How Creators of ‘Cats: The Jellicle Ball’ Are Figuring Out a Future Life for the Hit Show

variety.com:

Gordon Cox Theater Editor The creators of “Cats: The Jellicle Ball” are certain their hit show will have a future life — they just don’t yet know what that future life looks like. Listen to this week’s “Stagecraft” podcast below: Now playing in an extended run at the Perelman Performing Arts Center in downtown Manhattan, “Cats: The Jellicle Ball” mashes up Andrew Lloyd Webber‘s long-running 1982 musical with the colorful and very queer ballroom culture seen in “Paris is Burning” and “Pose.” Audiences and critics alike have fallen for the unexpected pairing, turning the show into one of the breakout hits of summer theater season.

As the production wraps up its second extension (ending Aug. 11), three members of the creative team — co-directors Zhailon Levingston and Bill Rauch and dramaturg/gender consultant Josephine Kearns — appeared on “Stagecraft,” Variety‘s theater podcast, to talk through the origins of the production and what the next step might be. “We’re all committed to it having a longer life, and there are so many possibilities,” Rauch said on “Stagecraft.” “In terms of what shape that takes, that will be a collaboration with [Lloyd Webber’s] Really Useful Group, because it’s their intellectual property.

We want to treat it with the respect that it deserves as we figure out how more people can experience it — because we certainly want more people, especially queer young people, and their allies to experience this project.” Rauch was the originator of the idea, which stemmed from a 20-year-old impulse he had about an older gay man singing “Memory.” But the concept really took shape in collaboration with Kearns, Levingston, co-choreographer Omari Wiles and others, and as the production’s ballroom setting.