The Show Is Closing. I’ve Been Here Before.
We had a Zoom call today.
If you’ve been reading this Substack for a while, you know what that sentence means. Cats: The Jellicle Ball is closing on Broadway. Final performance: August 8, 2026. We opened April 7. People on the call were surprised. I wasn’t. I saw the numbers. I felt the energy in the building. I kind of saw it coming.
People had been calling out sick. This show is incredibly physical, so injuries are part of it, but the callouts kept coming, and we had to cancel a performance tonight. It brought me right back to December 2021 at Ain’t Too Proud — and if you want to know exactly how I feel about everything from that era, call me. I won’t get into it here.
Here’s the thing. I’ve lived this movie before. More than once.
Back in 2012, I took a night off from Memphis: The Musical to do a gig with Michael Aarons and his wife, Anya Singleton. Before I left for the show, I started scrolling on the internet, and saw the headline: Memphis was closing. My stomach dropped. Nobody called me. I found out on the internet like everybody else. We played our final show on August 5, 2012, after nearly three years at the Shubert.
A week later, I was playing on an episode of Smash. First TV gig of my life. Then I went right back to what I’d been doing the whole time — subbing, club dates, sessions, teaching, everything. Because here’s what people miss: I never stopped doing those things. Even while I held the Memphis chair, I was subbing out to work my subs in and taking outside gigs. I wanted to stay in the marketplace of working musicians. That’s what kept me viable.
I did the same thing at Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill. Short run, extraordinary gig, playing behind Audra McDonald every night — and I still took nights off to play club dates. Same at Ain’t Too Proud. Great show, great energy, strong ticket sales. Then March 2020 shut the whole industry down. We came back in October 2021, Covid tore through Broadway in December, we canceled a pile of shows, and then came the Zoom call. Closing notice. Final performance January 16, 2022. We were all shocked. We were still one of the top-grossing shows in town.
That closing is why Broadway Drumming 101 exists. I decided I could never be caught flat-footed like that again, and I wanted to teach musicians what nobody taught me. Go back through the archives from 2021 forward and you’ll see it — the articles, the interviews, all of it. That work became my book, Broadway Bound and Beyond, and right now I’m recording Broadway Bound and Beyond: The Course, which will be finished very soon.
And between Ain’t Too Proud and this show? A tour of Hadestown. A tour of The Rock Orchestra by Candlelight. Subbing at the Big Apple Circus a couple of years. Club dates. A whole lot of different things — until the call came for Cats: The Jellicle Ball.
So here’s what I want you to think through, especially if you dream of playing Broadway:
Every show closes. All of them. Every single one. You are very, very lucky if you get a show that runs more than a year, because most don’t anymore. I thought this one would run a long time. It won’t. That’s the reality of this life in New York City.
And if you think the answer is to just focus on Broadway, you’ve got it backwards. To play a Broadway show, you have to play jazz, funk, disco, blues, rock, Afro-Cuban, polka, free jazz, klezmer — everything. That vocabulary comes from the gigs outside of Broadway. You have to play outside gigs to get the Broadway gig. Don’t get it twisted. Going from high school or college straight to a Broadway chair on a show that runs like Book of Mormon? That’s winning the lottery.
Me? I’m going to do what I’ve done since Ain’t Too Proud closed, but not the same way. I have plans in motion, and I’m expanding everything I’ve been building. You’ll be hearing more from me.
To everyone who’s a paid subscriber, everyone who bought the book, the merch, everyone who’s watched the interviews — thank you! There are many more interviews on the way.
And I’ll say this: I maybe have one more Broadway show in me. The Jellicle Ball is a genuinely fun show, but I’ll be honest — Andrew Lloyd Webber’s music was never my musical home.
The Hippest Trip: The Soul Train Musical?
Now THAT excites me the way Ain’t Too Proud did. If that show comes back, I don’t care where I am — I’m coming back for that gig. Even if it only runs six months, I’m fine.
Because I know what to do when a show closes.
Do you?
— Clayton
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.