Cats: The Jellicle Ball Tickets

Status: closed at the Broadhurst Theatre

Cats: The Jellicle Ball closed on Broadway on August 8, 2026, at the Broadhurst Theatre on West 44th Street. Previews began on March 18, 2026, and the production opened on April 7. Broadway News counted 21 previews and 143 regular performances (another tracker lists a lower total). The closing came early: the run had been extended through January 17, 2027, before the closing notice was posted in mid-July. As of October 2026, no tour or new New York engagement has been announced.

This page records the production. Any listings that appear here would be for other productions of Cats, not the closed Broadway run.

Cats, reimagined as a ball

The Jellicle Ball takes Andrew Lloyd Webber's 1979 musical, built on T. S. Eliot's poems about cats, and moves it into ballroom culture: the Black and Latino LGBTQ competition scene in which participants walk categories (themed contests judged on fashion, attitude and dance, including voguing) to win trophies for their houses. The Jellicle cats become ball competitors, and the annual Jellicle Ball, where one cat is chosen for a new life, becomes a ball. The score is Lloyd Webber's.

Zhailon Levingston and Bill Rauch directed, and Arturo Lyons and Omari Wiles choreographed. It was the first major production of Cats to break from the look and style of the original staging.

From the Perelman Performing Arts Center to Broadway

The production premiered in June 2024 at the Perelman Performing Arts Center in Lower Manhattan, where it was extended twice and ran until September. That staging was close to in-the-round, with a long runway and cafe-style seating. The cast included André De Shields as Old Deuteronomy and the ballroom figure Junior LaBeija, and much of the company carried over to Broadway.

At the 2026 Tony Awards it was nominated for Best Revival of a Musical, which went to Ragtime, and won three awards: Best Direction of a Musical for Levingston and Rauch, Best Choreography for Wiles and Lyons, and Best Costume Design of a Musical for Qween Jean.

How the Broadhurst was reconfigured

The Broadhurst Theatre, opened in 1917 and operated by the Shubert Organization, has 1,218 seats on two levels, an orchestra and a balcony. To bring the downtown runway into a proscenium house, set designer Rachel Hauck built a catwalk that extended from the stage into the audience, added seating along it for close-up views, and gave it a sprung floor (a shock-absorbing surface) to protect the dancers.

That changed the usual Broadway logic. Runway-side seats put the audience inside the ball, at the cost of seeing much of the action from the side. Center orchestra seats a few rows back from the runway's end saw both the stage and the catwalk head-on, and the front balcony showed the full length of the runway and the patterns of the ensemble. The show ran about 2 hours and 25 minutes with one intermission.

What it means for future productions

Cats itself is one of the longest-running shows in Broadway history; its original production ran so long that Chicago did not pass its performance total until 2014. The Jellicle Ball version is a separate production with its own creative team, and its future, whether a tour, a London staging or a return, has not been announced as of October 2026.

Fans of dance-driven musicals can find current options in the Broadway and Musicals sections of the site.

Sources

• Wikipedia: Cats: The Jellicle Ball
• Playbill: Cats: The Jellicle Ball sets final Broadway bow
• Broadway News: Cats: The Jellicle Ball to close early
• Broadway.com: Rachel Hauck on reimagining the Broadhurst
• Broadway Scorecard: Cats: The Jellicle Ball
• American Theatre Wing: 2026 Tony Award winners
• Wikipedia: Broadhurst Theatre
• Wikipedia: Ball culture
• Wikipedia: Cats (musical)