The Category is Broadway

Right now, in the spring of 2026, you can walk into a Broadway theater and watch a cast of Black and Latino ballroom performers vogue Andrew Lloyd Webber to his bones. You can see a non-binary comedian rewrite American history as camp. You can watch the first drag artist ever to headline a principal role in Moulin Rouge! take a standing ovation, purse first. You can watch Rocky Horror tear the roof off Studio 54 with a cast that includes Michaela Jaé Rodriguez, Stephanie Hsu, and Harvey Guillén.

This is not a hypothetical. All of this is happening right now, at the same time, on the same stretch of Midtown Manhattan. And it is not an accident.

“This is not a hypothetical. All of this is happening right now, at the same time, on the same stretch of Midtown Manhattan.”

Cats: The Jellicle Ball, which just began Broadway previews at the Broadhurst Theatre this month, is the most radical thing to hit the Main Stem in years. The production takes Andrew Lloyd Webber's classic and drops it whole into the world of New York City's underground ballroom scene — the LGBTQ+ subculture rooted in Black and Latino queer communities that gave the world voguing, house culture, and a model of chosen family that the rest of the community has been borrowing from ever since. The Jellicle cats are now competitors in a ball. They walk runways. They vogue for their lives. Choreographers Omari Wiles (House of Ricci) and Arturo Lyons (House of Miyake-Mugler) are NYC ballroom legends, and it shows. The New York Times called it “a lightning strike that sets joy free.” The Washington Post called it “the most exhilarating fun that can be had in the theater.” What it actually is, is an act of reclamation: a mainstream institution being handed back to the community that built so much of the culture it profits from.

“Cats: The Jellicle Ball is an act of reclamation — a mainstream institution being handed back to the community that built so much of the culture it profits from.”

Bob the Drag Queen just wrapped his Broadway debut — the first drag artist ever cast in the principal role of Moulin Rouge! The Musical. He played Harold Zidler, the larger-than-life emcee of a Parisian nightclub, for eight weeks at the Al Hirschfeld Theatre. He moved to New York at 22 to be a Broadway actor and spent years collecting rejections. He found drag instead, won RuPaul's Drag Race, toured the world with Madonna, co-hosted HBO's We're Here, wrote a New York Times bestselling book, and came back to Broadway on his own terms. His debut performance got a standing ovation. During the show's closing megamix, he performed a snippet of his own song, “Purse First.” His final curtain call, on March 22nd, he got emotional telling his castmates they had made his dreams come true. It’s the kind of story Broadway likes to tell about itself. The difference here is that it’s true, and queer, and 18 years in the making.

“He moved to New York at 22 to be a Broadway actor. He came back on his own terms, 18 years later. The standing ovation was immediate.”

Cole Escola — non-binary, formidably talented, genuinely unlike anyone working in theater right now — spent last season as the brightest new star on Broadway with Oh, Mary!, their irreverent dark comedy about Mary Todd Lincoln that somehow became the queerest, funniest thing on the Great White Way. Five Tony nominations. A sold-out run. Critics running out of ways to describe what Escola does on stage, which is basically to take the whole institution of theater and shake it until something unexpected falls out.

Death Becomes Her opened its musical adaptation of the 1992 camp classic and led with a song called “For the Gaze” — the pronunciation being, entirely intentionally, indistinguishable from “for the gays.” It received 10 Tony nominations. It is a musical about feuding frenemies, eternal youth potions, and fabulous destruction, and queer audiences recognized it immediately as something made with them in mind.

“Death Becomes Her opened with a song called ‘For the Gaze.’ The pronunciation is, entirely intentionally, indistinguishable from ‘for the gays.’”

And then there is Rocky Horror. Richard O’Brien’s The Rocky Horror Show — the musical that has been in continuous production somewhere in the world for 52 years, the show that invented the concept of audience participation, the show that gave a generation of queer kids their first glimpse of a character who dressed however they wanted and dared anyone to say something about it — opened previews at Studio 54 this week. The casting is, by any measure, extraordinary: Luke Evans as Frank-N-Furter, Michaela Jaé Rodriguez as Columbia, Stephanie Hsu as Janet, Harvey Guillén as Eddie, Juliette Lewis as Magenta, Amber Gray as Riff Raff. It is directed by Sam Pinkleton, who also directed Oh, Mary!, which means the same Tony Award-winning director is responsible for two of the queerest, most talked-about Broadway shows running simultaneously this spring. Frank-N-Furter is a character who has always been difficult to contain within a single identity — a “sweet transvestite from Transsexual, Transylvania” whose whole function in the story is to destabilize every assumption the straight couple brought to his door. Played now by a gay Welsh actor at the top of his career, in a production designed to be a party at one of the most historically queer venues in New York City, in the middle of a Pride season that feels like it matters more than usual. The show runs through June 21.

“Frank-N-Furter has always been difficult to contain within a single identity. That’s the whole point.”

And Titanique, the Off-Broadway phenomenon that turned the Celine Dion catalog and the Titanic disaster into a queer parody spectacle, is now in previews on Broadway. Which is just the right amount of unhinged.

None of this is new, exactly. Theater has always been a queer space. Long before it was legal to be openly gay in America, Broadway was where queer people worked, created, and found each other. The songwriters, choreographers, costume designers, and performers who built the American musical tradition were disproportionately queer — often working in a kind of open secret, their lives and identities present in the work even when they couldn't be named. The campiness, the spectacle, the emotional extremity, the chosen family backstage — these aren't incidental to theater. They are theater. Queer people didn't just show up to Broadway. They built it.

What's different now is that the debt is being acknowledged. The stories are being told explicitly, with the names attached. The culture that Broadway has always borrowed from is being centered rather than obscured.

"Queer people didn't just show up to Broadway. They built it. What's different now is that the debt is being acknowledged."

None of this happened in isolation. The 2024-25 Broadway season was the highest-grossing in recorded history, bringing in over $1.89 billion with more than 14.7 million attendees. Broadway as an industry is not struggling. But what’s notable about this particular moment isn’t the box office — it’s the direction of creative power. Ballroom choreographers helming a major revival. A drag queen headlining a long-running Tony winner. A non-binary comedian collecting Tony nominations for a show they wrote and starred in. These aren’t token gestures. They’re signals about who gets to make work, and what that work gets to look like.

“What’s notable about this moment isn’t the box office. It’s the direction of creative power — and right now it’s pointing somewhere new.”

And it’s happening at a moment when it matters. While the political news outside the theater district is as dark as it has been in a generation, you can walk into a Broadway house and watch queer artists make work that carries the full weight of the culture they come from. Ballroom on a major stage. Drag in a principal role. Non-binary writers rewriting history. Rocky Horror back where it belongs, at a venue that has always been queer, with a cast that reflects exactly who this show is for.

That’s not nothing. In 2026, that might be exactly what some people need.