Word: cats
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Alice, a musical adaptation of the Walt Disney classic, which is a cartoon adaptation of Lewis Caroll's essay on sex and revolution, is playing at the MIT Student Center this weekend. Rumor has it that the MIT Players wanted Derek Bok to play the Cheshire Cat (he does have such a nice smile), but it turns out he can't sing. Charles Colson, who can and did sing, was next in line for the role, but his new agent, a fellow Chuck calls "God," said there wasn't enough money in it. Whoever they got to be the cat...
...seemed appropriate to someone to select a work dating from 1955, the year the AST opened. The choice fell on Cat on a Hot Tin Roof by Tennessee Williams, who is, along with Arthur Miller, generally considered one of the two foremost native dramatists of our time...
...Broadway audiences were confronted with the topic during the twenties and thirties through such plays as The Captive, The Pleasure Man (by Mae West--who, we tend to forget, wrote as well as acted), The Children's Hour, The Green Bay Tree and, later, Tea and Sympathy. Prior to Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Williams himself had invoked the subject tangentially in A Streetcar Named Desire, and would return to it more seriously three years later in Suddenly Last Summer...
...theater audiences have notoriously short memories. When Cat was first mounted, Williams was widely deemed a purveyor of sex, sensationalism and violence; the play was found shocking, with most of the talk focussed on homosexuality and the inclusion of a bawdy joke about an elephant's erection...
...racketeer who understands that it's all a racket. "Marriage, politics, big business- everybody plays cops and robbers," and who says "Listen, lousy," when he means "I love you," Steven Gilborn's Moe Axelrod grows on you throughout the production. Donald Buka polishes off the role of the fat cat capitalist Uncle Morty as effortlessly as he wolfs down the huge dinner with which Bessie woos...