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June 25, 2004
TT: Another cat skinned
The Wall Street Journal sent me to Washington a couple of weeks ago to check out the Kennedy Center's revival of Tennessee Williams' Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, directed by Mark Lamos and starring Mary Stuart Masterton, Jeremy Davidson, George Grizzard, and Dana Ivey as, respectively, Maggie, Brick, Big Daddy and Big Mama. My review appears in this morning's paper, and it's broadly similar to what I thought of last year's Broadway revival: I didn't like the youngsters, but the old hands knocked me out. As for the play itself, well, let's just say eeuuww:Mind you, I don't much care for "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof," which I dismissed in my review of the Broadway revival as "a flabby, pseudo-poetic period piece that leaves you wondering what all the shouting is about--and there's a whole lot of shouting going on." For that matter, I don't much care for Tennessee Williams in general, most of whose plays seem to me to be peopled by a peculiar race of sentimental, logorrheic mutants bearing no obvious resemblance to human beings. As far as I'm concerned, Mary McCarthy nailed it in a single sentence of her 1948 review of "A Streetcar Named Desire": "Dr. Kinsey would be interested in a semi-skilled male who spoke of the four-letter act as ‘getting those colored lights going.'"
Big Daddy is no more convincing than Stanley Kowalski, least of all in the second-act speech in which he claims to sympathize with Brick's sexual confusion: "One thing you can grow on a big place more important than cotton!--is tolerance!--I grown it." Show me a plantation owner of his vintage who was capable of uttering those words, or anything remotely resembling them, and I'll eat a whole plateful of raw cotton drenched in molasses....
Meanwhile, back on Broadway, I paid a visit to Hairspray, which has a new pair of leads:
I confess to still being left cold as a Popsicle by its noisy blend of rock 'n' roll pastiche and what can only be called civil-rights kitsch. On the other hand, Jack O'Brien's staging and Jerry Mitchell's choreography are energetic and ingenious, and the current cast continues to deliver the goods, ramming "Hairspray"'s tedious little commercials for tolerance down your throat with all the gusto of a Disney cartoon. If that warms your cockles, rest assured that the Quality Control Department at the Neil Simon Theatre remains on the job.
No link, so either buy a paper or--better yet--subscribe to The Wall Street Journal Online, which is so convenient (and costs so much less) that I actually let my dead-tree subscription lapse and now read the Journal on my iBook each morning. In case you haven't heard, there's far more to the Journal than money and me. It also publishes top-notch arts criticism, daily book reviews, and the Friday Weekend Journal section in which my drama reviews appear. To subscribe, go here.
Posted June 25, 2004 12:15 PM
