'Cats: The Jellicle Ball' Co-Directors Bill Rauch & Zhailon Levingston

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1:42Carol Massar:Bloomberg Audio Studios. Podcasts. Radio. News. You're listening to Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Masser and Tim Stenevek on Bloomberg Radio. If you've been paying attention to us over the past couple of years, then by now you've seen cats the jellicle ball. Because close to two years ago, we were having a conversation with Chris Rauser of Bloomberg Pursuits about how the costumes were made. It was based on a story from James Tarmy. If you missed it, be sure to check it out on the terminal or at Bloomberg.com. But back then, our team called it a viral news show. I remember Chris saying to us that we absolutely had to see it.

2:16Carol Massar:He did. Now, The Hollywood Reporter is out calling it, quote, this season's must-see Broadway revival. We've got with us Bill Rausch and Jalen Levingstead. They are co-directors of Cats, The Jellicle Ball. Bill is also artistic director at the Perlman Performing Arts Center. Also with us is our own Chris Rauser, Bloomberg Pursuits editor-at-large. Chris, as we said, he's also the guy that we reach out to when we need to go somewhere and figure out what to go see. Welcome, welcome. Congratulations. How did this first come together? Did you guys call Andrew Lloyd Webber? Like, how does this happen?

2:51Eventually.

2:53Carol Massar:But how did it start to like there's always either people sitting around a table thinking, oh, my God, what if we just did this? We both have our own stories about that. About 30 years ago, I began to think about Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical Cats in a gay context. I thought about the possibility of Grizabella being an older gay man in a gay bar, singing the song Memory. And that was the seed. But over time, we realized, of course, it's not a bar, it's a ball. And Grizabella is not a gay man. Grizabella is a transgender woman. And that is, in fact, what Cats in the Jellicle Ball became. Yeah. I mean, it really started with that impulse from Bill.

3:34And we were connected after I had started to have some really in jest conversations with a roommate of mine about what if there was a production of Cats where no one was an actual cat? And there weren't ears and there weren't tails. It sounds sacrilegious, but you kind of love it. And you just kind of called each other cat in the way that you did in the 20th century. Look at that cat. Look at that cool cat. That's a sly cat right there. And I was like, well, it's already kind of in the American vernacular. I bet there's a cultural context that you could put the show in. But I just assumed Andrew Lloyd Webber would never let such a radical change happen with the show.

4:09And then we were connected soon after that because the casting director of that show was like, you need to talk to Bill. because Bill is also thinking along the exact same lines. So who calls Andrew Lloyd Webber? We really, it was a group of us who figured out how to do the show in the context of Ballroom, and we began to reach out to people in Andrew's company, and each person we talked to said, we think it's fantastic, we love the idea, it's going to be up to Andrew. And that was like a good year-long process, and eventually Andrew said yes. Can you talk a little bit more about how perfectly the world of Ballroom overlaps with structurally how Cats works?

4:53Because Cats, if you've seen it, it's not a linear plot line. It's essentially like a narrator announcer saying, like, and look at this character. And that is very much how Ballroom works. And with the additional script work that they did, it maps almost perfectly into it. I've talked to so many people who say Cats has never worked this well, including Elaine Page, right? It's been very exciting. We've had lots of Cats alum, both people who have been on stage and off stage who really relate to the show. There's people who have historically hated the musical and really enjoy themselves. And people who feel a lot of fidelity towards the original musical and enjoy themselves at the show as well.

5:34So there's a lot of that happening. It's very fascinating. But yeah, I do think that there is this kind of beautiful marriage between ballroom culture and cats. Some of the themes of cats that have always been there, themes of family, themes of tribe, themes of competition and one-upmanship and who's going to get the grand prize by the end of the night. You know, if you go to a ball, it is all centered around a competition where an identity is made pageant. and I think that the mix between that and just working with the original T.S. Eliot poetry and really finding new ways to interpret these humans, not as cats, but as humans in the ballroom scene, there are all these ways that the show ended up dancing with ballroom that was really surprising.

6:26One of the most fun aspects of the whole project was matching each song about each character with different categories in ballroom. And that was from early on, so many of them just completely locked into place and made perfect sense. So it does feel like T.S. Eliot meant this all along. And Andrew Lloyd Webber, it was just waiting to be excavated in this way. How do you take a production like this that was so successful downtown and bring it to Broadway? Well, I think one of the things you have to do first is to make a commitment to not copy and pacing and experience. Is it a different... I mean, Chris, you've seen it both on Broadway.

7:07It's different, right? It's enhanced. I mean, when you take something to Broadway, you enhance it, and it really is amped up. Do you get new producers on it? But not different in them very much. There needs to be additional funding.

7:19Carol Massar:Or the costumes get amped up, because that's a big part of this. It's the amping up you're talking about. We have two lead producers who are extraordinary, and many, many co-producers. But the biggest thing we struggled with was how to make it work in a proscenium. Because at PAC NYC, it's a very immersive space. It's very, very flexible. There were cabaret tables. The runway was 50 feet long. So essentially on Broadway, we have twice as many audience members, but only half the space. And what was great about the exercise of figuring out how to tell the story on a Broadway stage is that it forced more focus and it allowed us to dig into the story in an even deeper way.

8:00And I would say that by the end of Off-Broadway, we were able to say, what really works about this? What is the thing that if we had to take it somewhere else, people would go, but I can't lose this. And to my surprise, I really would have assumed that it was the 50 foot long runway. And I think that's the expectation of the thing that you think you might miss. But the truth is what felt life or death for this production was making sure that the audience felt like they were in a different relationship with each other. And that feels even more amplified on Broadway because you're on Broadway and you can't believe you're hooping and hollering next to people on Broadway.

8:37Were you hooping and hollering? Well, speaking of life and death, it is not an easy time to take a musical to Broadway. I mean, was this anxiety provoking? Can you talk about how much it was capitalized for or how risky it felt to take it from your theater to this huge stage? I think the final numbers on the capitalization are not known even to us. But it was not cheap. It's not cheap to do a 23-actor-on-stage musical on Broadway in today's economy. but it was there was just such passionate belief in the project from the get go from our producers I will say, I mean you say this all the time us being able to accomplish the show in the proscenium means that the show gets to have a longer life means that we don't make something that's so expensive that we can't eventually take it on the road or take it to another country or so there's always the negotiation between like what is the budget, what is the scale, how do we accomplish this without an audience ever knowing?

9:39Carol Massar:All right. I'm just going to, I'm just going to. Do not call me out, Carol. Just call me out. You're not just Google. No. I Googled proscenium. Yeah. No, no, no, but I was doing the same thing. I was going to do it. And I'm like, so what exactly is that? A traditional Broadway theater where most of the audience is sitting in what we think of as the audience. And most of the action happens on a stage behind the proscenium arch, behind the picture of the proscenium arch. So our job was to break that proscenium as much as we could. We have 80 audience members on stage. We have the actors out in the audience all the time.

10:16And to really make it that everybody's in one room together.

10:18Carol Massar:Well, and not to go back to the original Cats, but let's go there. But that's how you could actually sit on the side of the stage. And I also remember when it opened. I saw it a couple times. Yeah, I did too. It was my first Broadway show. But the Cats coming down the aisle and stuff. So it's really wonderful when you can figure out how to do that. And that's embedded into ballroom as well, right? Even that element of Cats from the original in terms of actors everywhere, that's the exact same kind of energy you want to create at a ball. So even down to that detail, we're in conversation with what was already in the event of Cats from the very beginning.

10:54Jalen mentioned taking the show on the road. And I just want to say one of the things we are so proud of is if you are somebody from the ballroom world or if you think ballroom means waltzing and foxtrotting, like whatever your degree of knowledge, if you love cats, if you've never been exposed to cats, everybody of all ages loves this show. And we can say that. It is a joy bomb. And we are so proud to be sharing it. And so we wanted to have a good long life from Broadway and we want to take it out on the road and get as many people to see it as possible.

11:28Carol Massar:How many times have you seen it? I saw it twice downtown. So far. twice on town and then once on Broadway the first time I went I got a group ticket discount and brought 50 gay guys from Brooklyn wow try that on Broadway when Temptress is about to hit like the big you know the big moment and I just looked around the theater and the theater was full of people just waiting for her to go and so yeah I mean it was really magical so from the PAC the Pearlman Performing Arts Center is part of your goal to create shows that move on from there? Or how does this fit into that project for you? Our mission at PACNYC is to bring people together in that historic site at the World Trade Center.

12:12We want to bring people together from as many different communities as possible to be in community together in our theaters. And we believe in every project we do. So when one can have a longer life, it is an absolute gift. It's not the only measure of success at all, but it is one lovely measure of success. I have to go see it.

12:33Carol Massar:I have to go see it. What did Andrew say? What did Andrew Lerber say when you got him on the phone? Oh, he really was just tickled by the amount of joy. And like he often, anytime, at least I'm talking to him and he's talking about the show, that's the first thing he mentions is, you know, it's just so joyful, isn't it? Has he come to see it? Oh, many times. Oh, he has? Yes, yes. In fact, one of his great quotes is, I've never been in a theater with as much love as I've been in for Catch the Jellicle Ball. And it's been thrilling to watch him receive the lyrics and the poetry in a new way through this lens as well.

13:07Carol Massar:I feel like that's what arts and culture, like arts is about, right? Like you take something and just, it evolves, right? And, I don't know, a rebirth or an innovative way, I don't know. It's just pretty cool stuff. A revival. A revival. But it evolves. And these guys are nominated for a Tony for it. You are. Congratulations. Nine Tony That's a pretty big deal. So Chris, next time will you take Tim and me? Yeah. We'll get a group discount. Let's do it. On Broadway this time. Bill Rauch, Jalen Levingston, co-directors of Cats, The Jellicle Ball. Bill, also artistic director at the Pro-Mitt Performing Arts Center.

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