I Was Broadway’s First Grizabella. I Couldn’t Have Imagined the New ‘Cats.’

Walking into the Perelman Performing Arts Center in Lower Manhattan to see *Cats: The Jellicle Ball*, I carried more than four decades of personal history with Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical. When I stepped into the original Broadway production at the Winter Garden Theatre in 1982, I had no idea I was stepping into history. What I saw at PAC NYC in 2024 told me that the show I'd loved and lived inside had dimensions I never fully understood until someone reimagined it entirely.

The Show That Rewrote Broadway History

The original *Cats* was unlike anything Broadway had seen. Directed by Trevor Nunn and choreographed by Gillian Lynne, it drew from T.S. Eliot's *Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats*, published in 1939, with music composed by Andrew Lloyd Webber. It opened officially on October 7, 1982, after previews beginning September 23 of that year. Audiences and critics alike were stunned.

The production was nominated for 11 Tony Awards and won seven, including Best Musical, Best Book of a Musical, and Best Original Score. By the time it closed on September 10, 2000, it had logged 7,485 performances over 18 years, holding the record for the longest-running Broadway show from June 19, 1997, until *The Phantom of the Opera* surpassed it on January 6, 2006. The show went on to play in more than 250 cities worldwide, accumulating a global gross of US$3.5 billion by 2012.

Grizabella and the Weight of "Memory"

I won the 1983 Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Musical for playing Grizabella, the glamour cat cast out from the Jellicle tribe, and I stayed with the production for 18 months. Before me, Elaine Paige had originated the role a year earlier in the West End premiere on May 11, 1981, at the New London Theatre, now known as the Gillian Lynne Theatre. Paige had stepped into the role under extraordinary circumstances, replacing Dame Judi Dench just four days before opening night.

The role's anchor is "Memory," the ballad that closes the first act and repises at the show's emotional peak. It has been covered by dozens of artists, including Barbra Streisand and Barry Manilow, whose version was released as a single in late 1982. The song became shorthand for the entire show: a woman discarded by the world, reaching for something she can barely name, asking to be remembered.

What I did not fully see then, but what became unmistakable watching *Cats: The Jellicle Ball*, is how much that plea has always resonated at the intersection of queerness and survival.

A Radical Reimagining Rooted in Ballroom Culture

*Cats: The Jellicle Ball* is not a gentle update. It is a complete reconception of the material through the lens of ballroom culture, the LGBTQ+ subculture that originated in African American and Latino communities and came to broader mainstream awareness through the FX series *Pose*. In this production, the "cats" are not creatures prowling a junkyard; they compete in an immersive runway competition, voguing and performing in categories as they vie for a new life. It is queer theater in the most precise and generous sense of that term.

The production was co-directed by Obie Award winners Zhailon Levingston and Bill Rauch, with choreography by Chita Rivera Award winners and New York City Ballroom legends Omari Wiles of House of Ricci and Arturo Lyons. The team also included Josephine Kearns as dramaturg and gender consultant, N'yomi Allure Stewart as Ballroom Culture Consultant, and Ann James as Sensitivity Specialist. This was not a creative team gesturing at a subculture from the outside; it was one deeply embedded in it.

The casting search began as early as September 8, 2022. The production premiered off-Broadway at PAC NYC in June 2024, the first significant departure from Trevor Nunn's original staging in over 43 years. It was extended twice due to popular demand and closed in September 2024. New York Theatre Guide's critic described it as "one of the best musicals, revival or otherwise, to be staged in New York."

The New Grizabella and a Legendary Company

Playing Grizabella in *Cats: The Jellicle Ball* is "Tempress" Chasity Moore, a Ballroom Icon and Hall of Famer from Mount Vernon, New York, and the founder and Queen Mother of Haus Maison Margiela, established in 2018. Moore has been with the production since its original workshop. She brings to the role not just vocal and theatrical skill, but a lived understanding of what it means to be an elder in a community that prizes transformation and legacy.

The off-Broadway production also featured Junior LaBeija, the legendary ballroom icon best known as the master of ceremonies in the documentary *Paris Is Burning*, in the role of Gus. André de Shields, one of theater's most singular presences, appeared in the PAC NYC premiere and is part of the Broadway company as well.

Josephine Kearns has observed that the show's central premise, that each cat holds three names: the one given by their owner, a nickname, and a secret third name known only to themselves, speaks directly to the queer experience of identity, interiority, and self-definition. Grizabella, the cat who is shunned and then redeemed, resonates with particular force in this context. The themes of rebirth and transformation that the original *Cats* explored in somewhat abstract theatrical terms become, in the ballroom version, deeply personal and politically alive.

"Oh, I loved the ballroom production. It was great!" That was my reaction after seeing it, and it was genuine. What I hadn't anticipated was how much it would reframe my own relationship to the work I'd done more than four decades earlier.

Broadway Bound: What Comes Next

On August 13, 2025, Andrew Lloyd Webber's production company LW Entertainment announced that *Cats: The Jellicle Ball* would transfer to Broadway. The production begins previews on March 18, 2026, with an official opening night of April 7, 2026, at the Broadhurst Theatre at 235 West 44th Street. Tickets are available through September 2026. The production is co-produced by The Shubert Organization and The Nederlander Organization, two of Broadway's most storied producing entities.

That Lloyd Webber has embraced this reimagining is itself significant. He is simultaneously overseeing a new off-Broadway reimagining of *The Phantom of the Opera*, titled *Masquerade*, suggesting a broader creative willingness to revisit his catalog through new lenses rather than preserve it under glass.

When *Cats* first opened, it asked audiences to believe that a junkyard full of cats could illuminate something essential about longing, identity, and the desire to begin again. Forty-four years later, *Cats: The Jellicle Ball* answers that question with a specificity and a community the original production never claimed to represent. Grizabella's song has always been about being seen after years of invisibility. It turns out the audience who needed to hear it most had been there all along.