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PLAYBILL ON OPENING NIGHT: Cat on a Hot Tin Roof—New Magnolias
By Harry Haun
07 Mar 2008
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Terrence Howard, Debbie Allen, James Earl Jones, Lisa Arrindell Anderson, Giancarlo Esposito, Lou Myers, Count Stovall, Marissa Chisolm and Boris Kodjoe.
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| photo by Aubrey Reuben | With an African-American now applying for residency in the White House, the notion of populating "Big Daddy" Pollitt's plantation in the Mississippi Delta entirely with African-Americans is an idea whose time has come, and it came March 6 to the Broadhurst.
For the record, this is the fifth Broadway coming of Tennessee Williams' Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, a winner of the Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award in its day (1955-1956). It's such a succulent slice of Southern strife that color-blindness sets in almost immediately, and it becomes another round of Everyfamily dysfunction, if more creatively crafted than most.
James Earl Jones, surprise to nobody, thunders through the magnolias and mendacity infecting his festering nest with customary clomp and gusto—lording majestically over the manor, in point of fact. He comes down hatefully hard on the ever-lovin' he never loved (a Big Mama played with battered dignity by Phylicia Rashad), but what is surprising is the compassion he brings to the father-son confrontations he has with Terrence Howard.
Jones, 77, but here playing 65 (it's Big Daddy's birthday), certainly "gave at the office," so he can be excused early from the after-party at Strata. Field-marshaled by his Desdemona and wife (Cecilia Hart), he ran the press gauntlet at 90 mph like a hotbed of coals and made it to his waiting limo in record time. NY1 got particularly short shrift. He spent most of his on-air time talking about the party he wouldn't be attending. Mendacity, Big Daddy.
This left the director, Debbie Allen, to explain his new-found "Puff Daddy." She gamely sallied forth with: "I said at the beginning that I didn't want to follow all the stage directions. I wanted us to find the play. There are places where we changed the blocking. I said, 'Why don't we walk around? Walk behind Terrence, James, while you're talking,' and it turned into that tender moment. A father loves his son—that's what it's all about."
Allen, a Tony-nominated Sweet Charity when she last performed on Broadway, now comes in hyphenated form—director-choreographer—and this is her Broadway-directing debut. It's a dramatic (nonmusical) debut for her, but you wouldn't have guessed it, save for a "Happy Birthday" that comes with special choreography (she couldn't help herself). There is also an Allen-esque flourish that starts the play. A saxophone player (Gerald Hayes) enters stage left and wafts across the stage playing a haunting blues riff, never to be seen again but heard during nonverbal, emotional-recovery time. "Wasn't that wonderful?" the director beamed proudly. "I fought for that." And you know she did.
Music wills out for her new projects. First up—right away (world-premiering in Baton Rouge on April 2) is The Bayou Legend. "It's an adaptation of Peer Gynt, which I've been working on with James Ingram for many years. The producer is Zev Bufman. I'll open it in Baton Rouge, then take it to Chicago. It looks like I'm going to be spending a lot of time in Chicago in the fall. I'm going to be doing two plays there. I'm also doing a show on Sammy Davis, Jr. Leslie Bricusse is the author, and I'm the director-choreographer. He wrote the book, and there are a lot of songs that he wrote along with Anthony Newley. These are songs that Sammy did, and then Leslie is writing some original songs as well."
Her daughter, Vivian Nixon, who Broadway-debuted in 2006's Hot Feet and recently played Mom's role in West Side Story (Anita) in Paris, is momentarily idling. "I'm here to support my mom," she said simply. After this, she'll support her more conspicuously and actively, starring in and setting the choreography of, the aforementioned Bayou Legend.
The curtain, advertised to go up at 6:30 PM on opening night, went up at 7:11 instead. The reason, now it can be told, was a backstage mini-drama in which the leading lady was taken ill by something stronger than Opening Night Nerves. "I had a migraine today, and it makes me extraordinarily nauseous," explained Anika Noni Rose when queried later. "It affects my stomach, and I was trying to handle that before I got on stage. I drank a lot of water and ate something, and I just had to let things settle. I've had migraines before on stage, and I have to tell you there's a lot going on when you're on stage like that."
Given that, her Maggie the Cat landed—heroically—on all fours. And the crisis seemed very much ancient history by the time she got to the party. She was, in fact, radiant.
She'll follow this Elizabeth Taylor role with another—Cleopatra—co-starring with Christopher Plummer in Shaw's Caesar and Cleopatra at the Stratford Festival in August and September. Plummer harbors hopes of bringing the show to Broadway.
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Morgan Freeman, Jeremy Piven, Lynn Whitfield and Charles Randolph-Wright, Harry Belafonte, Eartha Kitt, Miss America 2008 Kirsten Haglund, Elizabeth Withers-Mendes and Hank Aaron.
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| photo by Aubrey Reuben |
The skeleton in the Pollitt family closet, which Williams rattles incessantly, is referred to only (but a lot) as Skipper. Maggie sees him as her romantic rival and goes to the extreme of seducing him so they both can be feel close to her husband, Brick Pollitt. When these best-laid plans go awry, Skipper drunkenly confesses the old love that dares not speak its name to Brick, who rejects him in disgust, sending Skipper into a suicidal spin. (Blanche DuBois' fiance had the same response to that kind of rejection.) By the time the audience is introduced to Brick, he's pickled in booze and grief, questing for that alcoholic click.
Most productions allow the hint of homosexuality to seep, creep or bleed into the story, but Howard stems the flow emphatically. He's The Brick of Bricks, unassailably male, and he's not above heaping a huge amount of guilt at Maggie. "Even though she was one of Tennessee's favorite characters, he recognized that she had the devil in her," contended Howard. "I've learned a lot from plays about just being honest—doing it and just staying truthful—and one of the things that this play says is 'I've never lied to you, Big Daddy.' Continued...
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