Andrew Lloyd Webber visits Cats: The Jellicle Ball

CATS composer Andrew Lloyd Webber has visited the Jellicle Ball! The theatre icon went to see the new Broadway production at the Broadhurst Theatre over the weekend, just days before its opening.

A composer turning up at a new production of his own show days before opening is not unusual, but it is watched closely when the production is a reimagining rather than a revival. Lloyd Webber's presence, and his public comments, read as a signal of approval for a version that departs substantially from the original staging.

The Broadhurst is a mid-size Broadway house, which suits a production built around proximity between performers and audience. A ballroom is judged from the floor, and the staging has to work for people watching closely rather than from a distance.

In a new video posted to Instagram, Lloyd Webber can be seen enjoying the musical from the audience, before greeting the cast backstage once the performance ended.

Lloyd Webber recently called the reimagining of his musical "the most joyous experience."

"Just listening to the wonderful cast of the Jellicle Ball in such a different way but so much full of the joy that I know that T.S. Eliot, who wrote the wonderful words, the original poet. He just would have loved that. But it's just extraordinary for me to hear it like this, which is just a joy," he said at the sitzprobe.

A sitzprobe is the rehearsal at which the orchestra and cast first work through the score together, sitting rather than staging, and composers are often most vocal at that point in the process. It is the first time the music is heard as written, before blocking and choreography take over.

Eliot's Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats is a collection of light verse written for children, and the original musical took its songs largely from those poems. A production that changes the setting and the idiom while keeping the score is asking the composer to accept that his music is being heard differently, which is what he appears to be describing.

CATS: The Jellicle Ball, is directed by OBIE Award winners Zhailon Levingston and Bill Rauch and choreographed by Chita Rivera Award winners and New York City Ballroom icons Omari Wiles (House of NiNa Oricci) and Arturo Lyons (House of Miyake-Mugler). CATS: The Jellicle Ball has music by Andrew Lloyd Webber and is based on Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats by T.S. Eliot.

Ballroom culture emerged from Harlem's Black and Latino LGBTQ communities, built around houses that compete in categories judged on dance, costume and presentation. Recasting the Jellicle Ball — in the original show, the gathering at which the cats assemble and one is chosen — as an actual ballroom competition gives that structure a real-world referent rather than an invented one.

The movement vocabulary associated with ballroom, voguing, developed alongside it and has its own competitive categories and technique. Bringing choreographers from that world rather than from conventional musical-theatre dance is what makes this a reimagining instead of a restaging, because the movement is drawn from a living competitive form.

The title change is deliberate. The Jellicle Ball was always the event at the centre of the show, and naming the production after it shifts the emphasis from a gathering of characters to the competition itself, which is what the ballroom framing turns it into.

The Broadway cast includes Tony Award® and Grammy Award® winner André De Shields as 'Old Deuteronomy,' Ken Ard as 'DJ Griddlebone,' Kya Azeen as 'Etcetera,' Bryson Battle as 'Jellylorum,' Sherrod T. Brown, Jonathan Burke as 'Mungojerrie,' Baby Byrne as 'Victoria,' Tara Lashan Clinkscales, Bryce Farris, Sydney James Harcourt as 'Rum Tum Tugger,' Dava Huesca as 'Rumpleteazer,' Dudney Joseph Jr. as 'Munkustrap,' Junior LaBeija as 'Gus,' Leiomy as 'Macavity,' Robert "Silk" Mason as 'Magical Mister Mistoffelees,' "Tempress" Chasity Moore as 'Grizabella,' Primo Thee Ballerino as 'Tumblebrutus,' Xavier Reyes as 'Jennyanydots,' Nora Schell as 'Bustopher Jones,' Bebe Nicole Simpson as 'Demeter,' Emma Sofia as Cassandra'/'Skimbleshanks,' Phumzile Sojola, Kendall Grayson Stroud, B. Noel Thomas, Kalyn West, Donté Nadir Wilder, Garnet Williams as 'Bombalurina, and Teddy Wilson Jr. as 'Sillabub.'

Casting draws on two worlds at once. André De Shields is a veteran Broadway performer, while performers such as Junior LaBeija and Leiomy come out of ballroom itself — LaBeija is one of the figures documented in the film and television coverage of the scene, and Leiomy is widely credited with bringing voguing to a mainstream audience. Putting both in the same cast is the production's central bet.

Cats opened in London in 1981 and on Broadway in 1982, and ran for years on both sides of the Atlantic. It became known as much for its staging — an audience surrounded by a junkyard set, performers in unitards and makeup rather than cat costumes — as for its score, and Memory became the song that outlasted the show.

Whether this version works is a question critics answer at opening. What is already clear is the scale of the change: a score written for a very specific staging is being carried by a movement vocabulary and a community that sat outside the original's frame of reference, and Lloyd Webber's endorsement suggests he is comfortable with where it has gone.