B'way Update: Cat and Yankees, etc.

Paul Newman and Elizabeth Taylor in
Cat of a Hot Tin Roof.

A new production of Tennessee Williams' Cat of a Hot Tin Roof is headed for Broadway, scheduled to open sometime in the spring of 2027. Tony winner Sam Gold (Fun Home, A Doll's House, Part 2) will direct and Seaview will produce. Cat first opened on Broadway in 1955, winning the Pulitzer Prize. Barbara Bel Geddes, Ben Gazzara and Burl Ives starred as Maggie the Cat, her closeted husband Brick and Big Daddy. Ives repeated his performance in the 1958 movie version with Elizabeth Taylor and Paul Newman. Subsequent Broadway productions have starred Elizabeth Ashley and Keir Dullea (1974), Kathleen Turner and Daniel Hugh Kelly (1990), Ashley Judd and Jason Patric (2003), Anika Noni Rose and Terrence Howard (2008), and Scarlett Johanssen and Benjamin Walker (2013). TV versions have been headlined by Natalie Wood and Robert Wagner, and Jessica Lange and Tommy Lee Jones. I saw Sandy Dennis and David Selby play the leads in summer stock. Cast and creative staff will be announced at a later date.

"Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is the pinnacle of what the theatre can do," says Gold in a statement. "Two of the greatest roles for actors in the cannon, delivered to us by the world’s most original playwright, at the very height of his poetic powers, exploring themes that feel as shockingly honest and blood boiling today as they did 70 years ago. I couldn't be more excited to bring this masterpiece back to New York next season."

"It's been such a gift to be making work with Sam Gold over the last four years,” adds Seaview co-founder and CEO Greg Nobile. "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof will mark our fifth production together, and I am certain Sam's vision to bring Tennessee's extraordinary and timeless characters to life next season will once again thrill and delight audiences."

 

Theater Memories Part 9: Tennessee Williams

I just finished reading John Lahr's brilliant biography of Tennessee Williams (Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh). This led me to recall all of the productions of Williams' work I have seen in decades of theater going and to conclude he is our greatest modern playwright (surpassing O'Neill and Miller).

The Glass Menagerie: Maureen Stapleton (summer stock), Geraldine Fitzgerald (Phila. Drama Guild), Julie Harris, Jessica Lange, Judith Ivey, Cherry Jones, Sally Field, Katharine Hepburn, Shirley Booth (TV), Gertrude Lawrence, Joanne Woodward (film), Jessica Tandy (recording).

Streetcar Named Desire: Shirley Knight (McCarter Theater), Jessica Lange/Alec Baldwin (on stage and TV), Natasha Richardson/John Reilly, Blythe Danner/Aidan Quinn, Elizabeth Marvel in Ivo van Hove's wacko production at New York Theater Workshop, Gillian Anderson (NT Live on YouTube), Marin Mazzie (Barrington Stage), Nicole Ari Parker/Blair Underwood, Cate Blanchett/Joel Edgarton, Vivien Leigh/Marlon Brando (film), Ann-Margret/Treat Williams (TV).

Calm Cat and Placid Picnic

Sebastian Stan in Picnic
Credit: Joan Marcus

Two of the hottest playwrights of the 1950s are represented on Broadway right now with recently-opened revivals of Pulitzer Prize-winning works. Both William Inge's Picnic (1953) and Tennessee Williams' Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955) are by gay authors, feature hunky heroes in states of undress, and deal with the adverse effects of repressed sexuality.Both new productions which opened in the same week are surprisingly tepid. When they first opened, the plays addressed the rampant puritanism of America which included ignoring homosexuality altogether. Today, open sexuality of all persuasions is everywhere and the directors of these productions seem to have forgotten these topics were once so shocking.

In Picnic, the forces of repressions work to stifle the happiness of all the characters. The "old-maid" schoolteacher Rosemary Sydney (played by Elizabeth Marvel here, Eileen Heckart in the original Broadway production and Rosalind Russell in the movie) derisively comments on the bare torso of Hal Carter, the macho drifter who sets off sexual fireworks in a small Kansas town.It's later revealed Rosemary led a committee to have a naked male statue "castrated" by a janitor with a chisel. She represents the hypocrisy of sexual repression.