Jellicle Ball

Based on T.S. Eliot's Old Opossums book of practical cats, published in 1939 and featuring poems about the furry felines, Cats the Musical brings a larger-than-life junkyard to the stage.

That's where you'll find the Jellicle cats singing, dancing and sharing their stories at the legendary Jellicle Ball.

At the end of it, find out which one cat is chosen to ascend to the heavyside lair, that's a sort of a feline heaven, to begin a new life.

Along the way, you'll meet all manner of moggies like Macavity, Mr Mistoffelees, Grizabella, Bustopher Jones, Rum Tum Tugger and more.

I think you can attest to that.

You've seen it.

And, you know, the ball is amazing, the jellicle ball where all the cats are really, you know, showing off everything they've got dance-wise.

And so it doesn't want, for lack of high-energy, amazing spectacle – we're talking about the Rum Tum Tugger song is amazing – And again, Dylan's song, The Magical Mist of Mistoffelees, our Mistoffelees is something else.

Yeah.

W- well, I wanna hear the moment when you like... 'Cause you danced the Jellicle Ball.

Yeah.

What was that first kind of like rehearsals where you're like, "I've gotta, I don't know what a pirouette is, and now I've gotta dance this 14-minute, 13-minute intensive dance number," where you're doing all kinds of stuff.

And then the beauty of, of, uh, how they put up the show is that they s- they look at you, they see your talents, and they, and they feature it.

Um, and John Partridge obviously had a, has a, is a fantastic dancer, so they put him in the ball in the first row, and sometimes he would lead, you know, the, the sections and, um, and they didn't do that with me.

They just had me do like the bare minimum in, in the Jellicle Ball and, um, and, and made me look good.

Like, when I see recordings of it, it, it looks good.

And I must have seen her either as Rumpelteaser or as Demeter when I saw her in 92, because she was Demeter and a cover for Rumpelteaser at the time.

And she taught us the Jellicle Ball.

So there I was dancing the Jellicle Ball.

And that's when the possibility of like, hey, I can do this.

Like doing it, learning it, accepting it, that I could possibly do this.

And that choreography of the Jellicle Ball that she taught me never left me.

And a little bit later, we worked with a choreographer called Brigitte Derricks.

And she had also been, I think she's the original tantamount for the Dutch production, but I have either seen her as a Demeter or as Bombalerina in that production, because that's what she did.