One Hot Roof

Broadway has rarely been known for risk-taking. A commercial institution focused on the bottom line, theater producers like to give the audience what they think they want, over and over again, until the cash registers ring.

But with the opening (in preview) this week of a revival of Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Broadway is both playing it safe in restaging a classic, and taking chances–in the choice of performers–in a way that should leave producers and audiences most satisfied.

Williams’ 1955 Pulitzer Prize-winning play is getting a unique and innovative all-Black recasting, which while staying faithful to the original story of a wealthy, yet dysfunctional family in the Mississippi Delta, now has added nuance because of it.

The theater community has never completely embraced the concept of what it calls “alternative casting.” While White actors have always felt it their right to don blackface to do Othello, heaven help the Black actor who dares to perform a role previously conceived with a White person in mind. Drowning Crow, the 2004 all-Black adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull, received compliments for performance but rankled the nerves of critics seemingly for the shear audacity of touching the classics.

This revival works largely because of its strong cast. It is remarkable how Williams’ words seem just as authentic, just as believable, coming out of the mouth of James Earl Jones as Big Daddy, as they did from Burl Ives in the original production (and later the film) more than fifty years ago. Jones uses his massive voice and presence to portray the most ornery and irascible old man you ever saw, on the evening of his 65th birthday celebration.

Joining him is one of the best actors working in theater today, Tony Award winner Phylicia Rashad as Big Mama. (If you only know her work from The Cosby Show, you don’t know her work at all. Get your butt to the theater!) Rashad is simply delightful to watch as Big Daddy’s doting wife, mistrusted by him but perhaps the only real loving person in the family.

Movie actor Terrence Howard (Academy Award nominated for Hustle & Flow) makes not only his Broadway but his stage debut as their son Brick, the ex-star athlete who is descending rapidly into alcoholism following the death of his very close friend Skipper and the pressure to produce offspring. Calling Howard a movie actor is not a knock, merely a statement of his past credentials. Though less experienced than others on this stage, he more than holds his own in balancing the emotions of a man in a loveless marriage, still mourning the loss of a friend he deeply cared about. Had Howard not been up to the task, he might have withered like a raisin in the sun or some other less skilled celebrities who have attempted to work in the theater.

His wife Maggie is played by yet another Tony winner, Anika Noni Rose. A beautiful, young, social climber who has married into the family, she is skilled at using her abundant feminine charms to get what she wants, but not skilled enough to get Brick to love her. She understands all too well that the price of inheriting Big Daddy’s estate and thus securing her future, is a baby. Rose’s Maggie is a bundle of energy, mixed with raw sex appeal, laced with cunning and guile and just a smidge of spite.

This half-century-old play seems timeless under Debbie Allen’s direction. In light of contemporary discussions of “the DL,” the show’s insinuation of a homosexual underpinning to Brick’s mourning and marital indifference, is perhaps more easily accepted by today’s audience than when it originally opened. It also allows us to better understand the machinations one goes through to keep up appearances for family and society’s sake.

Giancarlo Esposito and Lisa Arrindell Anderson are eldest son Gooper and his wife Mae, a successful corporate attorney and a fertile wife, who have done all the right things to provide heirs to the empire, but who still can’t seem to ingratiate themselves. Both performers amuse us with their calculated missteps before Big Daddy and well-aimed backstabs at Maggie and Brick.

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof opens officially on March 6 for a limited run at the Broadhurst Theatre. I give it my “run, don’t walk” recommendation.