Cat on a Hot Tin Roof on Broadway

There’s been some huff over the use of curse words in the current Broadway revival of Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, which I had the pleasure of seeing last Sunday, and even the matinee was nearly sold out. As the New York Times reported, those curse words are Williams’s own, which he added to versions later than the 1955 Broadway production and the well-known 1958 movie starring Elizabeth Taylor and Paul Newman. A Google Books search reveals "poon-tang" is even Williams’s own inclusion. For the audience I was with, dirty words merely evoked laughter, which was a bit strange while witnessing the grimness of the story and the baseness of the characters.

Dreamgirls costar Anika Noni Rose’s Maggie the Cat and Phylicia Rashad’s (known best as the Cosby Show mother) Big Mama are superb, and I couldn’t help but love James Earl Jones—who I saw in our very own 360 Park Avenue South a few months ago, with a copy of the play in his pocket, long before I even knew it was being produced—and Terrence Howard despite the mixed review in the Times.