawed materials. If “Cats: The Jellicle Ball” has managed a Grizabella flip, reincarnating itself in fabulousness, don’t count on an 18-year run or, pardon me, copycat productions. It’s a lightning strike: not now and perpetually however now and as soon as.
Cats: The Jellicle Ball
Through July 28 on the Perelman Arts Center, Manhattan; pacnyc.org. Running time: 2 hours half-hour.
