Spat on a hot tin roof

When the Broadway curtain rose on Anika Nomi Rose as Maggie in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, the hot-gumbo drama of Southern mendacity and sexual longing, two prime seats remained unoccupied.

They had been saved for Democratic hopeful Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle. It had seemed such an obvious cultural coming together: America's first black presidential prospect meeting the first black incarnation on Broadway of Tennessee Williams's quintessential southern belle. Obama was sure to show up. It might be significant that he didn't.

Rose, 36, who starred in the Motown biopic Dreamgirls and won a Tony for the 2004 musical Caroline, or Change, has so far met with mixed reviews. Cat was a smash hit when first performed on Broadway in 1955 and as Maggie, Rose (above) has to follow in the smoldering paw prints of Barbara Bel Geddes, the original Cat, and fill the negligee flaunted by Elizabeth Taylor in the 1958 movie version.

The New York Times was turned on: "Though Ms Rose wears a slinky slip as beguilingly as Ms Taylor did, it's her take-charge energy and unembarrassed directness that makes this Maggie such a stimulating presence."

But the Hollywood Reporter was turned off: "In the first scene Rose, wearing Maggie's trademark slip, writhes and poses suggestively with all the subtlety of a porn star." Cat had become a "raucous family sitcom".

Either way, the publicity stills of Rose's bronze-brown legs propped up against the post of a four-poster bed are box office Viagra. But in this production it is neither the red-hot tempo of the play nor the sexiness of the female lead which is the talking point. Instead it is the gimmick of an all-black cast. This is Black Cat, and that is why Obama (above) was expected to add his stellar presence to the opening night.

It is daft. The genius of Williams's play is its scorching expose of white Southern culture: the anguished denial of homosexuality in Brick, Maggie's impotent husband; the repressed sexuality of Maggie; the arrogant power of the plantation owner 'Big Daddy' and the greed of the family fighting for his wealth... and so on.

This is the 'white boy's' curse. Why dump it on blacks who have suffered quite enough? Some see 'minority' performers breaking the bonds of typecasting for better work opportunities; others a bold assault on a white institution. Why should a play about whites be white, they ask. Why, indeed, should the White House be white? Vote Obama!

But the hope of Obama's presidential challenge is the possibility of his race being no longer relevant. As the New York Sun's critic Eric Grode pointed out, Black Cat "is colour-coded casting".

This Broadhurst Theatre production is something from the era of agitprop and Black Power salutes. Rose (left) boasts: "It's good to be back on the Great White Way and it's nice that it's a browner Way this year". And that's a shame. ·