Zhailon Levingston and Bill Rauch took home the Tony Award for Best Direction of a Musical last night. The duo claimed the honor at the 79th Annual Tony Awards for their work on Cats: The Jellicle Ball, the reimagining of Andrew Lloyd Webber‘s classic that has been one of Broadway’s most talked-about productions of the season.
It marks the first nomination and win for both directors.
“Ballroom is about audacity and disruption. In the words of Junior Labeija, ‘It do take nerve,'” Levingston said from the stage. “We honor the Black and brown trans women and gay men who were ballroom’s pioneers, as well as today’s icons, and our cast of astonishing triple threats, including people from their 20s to their 80s, and every decade in between.”
Levingston is a Louisiana-raised storyteller and activist. He sold concessions in Broadway theaters as recently as 2017 before becoming, at 27 years old, the youngest Black director in Broadway history when he staged Chicken & Biscuits on Broadway in 2021. That trajectory, from the concession stand to the Tony stage, is the kind of story Broadway rarely gets to tell about itself.
Cats: The Jellicle Ball began its life Off-Broadway at the Perelman Arts Center before transferring to the Broadhurst Theatre, where it officially opened on April 7. The production trades the original show’s ballet-inspired choreography and leg warmers for the language of ballroom culture, vogueing, runway categories, and the radical joy that has defined that world for decades. Choreographers Omari Wiles and Arturo Lyons, also 2026 Tony winners, brought that vision to the floor, while beats arranger and producer Trevor Holder gave Webber’s iconic score a dance music-inspired pulse.
Ballroom is an underground LGBTQIA+ subculture that arose in 1920s New York City, dominated by Black and Latino queer communities, and has become deeply ingrained in queer and popular culture, most famously documented in the 1990 film Paris Is Burning and more recently brought to wider audiences through FX’s Pose.
Beyond his work as a director, Levingston co-created the Broadway Advocacy Coalition and teaches a Theatre of Change course at Columbia University. He is, in other words, as committed to the ecosystem of theater as he is to what happens on the stage itself.
