NYC NOW - August 15, 2024: Evening Roundup

Episode Date: August 15, 2024

Some New York City street vendors are calling on the city council to lift the caps on the number of vendor licenses and permits in the city. Plus, New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy is expected to tap his former chief of staff George Helmy to replace Bob Menendez in the U.S. Senate. And finally, WNYC’s David Furst and Clayton Guse discuss the production of "Cats: The Jellicle Ball” and what this new show means to New York City.

Welcome to NYC Now, your source for local news in and around New York City from WNYC. I'm Jenae Pierre. Permissions, yes, tickets, no. That was the chant from a group of New York City street vendors who are calling on the City Council to lift the caps on the number of vendor licenses and permits in the city. Hundreds of them marched to City Hall Thursday morning. Vicente Ventamia has been selling rare coins and other wares in the Bronx for nearly 50 years. He says he's a lot of working with the acoso of the policeia. That not we're denigants, that we're investigators essential worker, not a delinquent.

And he wants to work without fearing he'll be harassed by the police. Ventamia is among the estimated 20,000 street vendors and counting in the city. For decades, only a few thousand have been legally allowed to operate. A bill to lift the caps was introduced in February. It has yet to receive a hearing. In New Jersey, Governor Phil Murphy is expected to tap his former chief of staff, George Helmy, to replace Bob Menendez in the U.S. Senate. That's according to multiple news reports. Menendez is stepping down from the post-effective August 20th.

He faced increasing pressure to resign by other Democrats following his conviction in a corruption case. After leaving the Murphy administration, George Helmi went on to work as an executive at R.W.J. Barnabas Health. Helmi will serve out the remainder of Menendez's term, which ends in January. Representative Andy Kim is the Democratic nominee for the seat. He'll face Republican Curtis Bashaw in the November election. A new show is the radical reimagining of the hit Broadway musical Cats, and it's all the rage. More on that after the break. For nearly two decades, the musical Cats was a Broadway phenomenon.

Now, a new version is selling out show after show. This one is called Cats, the Jellicle Ball, and it's happening downtown at the World Trade Center. My colleague David First talked with WMYC's Clayton Gusa about the production and what this new show means to New York City. Clayton, can you explain, first of all, how you got pulled into the world of cats? David, some of our listeners may know that I tend to cover transportation and infrastructure on our desk, But the joke that I made in asking to report on this show was that it's at the Perlman Arts Center, which is on World Trade Center ground. And the World Trade Center is owned by Port Authority, which is, of course, a transportation agency by and large. This is a stretch.

It's a bit of a stretch. Nevertheless, Katz is a show that's long, fascinated me. And one that I would contend that most audiences didn't understand. I think that the production originally on Broadway for nearly two decades was a romp and a masterpiece. So you take this new show, The Jellico Ball, downtown, and it takes all of these songs that you know and love from cats and gives it an entirely different treatment. Instead of dressing the characters up as a cast of cats with whiskers and ears and floppy tails, singing songs and dances about their different characters, instead they dress them up and give it a treatment as a kind of 1980s-inspired ballroom drag scene. Hmm.

Where instead of dressed up like literal cats, they are dressed up in Couture. Instead of a regular Broadway stage at this downtown theater, they have the show set up on this very expansive runway, where the audience kind of surrounds it on multiple levels down to cabaret tables, up the stairs. Well, the plot of the original cats was always confused. But does this new treatment do something to change that? Listeners that don't know the plot of cats, I can unpack it very quickly. Okay. These cats have used up all their lives and they want a chance at a new life.

And that means they go to a place called the Heaviside Lair. This is inspired by T.S. Eliot poems. So the whole plot revolves around that. But I spoke with a voice of the actor who plays the character Old Deuteronomy, the elder cat who selects which cat wins the jellicle ball. And he's played by a Broadway legend, Andre DeShields, and Andre DeShields is one. An Emmy, a Tony and a Grammy, he's been in this space for a half century. He made his Broadway debut more than 50 years ago.

He later starred in The Whiz. He was in hair. He's seen it all, which makes him kind of a fitting actor for this kind of elder statesman of cats. But I joined DeShields outside the Ambassador Theater for a talk. And that's where he actually performed in his Broadway debut. and here he is kind of explaining the difference between the original cats and what they're doing now downtown. There was no one there taking on the role that I'm now doing as old Deuteronomy in the Jellicle Ball. Deuteronomy has two songs in cats, the moments of happiness and how to add just a cat.

In those two songs, you find the philosophical treatise of what cats is. But it didn't get that kind of treatment in the original production in the 80s because there were so many whiskers and fur and tails and cute makeup. But you were so busy having your eyes dazzled that you didn't take on the cerebral connotations So he kind of gets to it a little bit more there. So Andre De Shields has performed on Broadway for half a century. Can you tell us more about his role in the production? Yeah, so like I kind of unpacked, he plays an elder statesman of Cats of Source,

the one who kind of leads them all. And it's kind of fitting because he reflected with me on arriving in New York in the 70s for the show called Warp. It only ran for a couple weeks, and it was brought here from a theater in Chicago. I knew this is where ultimately I needed to be. And I did the salad days thing by couch surfing. I had friends who were here working in Andrew Lloyd Weber's Jesus Christ Superstar. I mean, the parallel here, of course, is that Andrew Lloyd Weber also wrote cats on top of Jesus Christ Superstar and many others.

And Andrew Lloyd Weber has actually since seen the show, and he's reportedly called it electric. It's not missed on Andrew Lloyd Weber that cats and the ballroom drag scene hit New York around the same time in the 1980s. And there's an interesting symmetry here. And that symmetry isn't missed on Andre de Shields, right? Who's been a bit of an icon in the city's queer community for a long time. He's an HIV survivor. It's still he says he's working on certain things in that realm. And there's some overlaps into kind of what this show is about.

And I'm still working on the pronouns, because that's what we do now. Everyone says, my name is such and such, and my pronouns are. But I love, it's confusing in one sense because people are he and she and they. And when it comes to me, I said, my name is Andre DeShield. And my pronouns are king, legend, icon, and Broadway deity. And he also reflected on how in entertainment and Broadway, paradigines continue to change, whether it comes to gender or power dynamics. Clayton, can people still get tickets to this new production?

Yeah, it's been extended a third time. It's now running through September 8th. It keeps selling out, though. You're going to want to jump on getting tickets sooner. It may be extended another time if it continues to sell out. We'll see if it runs as long as the original cats. That's WMYC's Clayton Guse. Talking with my colleague, David First.

If you thought the skies looked a bit hazy Thursday, you're not tripping. Similar to last summer, it's smoke from wildfires in Canada drifting south, and it's expected to linger on Friday. The National Weather Service says there's rain in the forecast this weekend, so some of that haze may clear out by Sunday. Environmental officials say if you're someone who's sensitive to particle pollution, you should consider reducing the amount of time you're active outdoors. Thanks for listening to NYC Now from WNYC.

Catch us every weekday, three times a day. I'm Junae Pierre. We'll be back tomorrow.