Full Volume

It was loud while it lasted.

Picture it: one of the best-reviewed musicals of the season. Nine Tony nominations, three wins—including the first Tony ever given to an openly trans woman, Qween Jean. Booked through January. And then, gone in four months.

The Jellicle Ball will close August 8th. With it, a massive community of self-proclaimed kittens will lose a space, and a piece, that made them feel like they were finally home.

André De Shields said the show has sewn "the seeds of a cultural revolution." And as someone who saw it on a rush ticket I can tell you plainly: you could feel it in the Broadhurst.

From inside, the disco ball burned bright. But in the context of our increasingly desaturated, matte-finished business, there was no sustainable path forward for our beloved fur-friends.

That's what I want to sit with this week—what that theater had, why the math closed it anyway, and most importantly: what a closing like this can't take away.

Let's walk.

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Turned Down

A closing notice starts an autopsy.

How much did it cost. What did it gross. How far ahead were tickets selling, and how long could the producers keep carrying it. The questions are fair, and they're serious, because there are real people inside every answer. A single notice changes the shape of a calendar for actors, musicians, dressers, stage managers, the front-of-house crew, the press reps—everyone whose August opened up.

Commercial theater has to ask whether a show can pay for itself. The nightly math is real. So are the structures underneath it: ticket prices, what it cost to capitalize, what the theater takes off the top, how much a producer can spend to be seen, and how little time a show gets to find the people who'd love it before the money runs out. This summer, it ran fast. Audiences thinned across the board, and a show that had been extended into January was suddenly counting weeks.

None of that makes the producers villains. They're running a business built on rent and risk, and that math has hard edges.

The ledger can tell you whether a show can carry itself. It can't tell you what that show did to the people in the seats.

For that, you had to be there.

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Turned Up

For most of my life, I couldn't have told you why a show about cats made any sense.

By the end of the Jellicle Ball, I got it.

The ballroom unlocked it. Strip Cats down and it was always a competition to be chosen—a company of outcasts, each one walking to be seen, one of them lifted up and sent off to be reborn. Hand that to ballroom, a culture Black and Brown queer people built over fifty years out of exactly that raw material—being told you're too much, and walking anyway—and it all snaps into focus.

Zhailon Levingston and Bill Rauch directing, Omari Wiles and Arturo Lyons on the choreography, Qween Jean's costumes: artists who know that world from the inside imbued the show with new, long-awaited meaning.

When the kitties took the runway, it stopped being something I was watching and turned into something I was part of.

Clacking fans. Hooting and hollering. Strangers calling out like they'd been waiting their whole lives to. A freeness in the air I haven't felt in a Broadway house maybe ever. I was completely bought in and wholly let in.

The Broadhurst was undeniably overflowing with joy. But filling a theater with feeling is one thing. Filling it with enough ticket buyers to run eight shows a week, every week, is another. The Jellicle Ball had the first in spades. It ran out of the second.

The work never changed. The same production that felt like a revelation from my seat read, on a spreadsheet, as a risk that couldn't cover its costs. Put Cats in the ballroom and it becomes the truest version of itself. Put that version inside a commercial Broadway economy, and it goes from nine lives to none.

Same show. Different math.

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Full Volume

So: who turns out when things get turned up?

That question decides far more than one show's fate. It shapes who a producer believes will actually buy a ticket. Which neighborhoods a marketing budget bothers to reach. How long a new kind of show gets to find its people. What stories get a stage big enough to grow up and glow-up on.

Because a best-reviewed, Tony-winning show still read as a bigger gamble than something safer and more familiar. That common calculation reciprocally reinforces the narrow idea of who a Broadway audience is.

And yet despite it’s early departure, The Jellicle Ball will forever be a part of show business history.

Before the ball drops, the New York Public Library is filming The Jellicle Ball for its archive. Generations of artists will be able to study what happened here. This revolution will, in some ways, be televised.

You can close a show. But you can't close what it proved. You can measure a show’s financial success. But you can’t truly measure a show’s cultural or emotional impact.

No matter what, thanks to Cats, our industry will never be the same.

For four months, they turned Black and Brown joy all the way up at the Broadhurst. And a whole lot of us finally heard it.

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This week in One Last Thing: the first time in a long while that hope felt like it met me halfway—and the warm Pacific that had a little to do with it.

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