Studies in Musical Theatre - Volume 19, Issue 3, 2025

In June 2024, Cats: The Jellicle Ball premiered at the Perelman Performing Arts Center (PAC NYC) in downtown New York to wildly positive critical and audience reception. Billed as a ‘radical reimagining’, the production re-presented Andrew Lloyd Webber’s 1981 musical Cats within the immersive world of a queer Ball. As theatre and dance scholars embedded in rehearsals, we witnessed how the intergenerational creative team and performers reanimated Cats through a queer lens. With iconic elders from the worlds of theatre (André De Shields) and Ballroom (Junior LaBeija, ‘Tempress’ Chasity Moore), The Jellicle Ball activated the ethics of a queer communal web through a divine restorative practice that queered the Christian rites of passage that structure Cats. In this article, we discuss the crafting of a Ballroom community ethos within the constraints of capitalism. We trace efforts to queer time, space and direction in rehearsals and performance. We consider the relationship of rights to rites, asking how this community of mostly queer/trans, Black and Brown cats came together through the musical’s passages. We assess how choreography works within the rhythmic structures of the original score while making room for responsive performances ‘on the beat’. We sketch how the communal journey of the performance-making process maps onto the trajectories of Ballroom – the movement into chosen family and ‘legacy’ as well as the walk down the runway. We ask: How does this joyful manifestation of queer caretaking and intergenerational community play out? What does it mean to ‘adapt’ an AIDS-era megamusical into a contemporary moment – where the Otherness of ‘cats’ gets reimagined into Ballroom cat-egories? What does it mean to throw this particular Ball – to create the occasion for folks to gather around memory, ritual, legacy and community? What do we pass on?

What might it mean to think of Cats as a musical belonging to HIV/AIDS histories? Though the musical’s performance life begins just before widespread attention to HIV/AIDS, the musical ran on Broadway from 1982 to 2000, an eighteen-year stretch that encompasses the early days of HIV/AIDS awareness marked by myriad suffering and loss, US political aversions to addressing the crisis, art propelling activist campaigns and the eventual mitigation of the illness due to novel therapies. Throughout it all, Cats was performed on Broadway. Historicizing Cats through the HIV/AIDS crisis emphasizes how musical theatre can be understood as a genre perennially oriented towards cycles of loss and rebirth.

This article examines the intersection of musical theatre, toxic masculinity and adolescent mental health through a case study of Dear Evan Hansen. While the musical has been widely celebrated for its frank depiction of anxiety and social isolation in youth, it has also been criticized for romanticizing mental illness and recentralizing straight, white, cisgender masculinity. I argue that the production provides a valuable lens for understanding how social media exacerbates adolescent boys’ feelings of invisibility and inadequacy, contributing to the development of toxic masculine behaviours. Drawing on scholarship in psychology, media studies and theatre, I position Evan Hansen not only as a figure of teenage anxiety but also as a model of how digital culture intensifies pressures surrounding gender performance. The staging and score emphasize Evan’s longing to be seen, framing his self-loathing as a direct response to mediated ideals of masculinity. His trajectory from anxious outsider to viral pseudo-celebrity illustrates the dual risks of social media dependence: self-directed violence through anxiety, depression and suicidal ideation, and outwardly harmful behaviours including deceit and manipulation. By situating Dear Evan Hansen within broader conversations about social media’s role in shaping adolescent mental health, I demonstrate how the musical dramatizes both the dangers and the allure of toxic masculinity for young men who struggle to meet hegemonic standards. Ultimately, while Evan’s actions are troubling, his narrative suggests a possibility for detoxifying masculinity by exposing the costs of conformity and offering a vision of self-acceptance. In highlighting how musical theatre reflects contemporary experiences of boyhood, this article argues that Dear Evan Hansen provides a crucial site for interrogating the cultural interplay of gender, media and mental health in the digital age.

Review of: Death Becomes Her, directed by Christopher Gatelli (2025)

Lunt-Fontanne Theatre, New York, 3 January 2025

Review of: Gender, Sex, and Sexuality in Musical Theatre: He/She/They Could Have Danced All Night, Kelly Kessler (ed.) (2024)

Bristol: Intellect, 323 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-78938-954-8, p/bk, USD 34.95

Review of: Carousel, Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, John Wilson and Sinfonia of London, Chandos Records, CHSA 5342(2) (2024)

Oklahoma!, Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, John Wilson and Sinfonia of London, Chandos Records, CHSA 5322(2) (2023)

Review of: Leonard Bernstein in Context, Elizabeth A. Wells (ed.) (2024)

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 363 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-10883-570-1, h/bk, USD 120.00

Review of: Tammy Faye, directed by Rupert Goold (2024)

Palace Theatre, New York, 1 December 2024