‘Cats: The Jellicle Ball’ Will End Its Broadway Run in August
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Cats: The Jellicle Ball, the Broadway revival that reimagined Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical through the lens of Harlem ballroom culture, closed on 8 August after roughly five months at the Broadhurst Theatre. Despite strong reviews and healthy attendance, its weekly box office of around $1 million (roughly £790,000) proved insufficient to cover the running costs of a large-scale production, making it the first Tony-nominated show this season to announce an early closure following the June ceremony.
The production opened on Broadway on 7 April after a sold-out Off-Broadway run in 2024, having reimagined each Jellicle cat as a human competitor walking the runway in categories such as voguing and beauty, with a cast and creative team drawn from both the ballroom scene and Broadway. It won Tony Awards for best direction, choreography and costume design, though it lost best musical revival to Ragtime, and, capitalised at up to $18 million (about £14.2 million), never announced recoupment. Directed by Zhailon Levingston and Bill Rauch with choreography by Omari Wiles and Arturo Lyons, the show featured guest judges including Lin-Manuel Miranda and Anna Wintour, and its production was filmed by the New York Public Library's Theatre on Film and Tape Archive for permanent preservation.
- Cats: The Jellicle Ball closed on Broadway 8 August after five months
- Strong reviews and Tony wins couldn't offset high running costs
- First Tony-nominated show this season to close early post-ceremony
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Cats: The Jellicle Ball was a Broadway revival of Andrew Lloyd Webber's long-running musical Cats, but reworked to draw on Harlem ballroom culture, the underground scene built around dance and fashion competitions, particularly voguing. Instead of the original cast of cats, each character became a human performer competing in ballroom-style categories, with the creative team and many performers drawn from that community as well as from mainstream theatre.
The show first ran off-Broadway in 2024, where it sold out, before transferring to Broadway's Broadhurst Theatre in April. It went on to win several Tony Awards, the industry's top honours for theatre, including for direction, choreography and costume design, and drew attention for guest judges from outside the theatre world, such as Lin-Manuel Miranda and Anna Wintour.
Broadway shows are expensive to stage and need to earn back the money invested in them, known as "recouping," through ticket sales. Even productions that get good reviews and draw solid audiences can close if their running costs outstrip what they bring in each week, which is the financial backdrop against which this show's closure is being reported.
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Originally published by The Hollywood Reporter as “‘Cats: The Jellicle Ball’ Will End Its Broadway Run in August”.