The Jellicle Ball’ a fresh and fancy feast

Oh, well I never, has there ever been an old musical theater title given such a fresh and fancy feast as “Cats: The Jellicle Ball”?

The queens of the drag extravaganza, the cat’s meow downtown at the Perelman Performing Arts Center in the summer of 2024, have moved both Qween Jean’s fabulous collective couture and their quest for immortality up to the main stem with Andrew Lloyd Webber’s belated but righteous blessing.

They’re unleashing quite the Broadway bacchanal in a space that provides a warmer and, surprisingly, far more intimate setting for their Jellicle Ball, now amped up, tuned up and ready to give queer ballroom fans their summer in the sun. At the same time, this wildly entertaining show is skillfully and inclusively calibrated so as to offer Mr. and Ms. America a just-edgy-enough experience while sweetly comforting them with every last note of those catchy Lloyd-Webber tunes from, gulp, 45 years ago.

Forefather Andre De Shields, who looks like he spent the last 72 hours getting his Gandalf wig fitted and sparkly jewelry attached, will take you by the hand. Cheer for Macavity the Mystery Cat and vanquish your own heavy-side layer! If Grizabella the Glamour Cat can live forever, why can’t you? In this brave new world, even Old Deuteronomy has stayed fabulous.

Zhailon Levingston and Bill Rauch, the cool directing cats here, have avoided the usual traps of contemporary Broadway musical revisionism: you know, coaxing in the oblivious punters with an optimistic title like “Oklahoma” only then to douse Laurey and Curly with nihilistic blood. So many of these productions have secretly hated the musical they were actually producing and even, it has seemed, their baked-in audiences.

Not here. This is a highly original concept, albeit with every note of the score intact. But, crucially, one discerns from the very first purr that “Cats: The Jellicle Ball” actually loves “Cats,” even to the point of reverence. More importantly, it loves and respects the “Cats” audience every bit as much.

That audience deserves the respect. Lloyd Webber baked complexity — yes, dear reader, “Cats” has complexity — into the original 1981 production. I remember the tantalizing one-line ads for “Cats” in the ABCs of the London papers: “No entry while the auditorium is in motion.” That told you musical theater was on the move.

We old-school “Cats” fans, defensive for decades, admire its chutzpah of building a musical out of a bunch of weird T.S. Eliot poems from the 1930s and persuading audiences to abandon all prior expectations about plots and West End musicals. Right from the start, this show was themed around a competition — each cat shows off to make their case for which cat gets to live forever —and that was long before “American Idol” judge Simon Cowell or “Drag Race” host RuPaul.

The winning idea here is not the idea of using voguing and ballroom culture as the organizing principle, although that is big fun for an audience thanks much to choreographers Omari Wiles and Arturo Lyons and rendered here with such splendiferous visuals from designer Rachel Hauck that FOMO is a real concern, depending on which way your head is turned at a given moment. The revival’s ace in the hole is way simpler than that.

It’s that “Cats” can work perfectly well without people playing cats. You can forget that creepy AI-like movie trapping Taylor Swift in one of the seven circles of hell or the years of raggedy tours of BFA graduates with whiskers and tails stalking the aisles and getting all up in your face. Not now needed, says this production.

It’s just a metaphor, silly kitty.

Aside from the show’s great spirit of inclusivity — I actually felt at some point some renewed hope for a more unified America — the production always makes classy choices, even when tempted otherwise. This is typified by one moment when Sydney James Harcourt’s eroticized Rum Tum Tugger, eye candy for the matinee crowd, almost does a little strip but leaves it at a tease. That’s exactly right.

Add to that a bevy of committed and very joyous performances from the likes of Primo Thee Ballerina, Baby Byrne, Sherrod T. Brown, Emma Sofia and Leiomy, among several delightful others, and, well, you have a show.

My one caveat here is that “Cats: The Jellicle Ball” still hasn’t solved its “Memory” problem. Notwithstanding a Grizabella cast change from downtown with Tempress Chasity Moore now taking over the role, that big number still doesn’t land in the jaw-dropping way it originally did. With all respect to Moore, I’ve come to think that’s just the original “Cats” sending a message from 1981 that some memories belong with whiskers. And in their own time.

But the rest of the revisionist ball? A total blast from start to finish.