"Crap!" As the iconic, force-of-nature patriarch Big Daddy Pollitt, James Earl Jones hurls the expletive like a hand grenade, disrupting the polite chitchat of his obsequious family as they surround him to celebrate his 65th birthday and claim their share of his vast plantation. Big Daddy utters stronger epithets in short explosive bursts to express his disgust with conventional society and its hypocrisy, and Jones turns the cliché "bull in a china shop" into a vital reality as he crashes about the well-appointed Pollitt mansion, endowing this harsh former field hand with such subtext that you can almost feel the dirt and sweat as he speaks of his hardscrabble history. It's a towering performance capping an extraordinary career.
But this is Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, not Big Daddy Busts Out. Whenever Jones leaves the stage, Debbie Allen's all-African-American revival of Tennessee Williams' classic Southern-fried scorcher suffers. Allen, best known as a dynamic musical performer and choreographer, stages this complex drama like a broad sitcom. Maggie the Cat's long Act 1 monologue, in which she reveals her anger over her husband Brick's heavy drinking and refusal to sleep with her, comes across as empty chatter. Howls of laughter are elicited as Brick registers boredom, and the scene becomes a skit about a gossipy wife who won't shut up rather than an aria of sexual frustration.
Allen inserts the occasional unnecessary musical interlude, opening each of the three acts with an onstage New Orleans-style saxophone player blowing a bluesy riff, setting a razzmatazz tone disconnected from the material. She also has blocking problems, with too much traffic backing up into the corners of Ray Klausen's cluttered bedroom set.
Apart from Jones, the cast is largely at sea, though Phylicia Rashad manages a few moving moments as the befuddled Big Mama. Anika Noni Rose's Maggie is more of a cute sex kitten than the required fiery feline, failing to convince that she would scratch and claw for her husband's inheritance and to reclaim his love. As Brick, Terrence Howard is impressive in his extended scene with Big Daddy, his estranged father, but otherwise lapses into surface readings. In addition, he prances around the character's latent-homosexual subtext, missing several dimensions of meaning. Giancarlo Esposito and Lisa Arrindell Anderson give two of the worst performances of the season as the avaricious Gooper and Mae. Speaking in exaggerated drawls and gesticulating wildly, they make this ambitious but human couple so obviously villainous that they totally lack credibility.
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof has had more than nine lives. Allen's is one of its lesser ones, worth seeing only for a magnificent James Earl Jones.
Presented by Front Row Productions and Stephen C. Byrd with Alia M. Jones in association with Clarence J. Chandran, Norm Nixon, Michael Fuchs, Anthony Lacavera, Edward J. Jones, Sheanna Pang, Jovan Vitagliano, and Al Wilson
at the Broadhurst Theatre, 235 W. 44th St., NYC.
March 6-June 15. Tue., 7 p.m.; Wed.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Wed. and Sat., 2 p.m.; Sun., 3 p.m.
(212) 239-6200 or (800) 432-7250 or www.telecharge.com.
Casting by Peter Wise & Associates.