Jellicle cats

Eh, eh, probably.

Can you see in the dark? Can you look at a king? Would you sit on his throne? Can you say of your bite that it's worse than your bark? Are you cock of the walk when you're walking alone? Because Jellicles are angelicals too.

Oh my God.

I was like-

Jellicles do angelicals wood

...

I was racking my brain of the six musicals I know, and I was like, "What could this possibly be?"

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.

I'm not impressed.

No, I just know all the words to Jellicle-

I'm not impressed-

...

So where we are now is where we were then in-- for all intents and purposes.

And something specific and recent that I keep thinking about, head-to-head race with the Tonys between Cats: The Jellicle Ball on one side and Ragtime on the other side.

On the one hand, you have the ecstasy of pure Black queer trans joy.

On the other, the glorification of judicial and social unaliving of two Black main characters with racial thr- racial slurs thrown in there that not only the company had to endure, but that the audience takes back out into the world with them.

That's really good.

I think it's really interesting to think about.

I had the most fortunate experience of working on both shows as sensitivity specialist, and so I worked on Cats: The Jellicle Ball, and then I also worked on Ragtime.

And what we were able to find in the cast of Ragtime was a process that allowed everyone from wherever they were coming from on the story and through the story to connect with one another about being storytellers.

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.

[laughs]

Jellicle Cat?

[laughs] Are you telling me that I, that I told you to get out?

You told me to get out.