took home three Tony awards (for direction, choreography and costume design).

Not that I really blame producers. The show was doing meh business at the box office – and in the commercial theater world, that’s how true success is measured. If you can’t pay the light bills, let alone reward your investors, you can’t keep a production running.

But “Jellicle” felt special for so many reasons. In transforming Andrew Lloyd Webber’s feline-themed spectacle into a joyous statement of queer and BIPOC pride, the show did something miraculous: It made us rethink “Cats” in a radical way. A musical that many wrote off as Broadway bombast – remember how it was ridiculed in “Angels in America”? -- suddenly became a celebration of outsider culture. It seemed entirely improbable but somehow entirely logical, as if Lloyd Webber always meant for us to see “Cats” this way.

Why did it not then succeed? Some might suggest there’s an inherent anti-queer bias in the world – and it’s hard to argue against that. Others might point to the fact Broadway overall is slumping big time of late – and this show was just its latest victim.

But I’m not going to obsess over the “why,” at least not when there’s time for audiences to flock to it and perhaps prompt producers to reconsider their decision. It’s happened before on Broadway. Let’s make it happen again. — Charles Passy

(Photo by Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman for MurphyMade)