Cat On A Hot Tin Roof (The SOB Review) - Broadhurst Theatre, New York, NY
*** (out of ****)OK, so the jazzy saxaphone motif is a bit forced.
Sure, the exact time setting is as clear as Mississippi mud due to
Ray Klausen's ambiguous set design.
Yes, the spotlight effect offered by
William H. Grant III on each flashback soliloquy is a tad annoying and unnecessary.
And it goes without saying that by making many of the play's sacrosanct lines ... well ...
funny,
Debbie Allen takes more liberties with
Tennessee Williams' talents than a Cape Cod houseboy ever could.
But the net effect of Allen's direction lends this latest Broadway life for Williams' irascible
Cat On A Hot Tin Roof with a certain revelatory sympathetic spin, providing each of its major players with more nuance and subtle shading than I ever thought possible. Say what you will about the certain aforementioned risks Allen has made in her direction, her overall gamble has largely paid off, particularly in drawing out fine to superb performances from her quartet of celebrated lead actors.
Chief among them is
James Earl Jones' surprisingly compassionate Big Daddy, whose love for son Brick (
Terrence Howard in an initially uneven, yet ultimately moving Broadway debut) should never, ever be in question. He may not appear until the Second Act, but once he does, Jones offers the type of booming, commanding presence that makes it difficult to look anywhere else.
However, you just can't help but do just that as
Phylicia Rashad turns Big Mama into a tour de force. Her Big Mama is so much more than the blubbering simpleton she's often made out to be. When Rashad sheds real tears, she conveys both a desperate and intelligent woman who's not only grieving her husband's cancer diagnosis, but also anxiously wishing she could get back into his heart after being shunted aside for so long.
Then there's the proverbial
Cat herself. The stunningly sensual
Anika Noni Rose astounds as she digs deeply into the furthest recesses of her heart and soul. Unlike
Ashley Judd's benign turn in the role in the
2003 revival, Rose makes her sex-deprived Maggie one you can't help but empathize with in her steely determination to preserve her marriage with Brick. She has us believing her attempts are based more on her love for him than the desire to maintain her life of luxury and privilege. In Maggie, Rose is in full bloom.
Not only does Allen's unusually humane
Cat On A Hot Tin Roof offer a moving night at the theatre, it's also highly entertaining.
This is Steve On Broadway (SOB).
Click here for tickets.Related Stories:Is The F-Word Really Family Friendly? (April 11, 2008)
Did Cat Get Critics' Tongues Wagging? (March 7, 2008)
Opening Night: Cat Begins Fifth Life On Broadway (March 6, 2008)
The Onion: Ask The Stage Directions To Tennessee Williams' Cat On A Hot Tin Roof (February 11, 2008)
Black Cat Has More Than One Life (April 11, 2008)
Labels: Anika Noni Rose, Broadway, Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, Critics' Capsule, Debbie Allen, James Earl Jones, Phylicia Rashad, Play, Revival, Terrence Howard, The SOB Review
Did Cat Get Critics' Tongues Wagging?Last evening, the fifth Broadway production ever for
Tennessee Williams'
Cat On A Hot Tin Roof opened at the
Broadhurst Theatre in a limited run under the direction of
Debbie Allen.
Allen is directing a cast that includes her sister
Phylicia Rashad along with
Terrence Howard,
Anika Noni Rose, and
James Earl Jones. The show has received mixed reviews with Allen taking the brunt of the criticism.
Proclaiming the show as "thrilling,"
Newsday 's
Linda Winer offers up what is perhaps the most favorable review: "Without the reverse casting, however, we would never have seen James Earl Jones as a shattering Big Daddy, tenderly holding and kissing the sensitive head of Terrence Howard, stunning as son Brick, in an attempt to transfer his own power into the beautiful young man's broken soul. Without daring to re-imagine Tennessee Williams' Mississippi plantation owners as nouveau-riche blacks in 1955, we would have been denied the sight of Phylicia Rashad squeezing her formidable self into a rare and heartbreaking interpretation of that silly dim bulb of a woman, Big Mama. And without the bold casting of the gifted, but hardly brand-name, Anika Noni Rose instead of the usual world-class sex bomb, we might still have never seen a Maggie who could say 'like a cat on a hot tin roof' a hundred different ways without sounding deranged.... How remarkable, then, that this cast finds such earthy conversational ease in the emotional humidity of Williams' Southern gothic milieu."
While lamenting that "it's too bad there's not a fully developed visual imagination at the creative helm to match the intuitive skills of its actors,"
David Rooney of
Variety nevertheless mostly purrs: "While Debbie Allen's inexperience as a director shows in pedestrian physical staging with a tendency toward heavy-handedness, she lucks out where it most matters -- with her powerhouse cast.... [T]he design choices of Allen's production fudge the period just enough to make anachronism a non-issue.... Casting an untried stage actor as Brick was a risk, but Terrence Howard delivers. It's an understated performance that taps all the quiet, sleepy-eyed charisma of his screen work while also accessing the lacerating wounds of a man forced to confront emotional questions he'd rather ignore.... With James Earl Jones giving magnificent life to the cruelty, the ribald earthiness and the unexpected tenderness of this blustery self-made man, the production achieves the rare distinction of an entirely credible and deeply felt father-son bond at its center."
Deeming this
Cat "well-worth seeing,"
New York Post's
Clive Barnes offers a three-star review: "Director Debbie Allen and her producers have assembled a stellar cast, notably James Earl Jones as the cancer-wracked patriarch, Big Daddy, in a portrayal of bluster and subtlety that will surely leave a permanent mark on a role he both inhabits and embodies. And Jones is simply the first among an exceptional cast.... Rose's sexy yet poignant Maggie beautifully delineates love and desire against a pragmatic awareness of poverty.... Howard's low-key, high-tension Brick, waiting for the click of drunkenness to get him through another day of denial, and Rashad's broken yet defiant Big Mama -- her face a barometer of a family's pain -- fuse into one picture."
Declaring this a "flabby revival" that's "too often it’s without focus,"
Ben Brantley of
The New York Times demurs: "The irresistible part of the equation is embodied most persuasively by Anika Noni Rose as that determined Southern seductress Maggie the Cat.... As it turns out, Ms. Rose more than holds her own. She pretty much runs the show whenever she’s onstage, and when she’s not, the show misses her management. Mr. Howard and Mr. Jones have moments that suggest what they might have made (and possibly still could make) of their roles. And Ms. Rashad presents a creditable, if arguably misconceived, Big Mama.... Ms. Rashad...seems to grow in supportive strength and mother-knows-best wisdom. The production acquires a haze of sentimentality that makes it soft when it should be sharp."
Weighing in on "Ms. Allen's fascinating-despite-itself revival,"
Eric Grode of
The New York Sun takes note of the mendacity of the play's supposed color-blind casting: "With a production as lopsided and often wrongheaded as this, one has time to notice this sort of thing.... Mr. Howard, whose restless intelligence has enlivened even Hollywood piffle like "
August Rush," overthinks a role that requires as much body as soul. His intensely internalized Brick barely has bones anymore, let alone the muscles on top of them. And so Ms. Allen overcompensates by having Ms. Rose curl herself around their four-poster bed like a stripper's pole.... This cheapening of Maggie is hardly Ms. Allen's only or most egregious error. She has a particularly tough time weaving in the offstage dialogue that frequently interrupts the central drama, and she routinely bungles the arrival of these characters when they do finally appear."
Concluding that this "hit and miss" production "mostly just simmers,"
JoeDziemianowicz of New York's
Daily News mostly pans, with one notable exception: "[T]he one true thing that's fully alive in the uneven Broadway revival of the Tennessee Williams classic is the always dynamic James Earl Jones, who gives such a thundering and throbbing performance as dying Big Daddy that you feel it in your bones.... If only more of this
Cat" had so much bite. You first get the sense that director Debbie Allen's production isn't one for the ages when you lay eyes on the stage of the Broadhurst: The set has the neutered charm of a hotel suite. Allen does the production no favors by having a sax man blow a bluesy tune before each act (an idea better suited to a different Williams play), or by fiddling with the lights during key monologues. The young stars have their ups and downs."
Whatever they have to say about this
Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, it certainly
sounds intriguing, even with the worst of the criticisms. The show had already extended (although Terrence Howard won't be with the production from April 15 to May 4 when
Boris Kodjoe will perform the role of Brick). I'll be taking in a performance a little later this month and will let you know what I think in an upcoming SOB Review.
This is Steve On Broadway (SOB).
Click here for tickets.Related Stories:Opening Night: Cat Begins Fifth Life On Broadway (March 6, 2008)
The Onion: Ask The Stage Directions To Tennessee Williams' Cat On A Hot Tin Roof (February 11, 2008)
Black Cat Has More Than One Life (April 11, 2008)
Labels: Anika Noni Rose, Broadway, Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, Critics' Capsule, Debbie Allen, James Earl Jones, Phylicia Rashad, Play, Revival, Terrence Howard
Opening Night: Cat Begins Fifth Life On BroadwayThis evening, the fourth Broadway revival of
Tennessee Williams' classic
Cat On A Hot Tin Roof opens at the
Broadhurst Theatre. The original, Tony-nominated
1955 production earned the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
Proving there is more than one
ducking way to skin Williams'
rutting Cat, director
Debbie Allen is infusing this production with some of the playwright's
intended language. But the bigger news perhaps is that
this particular incarnation of the show made it here at all, given all the lives it has had, giving it a backstory worthy of the drama itself.
Even though
Cat On A Hot Tin Roof was
last produced on the Great White Way a scant four years ago, this all African-American cast is about as stellar as can be. As Brick, acclaimed film actor
Terrence Howard is treading Broadway's boards for the very first time, alongside three Tony Award-winning actors:
Anika Noni Rose (
Caroline, Or Change) as Maggie,
Phylicia Rashad (
A Raisin in the Sun) as Big Mama and the voice of
CNN and
Darth Vader himself
James Earl Jones (
Fences).
When
Cat On A Hot Tin Roof first debuted in 1955 under the direction of
Elia Kazan, the production caused a sensation in its depiction of a Southern family's attempt to cope with one spouse's latent homosexuality. All in all, the production would play 694 performances and score four Tony nominations. The cast included
Ben Gazzara as Brick,
Barbara Bel Geddes as Maggie,
Mildred Dunnock as Big Mama and
Burl Ives as Big Daddy.
It took nearly twenty years before the
first Broadway revival was staged, but in 1974,
Michael Kahn directed
Keir Dullea as Brick,
Elizabeth Ashley as Maggie,
Kate Reid as Big Mama and
Fred Gwynne (television's Herman Munster) as Big Daddy. This
Cat lived 160 performances and earned Ashley a Tony nomination.
The third Broadway production of
Cat came in 1990 with the 149 performance run directed by
Howard Davies. It would also be the only one to win a Tony -- for
Charles Durning's celebrated turn as Big Daddy, alongside
Daniel Hugh Kelly's Brick,
Kathleen Turner's Maggie and
Polly Holliday's Big Mama. All totaled, the production earned three Tony nominations.
My first kick at the
Cat was through the 2003 revival when I caught the final preview. In the scene where Big Daddy (
Ned Beatty) is receiving his gift and asks "What's this?" A giddy voice came from somewhere near the front of the audience screaming enthusiastically, "Kitties!"
I kid you not! Fortunately for the audience, Beatty and the rest of the cast -- including
Jason Patric (Brick),
Ashley Judd (Maggie) and the breathtaking
Margo Martindale -- maintained their composure and didn't skip a beat. Yet it only earned one Tony nomination, running for 145 performances.
So will critics think that this all-star
Cat has a life? Find out tomorrow as I share my critics' capsule (I'll be seeing the show myself a little later this month).
This is Steve On Broadway (SOB).
Click here for tickets.Related Stories:The Onion: Ask The Stage Directions To Tennessee Williams' Cat On A Hot Tin Roof (February 11, 2008)
Black Cat Has More Than One Life (April 11, 2008)
Labels: Anika Noni Rose, Broadway, Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, James Earl Jones, Phylicia Rashad, Play, Revival, Tennessee Williams, Terrence Howard
