All-black 'Cat on a Hot Tin Roof' heats up Broadway

by Linda Winer

Newsday (MCT)

3 March 2008

When “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” was on Broadway in 2003, the marquee seduced theatergoers with a gigantic poster of Ashley Judd and Jason Patric in their underwear.

When the steamy Tennessee Williams classic was revived three years earlier, Kathleen Turner in a slip loomed above the box office - her torso tilting uptown, her legs crossed toward Broadway, her face turned defiantly toward the house.

But what’s this outside the Broadhurst Theatre, where yet another production of the 1955 Pulitzer Prize winner opens Thursday? Yes, there is a shimmering image of the current Maggie the Cat, looking sultry in white push-up satin. But she has been pushed back to a spot over one shoulder of her moody husband, Brick, while his mother and father stand up close behind him.

Clearly, the ads are selling something beyond sex and stars. Of course, with Terrence Howard ("Hustle & Flow") as Brick, Anika Noni Rose (the movie “Dreamgirls” and a Tony winner for “Caroline, or Change") as Maggie, James Earl Jones as Big Daddy and Phylicia Rashad as Big Mama, there are plenty of both commodities to sell.

For the first time on Broadway, the family is black. Stephen Byrd, 54, a private equities investor with no prior producing experience, has put 14 years and $3.8 million of his own money toward seeing a black “Cat.” There has been at least one such production, nine years ago in Virginia, but this is the first major recasting of the ripe Mississippi melodrama about the overheated Maggie, her alcoholic (and probably gay) husband and his family of grasping, lying grotesques and vulgarians.

The project has been off and on with different stars and directors for a long time. Byrd says he got the Williams estate to approve his dream, so long as Jones played Big Daddy. Debbie Allen, sister of Rashad and better known as an actress and choreographer, directs Williams’ 1973 revision - the one with all the naughty words he couldn’t use in the `50s.

Byrd has promised “a historical presentation of a classic piece of theater.” Judging by the hot ticket sales during previews, he may be onto something.

But can it work? We are long past any prolonged brow-furrowing about the superficial logic of nontraditional casting. Right now, S. Epatha Merkerson has a white husband in the revival of William Inge’s `50s chestnut, “Come Back, Little Sheba.” Morgan Freeman, who stars in Mike Nichols’ multiracial revival of Clifford Odets’ “The Country Girl” this season, played roughhouse romance with Tracey Ullman in “The Taming of the Shrew” in Central Park 18 years ago.

But will audiences accept a black self-made multimillionaire and plantation owner in the Deep South in the `50s? Big Daddy does, after all, say he got rich by “working like a - in the field.” As I understand it, the only deleted lines relate to Brick’s lost football days at the University of Mississippi, an impossibility at the then-segregated college.

In 1967, of all the racially fraught years, producer David Merrick decided to freshen up the long-running “Hello, Dolly!” by recasting the whole show with black performers, including Pearl Bailey in what had been the Carol Channing showcase. (Morgan Freeman was in that one, too, presumably singing and dancing.) Merrick, a showman among showmen, took out a full-page ad in The New York Times proclaiming it “The Event of the Century.” Maybe it wasn’t. But it sold out for two years.

Where race is concerned, however, the ground is always shifting. In 1990, Broadway had an all-black version of “Oh, Kay!” - a 1926 Gershwin farce about high-living playboys and dukes in Prohibition. In my upbeat review, I said it used to be a fluffball musical with white people and now it is a fluffball musical with black people. Imagine my surprise to read a colleague’s review, condemning it as a “minstrel show.”

Was it? Should I have been offended? Should anyone have been offended? I still don’t know.

Williams never wrote major African-American characters, though black music, especially the blues, permeates much of the heated air of his early best work. In his 1974 “Memoirs” - written a decade before he choked to death in a Manhattan hotel - Williams recalls a meal he had in Harlem with an author of a jazz-history book.

Williams says the fellow made “such a wise and amusing `black’ remark that I wrote it down on a paper napkin.” It said, “God don’t come when you want Him, but He’s right on time.”

“Cat,” with its repressed sexuality and poetic symbolism, hasn’t worn that well in recent revivals. Perhaps this one will be right on time again.