A DJ enters an empty stage with a box of records. Each album evokes a story we think we know. We see him consider a few classics (Diana Ross, Beyonce), before he settles on the iconic Andrew Lloyd Webber musical Cats.
This is the opening of the new Broadway production, Cats: The Jellicle Ball (a reimagining of Webber’s long-running production). And to me, as a therapist, it resembles the moment a new client enters my office. No matter what I think I already know about them, I always ask: “Where shall we begin?”
As our DJ chooses his record, a magic sparkle enters our collective space. With the fresh setting of a ballroom event—a community gathering celebrating fashion, style, and the possibilities of the self— we all begin to tune into songs we think we know (too well) as if for the first time.
Curious Cats
Cats has a complicated legacy. For many, it’s beloved. But for many others, it’s a bit confusing. To be sure, many people I know remember the original production with affection, in some cases deep reverence. For some, it was a vital portal to a world of imagination. Even so, for decades, Cats has occupied a strange cultural space. The music is undeniably beautiful—each of Webber’s melodies is an indelible earworm. Yet the original production left many audiences–including myself–asking: Wait, whaaaaat?
(When my husband and I asked my uncle to join us for this new production, he hesitated as he recalled an awkward and confounding encounter while watching the original back in the 1980s—during which an adult suited up in feline lycra, gave themselves a “bath” in the aisle next to him.)
For many audiences, the story never quite made sense. And at times it tipped into camp if not full-on cringe—especially the now-infamous movie version. And yet, somehow, like the second chance we all get to be recognized as our “true selves” in therapy, Cats: The Jellicle Ball is an invigorating witnessing of what was always there. (Take it from Betty Buckley, who sang the unforgettable song Memory in the original Broadway show.
The Healing Power of Recognition
There are numerous debates about what heals in psychotherapy. And although techniques, insight, and behavioral modifications all matter, what most clinicians (and scientific studies) all agree on is that what leads to transformative healing and growth in therapy is simply being witnessed by another person.
Decades of meta-analyses show that therapist empathy and recognition—our capacity to accurately receive and respond to a client’s inner world/ their full experience of being themselves—is strongly associated with positive outcomes (Elliott and colleagues). Recent studies suggest that when a person’s emotional experience is accessed, expressed, and witnessed by another person, healing and growth in their mental health accelerate (Ong and colleagues, 2024).
It’s not just that we feel alive, which is how seminal psychoanalyst Winnicott described the desired outcome for a client in therapy (Winnicott, 1971). But more significantly, it is the experience of feeling alive in another’s presence that helps us to heal and grow. And specifically of note: LGBTQ+ youth—who otherwise tend to experience higher rates of suicide than the general pollution—have significantly lower suicide risk when they are seen and affirmed by others. (Price, 2021), (Trevor Project, 2023)
Ballroom Culture as a Healing Intervention
Ballroom culture has understood the healing power of witnessing for many years.
Long before ballroom was visible to mainstream audiences on the Ryan Murphy series Pose or more ubiquitously on RuPaul’s Drag Race, and long before others encountered it in the documentary Paris Is Burning, ballroom was—and remains—a reliable space for witnessing. A place where people who have been overlooked, stigmatized, mischaracterized, or rendered invisible can be recognized in all their beauty, potential, and aspirations–on their own terms.
Not corrected, or assimilated, or made palatable by the cultural norm. But recognized beyond their everyday identities out in the mainstream world. Categories are called, names are spoken, bodies move to the music, and stories are told. And like in therapy, participants are witnessed as their fullest, freest, authentic selves.
Ballroom doesn’t ask, “Do we fit?” It asks, “Can we see one another more clearly?”
Cats Recognized
And so suddenly—inside the structure of a “ball”—the latest incarnation of Cats makes glorious sense.
Not intellectual sense (I totally get that). Not normative sense (I’ve seen that before). But relational sense–the kind that is found in therapy (Ah, there you are).
The Jellicle Ball reveals what Cats was perhaps always trying to be: A ritual of recognition, beyond the surface. An event in which identities are not just displayed, but witnessed into legitimacy.
What once felt random now feels grounded, embodied, and specific. What once felt like spectacle now feels like a lived truth. Even my uncle—who entered with his own memory of the original—found himself moved in new and deep ways. Particularly as a gay man who saw the first production in the 1980s.
It can’t be overstated what it was like to be a gay person in the ’80s. As the AIDS crisis devastated communities–mostly gay men–the Ronald Reagan administration’s delayed response left many feeling abandoned by the very systems meant to protect them. In addition, the 1986 Supreme Court ruling in Bowers v. Hardwick upheld the criminalization of same-sex intimacy. The cultural message, both implicit and explicit, was that queer lives were disposable, and queer love unlawful. In that context, spaces of recognition–like ballroom events–weren’t just meaningful, they were life-saving. Particularly for a range of queer people of color who did and still do experience a disproportionate amount of stigma.
For my uncle to witness beautiful, familiar songs telling new, highly specific stories about a range of queer people surviving and thriving; to witness that event next to his nephew, along with his nephew’s husband and son; to witness it with Junior LaBeija in the cast (as Gus: the Theatre Cat)—a real figure from ballroom history, along with a variety of queer performers getting to perform a “ball,” eight shows a week in a Broadway theater, and getting paid to do it, along with receiving health insurance; to witness a highly moving in memoriam dedicated to queer people from the ballroom scene who have lost their lives; and to share in that witnessing with a wide variety of mainstream theatergoers is nothing short of a healing transformation.
Cats had no problems that needed to be fixed; however, this telling allows a potential that had been implicit to finally become explicit.
Like an effective therapy experience: the show springs to life with vibrant clarity. The Jellicle Ball shines a light on unsung stories that had been hidden in the shadows and can now be found.