Overview
- Cats: The Jellicle Ball won Tony Awards for Best Choreography and Best Direction on Sunday, June 7, with Omari Wiles and Arturo Lyons taking choreography and Zhailon Levingston and Bill Rauch taking direction.
- The choreography prize marks the first Tony nomination and win for Wiles and Lyons, who brought vogueing and runway-style movement from the ballroom scene to their Broadway debut.
- Levingston and Rauch also registered their first Tony nominations and wins for directing a musical after staging the show Off-Broadway and opening it at the Broadhurst Theatre this season.
- Onstage acceptance remarks explicitly credited ballroom’s Black and Latinx trans women and gay men as the production’s roots, and the creative team framed the wins as celebration of that community.
- The revival blends ballroom practitioners with veteran Broadway performers, increasing mainstream visibility for ballroom culture and likely opening new creative and career pathways for artists from that scene.