Junior LaBeija was always going to be a Jellicle

He called the categories at the most famous balls ever filmed. Now he's on Broadway playing Gus, the theatre cat who looks back on every part he ever had. Junior LaBeija isn't acting. He's remembering out loud.

There's a moment in Cats: The Jellicle Ball where the youngest cats crowd around the oldest one and ask him to tell them about his life onstage.

The old cat is Gus. The Theatre Cat. A character T.S. Eliot wrote almost a century ago about an aging performer with a long memory and not much left to prove.

On Broadway, Gus is played by Junior LaBeija. And you cannot cast that part better than that. It isn't possible.

If you don't recognize the name, you've seen the rooms he ran. Junior LaBeija has been a member of the House of LaBeija for more than fifty years. He's the emcee whose voice runs straight through Paris Is Burning — the man on the mic calling the categories, naming the children, setting the floor on fire with a sentence. Before ballroom was a Netflix season or a dance break in a pop video, he was already the institution.

So here's what's actually happening at the Broadhurst Theatre. A real ballroom elder is standing center stage playing a fictional elder, surrounded by young performers asking him to remember. The kittens lean in. He talks about the roles he's played. And the room understands that the line between the character and the man has quietly disappeared.

That's not a coincidence. That's the entire design.

Cats: The Jellicle Ball takes Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical and reimagines it inside the world that ballroom built — vogue, face, realness, runway, the whole vocabulary of a culture started by Black and Latino queer and trans people who were shut out of everywhere else. It premiered off-Broadway at the Perelman Performing Arts Center in 2024. It picked up Bessie Awards. It moved to Broadway and opened this spring. It won three Tony Awards: Best Direction, Best Choreography, and Best Costume Design for Qween Jean. The choreography comes from ballroom icons Omari Wiles and Arturo Lyons, because of course it does. Nobody borrowed this language. The people who speak it natively are the ones on the stage.

Which is why Junior in that role matters more than a fun bit of casting. The show is making an argument, and Gus is where it lands. The argument is: we see you, we are not done hearing from you, sit down and keep talking. Ballroom has buried too many elders too young. To put one of its founding voices in front of a Broadway house, on a Tony-winning stage, and let him be celebrated while he's here. That's the thesis. The whole production is a refusal to wait for the obituary to say the nice things.

We got to be a small part of that.

Earlier this month, Junior wore our DISCO KITTY jersey for the CATS x GPA campaign — fan open,come one, come all, the Jellicle banners going gold behind him. Watching a legend put on something we made was one of those moments you don't fully process until later. We've made a lot of shirts. Very few of them have been worn by the man who taught a generation what reading the room actually means.

So if you've got tickets to the Broadhurst, here's what to do. When the kittens gather around Gus and the lights go soft, don't just watch the character. Watch the man underneath him. Fifty years of category, of house, of showing up when the world wasn't watching, finally getting the room to go quiet and listen.

Come one. Come all.

He earned every seat.

Cats: The Jellicle Ball is playing at the Broadhurst Theatre. The CATS x GPA collection is at gayprideapparel.com.