When the closing of Cats: The Jellicle Ball was announced this week, I felt far sadder about it than I expected I would. The production will play its final Broadway performance at the Broadhurst Theatre on 8 August, despite having previously extended its run until January 2027. By the time it closes, this radically reconceived revival of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cats will have lasted fewer than five months on Broadway.

My thoughts returned almost immediately to the Tony Awards, where Ragtime won Best Revival of a Musical. I had been disappointed by that result at the time. Now, I can’t stop wondering whether Cats: The Jellicle Ball needed that Tony Award in a way that Ragtime didn’t. I’m fully aware that awards don’t determine the artistic value of any production and that there’s no way to know whether a different result would have given the production a longer life. But on Broadway, the Tony for Best Revival can be more than a ceremonial pat on the back. In addition to being a marker of cultural importance, it can be a marketing tool and a commercial lifeline. I think Cats needed that lifeline.

To be sure, the production did not leave the ceremony empty-handed. It received nine nominations and won three awards: Best Direction of a Musical for Zhailon Levingston and Bill Rauch, Best Choreography for Omari Wiles and Arturo Lyons and Best Costume Design of a Musical for Qween Jean. Those victories recognised some of the very elements that made the revival so remarkable. Levingston and Rauch did far more than place Cats in a fashionable new setting. They found a theatrical language that illuminated qualities already present in the musical.

At its heart, Cats is about a community of outsiders gathering to present themselves to one another. Each Jellicle asks to be recognised, celebrated and remembered. They name themselves, communicate their identities through the ritual of performance and wait to see who will be granted the possibility of rebirth. Audiences who engaged with the original production in good faith could find, beneath the leg warmers and feline eccentricities, a musical about belonging and the human need to be seen. Cats: The Jellicle Ball ran with this metaphor to glorious effect.

By relocating the musical to the ballroom scene, the production celebrated the resilience, imagination and artistry of the predominantly Black and Brown queer and trans communities that created a culture in which people excluded from conventional society could gather, compete, build families and affirm one another. Ballroom culture was not simply pasted onto Cats. Its integration into the production illuminated the emotional logic of the material. “The Jellicle Ball” became an actual ball, while the musical’s parade of self-invention became an act of cultural reclamation. That is why the production’s loss to Ragtime bothered me.

One cannot deny the emotional power of Ragtime. Lynn Ahrens, Stephen Flaherty and Terrence McNally created one of the grandest and most moving American musicals of the late twentieth century. Its score soars, giving its performers rich material to inhabit, and its intersecting narratives offer audiences an expansive portrait of a nation struggling with race, class and immigration. The current Broadway production also features tremendous performances, with Joshua Henry and Caissie Levy both winning Tony Awards for their work. That said, it is clear that the musical itself is doing the heaviest lifting in this revival. I remain unconvinced that the revival of Ragtime offers a theatrical argument as radical as the one made by Cats: The Jellicle Ball.

More significantly, perhaps, I am no longer convinced that Ragtime makes as revolutionary a social statement as musical theatre fans sometimes argue it does. Something about Ragtime has always bothered me, but I was never quite able to identify it. Its emotional impact makes critical distance difficult. But during the Tony Awards presentation, when I watched Little Coalhouse standing silently alongside the Little Boy as the show’s performance of the opening number began, something suddenly snapped into focus.

On the surface, Ragtime is a musical about different groups of people shaping America together. On closer examination, its narrative is built upon a particular arrangement of suffering and survival. Sarah and Coalhouse, for example, don’t live to inhabit the more generous future for which they have suffered. Their deaths transform the people around them. Coalhouse’s struggle awakens Younger Brother’s political conscience. Mother finds the strength to create another life. Tateh rises from poverty to become a successful filmmaker, giving some voice to the immigrant experience. And at the end of the musical, Mother and Tateh form a new family that includes Little Coalhouse. It’s moving, yes, but it’s also troubling because the cost of Ragtime’s vision of reconciliation is Black loss. Sarah and Coalhouse become the absent dead whose suffering allows other characters to discover their courage, independence and capacity for change. Their child may be carried into the future, but they are not permitted to enter it with him.

It would be inaccurate to say that Coalhouse and Sarah are merely peripheral characters. Coalhouse is central to the dramatic action of Ragtime, and his resistance gives the second act much of its urgency. The problem is subtler than that. Ragtime allows Black suffering to become the moral crucible through which its surviving characters – and its audiences – are enlightened.

In an interview with the Associated Press, Lynn Ahrens described the musical’s latest Broadway production by saying that ‘three is the charm’. Stephen Flaherty observed that, while the original 1998 audience generally encountered Ragtime as a period piece, people now respond to it ‘as a contemporary story’. There is a difficult contradiction within this observation.

Ragtime undoubtedly reflects contemporary America. Its depictions of racism, violence and hostility towards immigrants, alongside its rhetoric about national greatness, all remain painfully recognisable. But reflecting the present is not necessarily the same as challenging the conventions through which we understand it. Perhaps Ragtime feels contemporary because America and the world at large continue to repeat the injustices the show depicts, making its central narrative feel familiar: the suffering of people of colour reveals society’s moral failures, while others are granted the opportunity to learn from it.

During the Tony Awards, Broadway commentator Jonathan Lewis, known online as The Sweaty Oracle, made a blunt observation about the Best Revival result. He argued that the voters were ‘more comfortable watching Black people suffer on stage than they are watching Black joy on stage’. His statement is necessarily reductive. Neither production can be reduced to a single emotional register: Ragtime contains love, resistance, dignity and moments of joy. Cats: The Jellicle Ball, for all its exuberance, emerged from a culture shaped by rejection, discrimination and survival. But in making his point this way, Lewis identifies something deeply uncomfortable about the kinds of representation that earn prestige from cultural institutions.

Visible suffering is readily accepted as serious. When mediated through art, it is often granted cultural significance. Black pain, for example, can be mourned, admired and rewarded when it confirms an established liberal narrative about prejudice and the possibility of eventual progress. Black joy, especially the kind of unapologetic Black queer and trans joy seen in Cats: The Jellicle Ball, is more often than not treated very differently. It is praised for being vibrant, dazzling, fabulous or fun, and somehow regarded as less substantial. Its political power is easier to overlook because it does not necessarily ask for validation through trauma.

The closing of Cats: The Jellicle Ball is, of course, also part of a much larger crisis facing commercial theatre. Following the announcement of its closure, Lloyd Webber issued an impassioned statement about Broadway’s financial model. He argued that the cost of mounting and running large-scale work has made creating original or experimental theatre increasingly prohibitive. There is a huge amount of truth in what Lloyd Webber has to say. When a critically acclaimed production can win three Tony Awards, attract considerable attention and still fail to survive, something in the business model is plainly broken. Even so, economics can explain how a production closes without entirely explaining which productions audiences and institutions decide are essential enough to sustain.

Theatre cannot exist outside commerce, particularly at Broadway’s scale. People must be paid. Buildings must be maintained. Investors cannot be expected to lose money indefinitely. But theatre cannot be only a commercial endeavour either. Nor should it exist merely to offer an escape from reality or to affirm ideas with which its audiences are already comfortable. It has to mean something more.

I have been thinking a great deal about the relationship between the arts and society, particularly about the function of art in times of crisis – and our world most certainly finds itself in such a time today. There is nothing inherently shameful about entertainment or escape. Sometimes we need laughter, beauty, music and spectacle precisely because the world has become unbearable. At the same time, escape can become another way of looking away. It can soothe us without challenging us, acknowledge devastation without demanding change or transform suffering into a familiar form of prestige entertainment.

At the heart of theatre lies the ability both to entertain and to enlighten. The two should not be opposites. Joy can reveal as much as grief. Celebration can be politically disruptive. In a culture that repeatedly asks marginalised people to justify their visibility by displaying their wounds, joy may itself be an act of resistance.

This brings me back to Cats: The Jellicle Ball, which is where this reflection began. This production should have been an enduring Broadway triumph. While its premature closing reflects the financial crisis Lloyd Webber describes, it also raises a more disturbing question about what Broadway chooses to recognise and what it is prepared to carry forward. I can’t prove that the Tony Award for Best Revival would have saved the production, but I can’t shake the belief that it would have benefited from an institutional declaration that it mattered.

The Jellicle Ball will close on Broadway. Ballroom culture, however, has survived deliberate attempts at erasure. Punishing economics and a lack of institutional approval will not erase it now. Its communities survived because people continued to gather when the world denied them space and insisted on joy when the world expected only suffering.

Broadway may not have given Cats: The Jellicle Ball the run it deserved, but that doesn’t mean the rest of us should stop carrying forward its joy.