The Tony-winning choreographers of 'Cats: The Jellicle Ball' want to keep pushing the possibilities of theatre — and themselves

Omari Wiles and Arturo Lyons, who hail from NYC's ballroom scene, infuse the musical Cats with that world's moves in a revival unlike any other.

“We don't want people to just think of us as vogue choreographers,” choreographer Omari Wiles said after he and co-choreographer Arturo Lyons scooped the Tony Award for Best Choreography for Cats: The Jellicle Ball.

Werk! These days, many revivals strip down their designs or create replicas of older productions. Cats: The Jellicle Ball isn’t content to be a run-of-the-mill revival. It takes a radical approach: reimagining Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical Cats in LGBTQ+ ballroom culture. It paid off: Jellicle Ball’s other Tony Awards wins include Best Direction and Best Costume Design of a Musical.

Lyons and Wiles both hail from ballroom houses: Lyons from the House of Miyake-Mugler, and Wiles the co-founder of The House of NiNa Oricci. They're real winners at tag-team performance, to name a ballroom category. “We do West African street jazz, hip hop, contemporary. We're full of many tricks,” Wiles said.

“We’re breaking down walls, and we're letting in all kinds of people, all different shapes, all different sizes, races, genres, genders,” Lyons added. Indeed, it is historical that Cats: The Jellicle Ball also got its purr-fect paws on Best Costume Design for Qween Jean, the first openly transgender person to win that award and one of only a handful of trans Tony winners, including three non-binary actors. Her acceptance speech paid tribute to costume designers as the “architects of imagination,” echoing a similar spirit of pushing boundaries.

Being that Cats: The Jellicle Ball is about love — between the original musical and this reimagining, between queer elders and youths — the two choreographers shouted out the generations that came before: Webber, their houses, and, for Wiles, his mother, a West African dancer. “She goes back to Senegal every year to learn from her elders and learn from her nieces and nephews,” Wiles said.

“No matter what, as artists and as creators, we always have to constantly keep sculpting what we do,” Wiles said. They also said they'd love to shepherd a revival of Fame someday — and we'd love to see how they sculpt that into a reimagined experience.

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Photo credit: Cats: The Jellicle Ball on Broadway. (Photo by Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman for MurphyMade)