The Rose Tattoo
Opening Night: October 15, 2019
Closing: December 8, 2019
Theater: American Airlines
This is one Tennessee Williams woman you won’t soon forget. Academy Award winner Marisa Tomei unleashes a tour de force as Serafina, a widow who rekindles her desire for love, lust and life in the arms of a fiery suitor. Sharply directed by Trip Cullman (Significant Other), Williams’s lesser-known gem sizzles with humor and heart one sultry summer off the coast of Louisiana. Don’t miss Tomei’s quintessential performance—erupting from the depths of despair to the heights of passion in this Tony Award-winning Best Play.
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October 15, 2019
“The Rose Tattoo” is an anomaly among Tennessee Williams’ great dramas. Despite the fact that it concerns a protagonist newly widowed, it’s essentially a romantic comedy, a genre Williams was never really known for, but he came up with this charmingly spirited story after returning from a getaway in Sicily with his lover and was said to be floating on a romantic high. It’s still far from his best, and it really only hits the mark when the lead performances are strong and the production is tightly focused. This time around, they got it only half right.
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October 15, 2019
You thought tropical storms were disruptive? The Italian-Americans living along the Gulf Coast in the Roundabout Theater Company’s untethered revival of Tennessee Williams’s “The Rose Tattoo” are really up against the elements, and so are the actors playing them. But it’s nothing as palpable as a hurricane that keeps knocking them off balance and making them flail like sandpipers in a heavy wind. To understand what’s sweeping through this production, which opened at the American Airlines Theater on Tuesday with a cast led by a valiant Marisa Tomei, listen to the words of Assunta, a wise old Sicilian signora.
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October 15, 2019
“The Rose Tattoo” is what happens when a poet writes a comedy — something strange, but kind of lovely. The same might be said of director Trip Cullman’s production: Strange, if not exactly lovely. Even Marisa Tomei, so physically delicate and expressively refined, seems an odd choice to play the lusty and passionate protagonist, Serafina Delle Rose. She, too, is kind of lovely — if lost.
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October 15, 2019
The trailer for the 1955 film adaptation of Tennessee Williams’ The Rose Tattoo, which won Anna Magnani a best actress Oscar, proclaims: “Will leave its imprint forever. With the memory of its seething violence! Its lusty drama! Its startling frankness!” Even if the typically emphatic hyperbole of that era’s movie marketing oversells it, a disconnect as big as the Gulf of Mexico separates those claims from this wobbly Broadway revival, which tackles the problem of a dated melodrama by playing up the comedy at the expense of any real feeling. Marisa Tomei’s earthy performance as half-crazed Sicilian American widow Serafina Delle Rose is the main attraction in Trip Cullman’s maddeningly uneven production, first seen in 2016 at the Williamstown Theatre Festival with a mostly different supporting cast. Tomei emotes up a storm more brooding even than the clouds billowing over the Louisiana Gulf Coast in Lucy Mackinnon’s atmospheric wraparound projections.
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October 15, 2019
Imagine you’re invited to some netherworld, Southern Gothic-themed cocktail party peopled with Tennessee Williams heroines. There’s Amanda Wingfield and Blanche DuBois competing for pity with wilted stories of glory days, Maggie the Cat in her slip, stalking waiters, and lusty Maxine walking a leashed iguana and a cabana boy or two. Even among this look-at-me bunch, The Rose Tattoo‘s Serafina Delle Rose would be a spectacle, the brash, loud and vulgar center of attention outtalking everyone else, bragging about her long-dead husband’s bedroom talents, how the two got those colored lights going like even Stanley Kowalski would envy. Now imagine Serafina portrayed by Marisa Tomei in prodigious Cousin Vinny Oscar-getting mode, and you’ll maybe get a sense of director Trip Cullman’s tonally raucous production of The Rose Tattoo, opening on Broadway tonight in a Roundabout Theatre Company presentation at American Airlines Theatre.
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