page_title: Cats (musical)
section_title: Broadway
hierarchical_section_title: Cats (musical) / Productions / Broadway
caption_attribution_description: English: Cats at Neil Simon Theatre in Broadway
context_page_description: Cats is a sung-through musical composed by Andrew Lloyd Webber, based on the 1939 poetry collection Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats by T. S. Eliot. It tells the story of a tribe of cats called the Jellicles and the night they make the "Jellicle choice," deciding which cat will ascend to the Heaviside Layer and come back to a new life. The musical includes the well-known song "Memory" as sung by Grizabella. As of 2019, Cats remains the fourth-longest-running Broadway show and the sixth-longest-running West End show.
  Lloyd Webber began setting Eliot's poems to music in 1977 and the compositions were first presented as a song cycle in 1980. Producer Cameron Mackintosh then recruited director Trevor Nunn and choreographer Gillian Lynne to turn the songs into a complete musical. Cats opened to positive reviews at the New London Theatre in the West End in 1981 and then to mixed reviews at the Winter Garden Theatre on Broadway in 1982. It won numerous awards including Best Musical at both the Laurence Olivier and Tony Awards.
context_section_description: Cats debuted on Broadway on 7 October 1982 at the Winter Garden Theatre with a record-breaking $6.2 million in ticket pre-sales. Most of the original creative team remained, with Martin Levan replacing Jacob as the sound designer and Stanley Lebowsky replacing Rabinowitz as music director. The musical was co-produced by the original London production team, along with David Geffen and The Shubert Organization. It was the most expensive Broadway show ever mounted at the time with a production cost of $5.5 million, though it recouped its investment in less than 10 months. On 19 June 1997, Cats overtook A Chorus Line to become the longest-running show in Broadway history with 6,138 performances. At the time, the musical was found to have had an economic impact of $3.12 billion on New York City and had generated the most theatrical jobs of any single entity in Broadway history. A June closing date was announced in early 2000 but was subsequently pushed back after a resulting surge in ticket sales. The show closed on 10 September 2000 after a total of 15 previews and 7,485 performances. One actress, Marlene Danielle, performed in the Broadway production for its entire 18-year run. Its Broadway-run record was surpassed on 9 January 2006 by The Phantom of the Opera, and Cats remains Broadway's fourth-longest-running show of all time. Overall, the original Broadway production grossed approximately $388 million in ticket sales.
  Encouraged by the reception to the first West End revival, producers began looking to bring Cats back to Broadway in early 2015. The Broadway revival opened on 31 July 2016 at the Neil Simon Theatre. It featured new choreography by Andy Blankenbuehler, with Nunn and Napier from the original creative team returning to direct and design respectively. Scherzinger, who played Grizabella in the 2014 West End revival, had originally agreed to reprise the role on Broadway but later withdrew. Leona Lewis was cast as Grizabella instead, and was succeeded by Mamie Parris four months later in October 2016. The Broadway revival closed on 30 December 2017 after 16 previews and 593 performances.
caption: Broadway revival of Cats at the Neil Simon Theatre
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