She has managed to avoid ever catching Taylor in the 1958 classic film, except for a few minutes. It happened while she was looking up a Marlon Brando film online and YouTube recommended a clip from “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.”
“I clicked and watched a couple of minutes and I realized it was a terrible idea,” she says. “Not saying anything about the film, it's just a different version of the story.”
She and Ashford are after a more naturalized take. To that end, Maggie will be trying to seduce her husband emotionally, not physically. “What we've set out from the beginning is to take these characters off these pedestals where they've been placed and try to put them back in the play,” Ashford says.
OK, then what about the poster for the show, which features a reclining Johansson, lips slightly apart, loosely wrapped in white material and looking almost post-coital? Ashley sees not sex, but ache. “I think it's her longing,” he says.
Johansson had been looking for a way to return to Broadway since “A View From the Bridge” closed. She sifted through new scripts and classics, searching for something meaty.
“I think after doing ‘View,' I realized that I didn't want to work on anything that wasn't challenging in some way and that brought me into a whole different world. I didn't want to do an easy job,” she says.
“One day I was daydreaming and remembered ‘Cat' and thought, ‘I should read that again,”' she recalls. “It was just terrifying. It was the first thing I felt that way about in the couple of years that I'd been looking.”
The actress was raised in New York and she and her mother often made their way to Broadway, seeing “Gypsy,” ‘'Secret Garden,” ‘'Carousel,” ‘'My Fair Lady” with Richard Chamberlain and Brian Dennehy in “Death of a Salesman,” among others.
