Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (2012)
The marketing, as you can see, is built around Scarlett Johansson as Maggie "the Cat," with her giving a come-hither look in the poster. What's interesting is, despite her alluring figure, her Maggie isn't particularly sexy. She makes a sympathetic character--as Williams noted, she's the only one who seems to have any sense--but she doesn't ooze sexuality. This is by no means a bad thing, and we (which means I) got to see her in a slip. Her Maggie is brassy, with more than touch of Kathleen Turner in the performance.
I've written about the plot of the play already, so I'll stick to the production. The set, designed by Christopher Gram, is Maggie and Brick's round bedroom, with the bed smack dab in the middle of it. Behind the head of the bed is the dry sink, where Brick repeatedly returns to get a drink (between this play and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, which I saw last month, there are gallons of spirits consumed). The bed is used for almost everything but sex, as Maggie can't get Brick to go to bed with her, because he's pining for his dead friend, who was likely his gay lover (in a directorial touch, Ashford has an actor playing Skippy wandering around the stage as Brick imagines him).
While Johansson, who surprised people with her performance on Broadway in A View from the Bridge (she won a Tony), ably handles Maggie, I wasn't thrilled with Benjamin Walker as Brick, but I think it's more the writing--this is a tough part to make sing. Brick literally carries a crutch, a forced metaphor, and is almost always looking out the window, wanting to be anywhere else but there. When people speak to him he tends to repeat the lines back. I don't remember this problem with Paul Newman in the film version, but it sticks out in this production.
The highlight of the production, as it is surely almost always, is Big Daddy, the patriarch of the family who is celebrating his 65th birthday, unknowing of his terminal cancer. Here he is played by Irish actor Ciaran Hinds, who drawls a bit like Foghorn Leghorn, but commands the stage as the man should. He is verbally abusive to almost everyone, especially his wife (Deborah Monk), his favorite epithet "Crap!" which I'm sure would have been more vulgar if Williams had written the play today. In his crisp white suit, slight mullet, and pointed beard, he suggests Colonel Sanders on a rampage.
The long conversation between Big Daddy and Brick, in which the father finally comes out and suggests that Brick is drinking because he misses Skippy, is the highlight of the production, and is when Walker is able to shine and Hinds is spellbinding. The third act, when Brick's obsequious brother (Michael Park) and his shrewish wife (Emily Bergl) realize they may not inherit the estate also makes for some enjoyable fireworks. Park's face, even from my vantage point in the cheap seats, turned a vivid scarlet as he voiced his resentment at the favoritism shown to his younger brother (at one point Monk refers to Brick as her "only son," right in front of the brother).
Ashford, judging by his biography, is mostly a helmer of musicals. He's a choreographer, which helps when there as many as a dozen characters on stage, five of them small children running through the room shooting cap guns. But at times there is an awkwardness. Granted, this was the first performance, and there might be tweaks before the opening, but it doesn't appear the director has a grasp of the material.
Still, though it's a mixed bag, I'm glad I saw it. When I left the theater, a line had already started forming by the backstage entrance. I'm sure it was for Johansson, and if I didn't have to get home to go to bed, I probably would have joined the line, just to get a glimpse of her.
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