“(Tennessee) Williams would probably love Matt de Rogatis’ Brick.” – Juan Ramirez, The New York Times

“Brilliant…intense…funny!” – Dave Carlin, CBS

“An innovative Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.” – Harry Haun, The Observer

Ruth Stage Sets Dates For Unprecedented Off Broadway Re-Engagement

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof By Tennessee Williams Directed by Joe Rosario

Previews Begin February 24th Opening Night March 5th Must Close March 31st
 

Theatre at St. Clement’s

423 W 46th Street – NYC

Limited 42 Performance Re-Engagement www.ruthstage.org

On the heels of a 35 show run this past summer, Ruth Stage has announced that their provocative and controversial modern staging of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof will return to New York City in early 2023.

Directed by Joe Rosario, the Off Broadway premiere of the Tennessee Williams masterpiece, concluded its run on August the 14th playing to sold out audiences and standing ovations.

“Very happy” with the Off Broadway premiere production, the Tennessee Williams estate has yet again given their blessing to the maverick theater group, Ruth Stage, and an unprecedented re-engagement license has been issued. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof will play at the Theatre at St. Clement’s (423 W 46th St.) for an additional 42 performances with previews beginning on Friday February 24th 2023. Opening night is scheduled for Sunday March 5th, 2023. The production will close on Friday night March 31st, 2023.

Tennessee Williams’ sultry, southern storm of a play about greed, deceit, self-delusion, sexual desire and repression, homophobia, sexism, and the looming specter of death won the Pulitzer Prize in 1955. Ruth Stage’s modern and haunting interpretation is set in an estate in the Mississippi Delta of Big Daddy Pollitt, a wealthy cotton tycoon. The play examines the relationships among members of Big Daddy’s highly dysfunctional family, primarily between his son Brick and Maggie the “Cat”, Brick’s wife.

Matt de Rogatis will reprise his critically acclaimed role as “Brick” in the new production.

Further casting and design team announcements will be made in the coming weeks. Tickets, priced between $39 and $125, are on sale now and can be purchased at either www.ruthstage.org/cat or www.telecharge.com.

Matt de Rogatis (Brick) Some previous New York City credits for Matt de Rogatis (Brick) include “Frederick Clegg” in the United States premiere of The Collector at 59E59, “Richard III” in Austin Pendleton’s Wars of the Roses (124 Bank Street Theater), “Tom” in The Glass Menagerie (Wild Project) and “Roy” in Lone Star (Triad). He was last seen on stage as “Brick” in Ruth Stage’s summer 2022 Off Broadway premiere of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (Theatre at St.

Clement’s). Find Matt on social media @themightydero and www.mattderogatis.com

Joe Rosario (Director) is a writer, producer, actor and director from the New York City area. As an actor he has appeared on The Sopranos, Ed, Law and Order, Sex and the City, Law and Order SVU, Oz, 100 Centre St, Hope and Faith, and the original pilot Thunderbox. Joe has also appeared numerous times on The Chappelle Show and The View in various comedic skits and was a re-occurring character on the Late Show with David Letterman. He has also appeared in over 50 commercials. Rosario is also an award winning filmmaker and producer. His films and scripts have been official selections at over 50 festivals including Cannes, Barcelona and the New York International Film Festival. His feature length drama, Snapshot, starring Zach McGowan of Shameless, was one of his winning submissions. A resident of New Jersey, Joe is also an accomplished acting teacher and he coaches many actors seen on TV and film. Rosario directed the summer 2022 Off Broadway premiere of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof at the Theatre at St. Clement’s in New York City.

Tennessee Williams (1911-1983) explored passion with daring honesty and forged a poetic theatre of raw psychological insight that shattered conventional proprieties and transformed the American stage. The autobiographical The Glass Menagerie brought what Mr. Williams called “the catastrophe of success,” a success capped by A Streetcar Named Desire, one of the most influential works of modern American literature. An extraordinary series of masterpieces followed, including Vieux Carre, Sweet Bird of Youth, The Rose Tattoo, Orpheus Descending and the classic Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.

(Production logo and photo: Ruth Stage)

(Daniel Lewis’s article appeared in The New York Times,. 10/11; via Pam Green; Photo:  Angela Lansbury; Ms. Lansbury  as Madame Arcati in the 2009 production of “Blithe Spirit” with, from left, Jayne Atkinson, Christine Ebersole and Rupert Everett. The role won Ms. Lansbury her fifth Tony.Credit…Sara Krulwich/The New York Times.)

She was a Hollywood and Broadway sensation, but she captured the biggest audience of her career as the TV sleuth Jessica Fletcher.

Angela Lansbury, a formidable actress who captivated Hollywood in her youth, became a Broadway musical sensation in middle age and then drew millions of fans as a widowed mystery writer on the long-running television series “Murder, She Wrote,” died on Tuesday at her home in Los Angeles. She was 96.

Her death was announced in a statement by her family.

Ms. Lansbury was the winner of five Tony Awards for her starring performances on the New York stage, from “Mame” in 1966 to “Blithe Spirit” in 2009, when she was 83, a testament to her extraordinary stamina. Yet she appeared on Broadway only from time to time over a seven-decade career in film, theater and television in which there were also years when nothing seemed to be coming up roses.

The English-born daughter of an Irish actress, she was just 18 when she landed her first movie role, as Charles Boyer’s cheeky Cockney servant in the thriller “Gaslight” (1944), a precocious debut that brought her a contract with MGM and an Academy Award nomination for best supporting actress. She received a second Oscar nomination in 1946, for her supporting performance as a dance-hall girl in “The Picture of Dorian Gray.”

It was a giddy start for a young woman who at 14 had fled wartime London with her mother and had only recently graduated from New York’s Feagin School of Dramatic Art. Ms. Lansbury imagined she might have a future as a leading lady, but, she said in a New York Times interview in 2009, she was not comfortable trying to climb that ladder.

“I wasn’t very good at being a starlet,” she said. “I didn’t want to pose for cheesecake photos and that kind of thing.”

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(David Jays’s article appeared in the Guardian, 9/27; via Pam Green; Photo:  Swerving convention … Olivier Huband (Ferdinand) and Ferdy Roberts (Prospero) in The Tempest at Shakespeare’s Globe, directed by Sean Holmes. Photograph: Marc Brenner. )

Misogynist gags? Ancient puns? Unethical bed tricks? Theatre-makers discuss how they tackle the Bard’s trickier works

Earlier this year, I spoke to the actor Natasha Magigi, a regular at Shakespeare’s Globe. With the audience crowding close around the stage, she must know exactly when a play is or isn’t landing, I suggested. “One hundred per cent. You can see the whites of people’s eyes and you can also see when they start to zone out. You can’t pretend that you haven’t said something weird, especially if you catch someone’s eye.”

The conversation made me wonder where audiences and creatives stub their toes on Shakespeare’s plays. Unfamiliar language, outdated ethics, baffling behaviour? We’ve become used to sifting racism or sexism in these texts – but what other problems give people pause in rehearsal or performance?

Blanche McIntyre has been juggling problems in All’s Well That Ends Well, one of the gnarliest of the comedies, currently staged at the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It’s almost as though Shakespeare wrote an anti-romcom,” the director says. “Every time it seems to be progressing straightforwardly, there’s a sudden turn and everyone is left sprawling in the dust.”

Nonetheless, McIntyre explains, “intractable problems, both of situation and personality, make for juicy drama. You go to watch people going through things that you can’t imagine going through.” In All’s Well (“famously the play where you don’t like anyone”), the biggest stumbling block is a moral one – Helena, the heroine, beds her crush Bertram by convincing him he’s having sex with someone else. “The idea of a bed trick is ethically questionable,” McIntyre protests. “It’s essentially a sexual assault: Bertram can’t consent because he doesn’t know who he’s sleeping with. But the play has no problem with the bed trick. The play thinks it’s fine; it even cheers her on.”

She refuses to skate over this “appalling” moment. “When the world of the play contains this poisonous central act, I cannot excuse it to the audience. It’s a play about incredibly flawed people who do awful things to each other, and this is the worst of many.” It nonetheless helps McIntyre and Rosie Sheehy, playing Helena, to reassess the heroine – her quest is “a romantic fixation that develops into an obsession. The first half is full of her soliloquies. She shares her thoughts and feelings – it’s very unguarded. At a certain point she stops talking to us, and that’s the point where she gets this idea. I hope the audience will go on a journey of separation.”

Much Ado About Nothing might seem a smoother ride. The romantic comedy is everywhere this year – Robert Hastie’s co-production for Sheffield Theatres and Ramps on the Moon follows other versions at the RSC, Globe and National Theatre. He cites Peter Brook’s description of Shakespeare’s plays being like planets with regular orbits: “There are times when certain plays swing closer to us.” With Much Ado: “I feel like I know these people. I feel like I’ve been these people on occasion.

“In our show,” he continues, “the actors largely identify as deaf or disabled, so the characters do as well. We are surprised by how much the text not only allows for that, but chimes with it and makes it a rewarding artistic experience.” Their lived experience informs a plot driven by being misheard or misconstrued. “It’s absolutely riddled with overhearing, spying and picking up information that you either misunderstand or misinterpret. We are striving for clarity, so we’re working with British Sign Language, captioning and audio description throughout. There’s an enjoyable dance about how we make things clear to the audience when we need the characters to swim in confusion.”

The most devastating mistake has young Claudio assume his fiancée Hero has betrayed him. “When he sees somebody having sex at a distance, why does Claudio believe that it’s Hero? Crucially, Shakespeare doesn’t stage that moment, leaving the actual witnessing to an audience’s imagination.” Claudio is duped by the play’s blatant villain, Don John. “You’ve got to ask yourself, what are the forces operating in this society that make what he suggests so readily accepted by other men?” Hastie asks. “He goes big with the lie, and it taps into something in the male psyche – none of the women believe him.”

A similar dynamic, says Sean Holmes, informs The Winter’s Tale, which he directs at the Globe in February and which also turns on accusations of female infidelity. “King Leontes has this insane attack of jealousy,” he explains. “Everyone says, you’re mad – but because of the monarchical system there is no way to properly challenge him.”

For Holmes, the dilemma is less what’s in the plays but what surrounds them: “Four hundred years of accrued assumptions around Shakespeare. You can’t ignore his dominance in our cultural life, even if you’ve never seen Hamlet. We’re trying to make it like a new play has dropped in our lap, and scrape the barnacles – the received ideas – off the hull of the boat.” With The Tempest, that means swerving conventions like “Prospero as an old guy with a white beard” – Holmes has cast Ferdy Roberts wearing only bright yellow budgie smugglers.

Holmes’ frequent designer Grace Smart notes that designers aren’t immune to received ideas. Of their recent Hamlet, she says: “I thought it was really clever and wicked to put him in a beanie and raincoat. Sean had to sidle up and go, that’s what they all do.” As McIntyre has found, it may be easier to rethink less familiar plays like Titus Andronicus or The Two Noble Kinsmen. “I would much rather have the difficult, thorny ones that are less well known,” she confirms. “You can surprise the audience better.”

Holmes and Smart similarly refreshed Shakespeare’s back-stabbing early history plays. “Grace had a brilliant idea,” Holmes says. “When we got into the wars of the roses they had football shirts with numbers and names on. We were in a weird, non-naturalistic world where they were not using swords but choking each other in the mud. When somebody suffocates somebody else with a plastic bag, that’s really unpleasant.”

If there’s one thing worse than Shakespeare’s gore, it’s his comedy. Who hasn’t endured the tumbleweed silence of an audience faced with ancient puns? Both Much Ado and All’s Well contain clown roles that are notoriously hard to animate. “On the page some of it is woefully uncomic,” Hastie concedes. Casting helps, he reckons, getting “a brilliant comic actor in the room” – in his case Caroline Parker, as the watchman Dogberry.

When I mention comedy to McIntyre, she sighs in frustration. She too lauds a “brilliant” actor, Will Edgerton as the jester Lavache in All’s Well, but his gags are “so misogynist, so dark, so angry – it’s hard to imagine how an audience today would have their funny bones tickled. There’s a strand in the play of male aggression about women – Lavache takes this to an extreme place and draws your attention to the fact that many other characters do that as well. So long as there are jokes elsewhere, I don’t mind if Lavache isn’t where the jokes live.”

In a recent RSC podcast, David Tennant describes negotiating As You Like It’s often mirthless Touchstone with the voice guru Cicely Berry: “She encouraged me to use the rhythms, which are those of a standup comic. If you phrase something in the right rhythm you can make an audience laugh even though they clearly don’t understand the joke. You can trick people.”

Hastie argues that clowning blooms in “a strong context. Much Ado is structured around a series of parties – you go from welcoming party to masked ball to wedding to funeral to another wedding, so we’re making Dogberry and his crew sort of wedding planners. I nick a couple of lines from another play to pull it together. It’s like the reconstruction of dinosaurs in Jurassic Park, where they’re missing a couple of the strands of DNA so fill in with frog DNA. King John is our frog DNA.”

Editing the text is standard modern practice. On Hamlet, Holmes worked with the dramaturg Zoë Svendsen, who “noticed that the speeches are so densely put together that they’re quite hard to cut. Whereas it’s very surprisingly easy to move a scene, if you keep the narrative.”

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