Wait a minute, everyone celebrates with what? That isn’t in the script – All My Sons ends with the patriarch killing himself to end his unbearable guilt and then everyone unites in a tableau of profound grief. Where’s all this bloody cake come from?

Oh, Tom Cruise. We should have known. Yesterday was Katie Holmes‘ 30th birthday, so Tom Cruise sent cake and champagne for everyone in the play to enjoy. In a tableau of profound grief, obviously.

On the surface it might look like Tom Cruise controls Katie Holmes’ life to the extent that she constantly looks relieved not to be chained up in her kennel-dungeon and drip-fed rainwater, but the truth is that Tom Cruise needs Katie Holmes to help him promote movies.

For instance, War Of The Worlds was the Tom Cruise And Katie Holmes Get Engaged movie, and it was all very sweet and lovely and romantic. Then Mission: Impossible III turned out to be the Tom Cruise And Katie Holmes Have A Baby movie and, well, that was harder to find sweet and lovely and romantic because nobody really believed that the baby existed.

And now Tom Cruise has another movie coming out, about a one-eyed Nazi who couldn’t even blow up Hitler with a suitcase properly. But it’s a bit harder to rope Katie Holmes into promoting this one, because what would it be? The Tom Cruise Lets Katie Holmes Star In A Play movie? The Tom Cruise Stands Next To Katie Holmes And Everyone Sees What A Funny Little Elf He Is movie? It’s a tricky one.

Luckily, yesterday happened to be Katie Holmes’ 30th birthday, thereby making Valkyrie the Katie Holmes Reaches An Age Where People No Longer Mistake Her For Tom Cruise’s Daughter And Tom Cruise Sends Her A Cake To Celebrate Because He’s Too Busy To Do It In Person movie. God, Valkyrie’s going to be rubbish, isn’t it?

But, hey, who doesn’t like cake and a sing-song to puncture the emotional impact of a play about death? People reports:

Addressing the audience, Holmes’s costar John Lithgow announced, “Tom Cruise, our good friend, devoted fan to the show, doting husband of Katie, could not be here tonight. He’s heartsick that he couldn’t be here … So, he’s joining us, inviting all of you, to celebrate Katie’s birthday.” And with that, crewmembers wheeled out a five-tiered, white-frosted, circular birthday cake as the crowd cheered and applauded.

We were just kidding about Tom Cruise ruining the ending to the play, by the way – when Katie Holmes received the cake and read that it was iced with the inscription “Don’t eat any of this. The last thing I want is a fat wife. I can tell, you know. I’m always watching you. ALWAYS” the mood in the theatre returned to the tangible solemnity that Arthur Miller had always envisioned for the climax of his play. Tom Cruise saves the day again!

But now he’s exhausted engagements, childbirth and landmark birthdays to promote his films, Tom Cruise is in a bit of a bind. That’s why we’re comfortably predicting that Tom’s next movie will either be the Tom Cruise And Katie Holmes Divorce movie, the Tom Cruise And Katie Holmes Have A Marital Wobble But Ultimately Pull Through movie or the Katie Holmes Accidentally Falls Down A Flight Of Stairs And Mysteriously Dies And Tom Cruise Has To Tenderly Grieve In Public movie.

Which will it be? We’re so excited!

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Last night, that’s what the world got – Katie Holmes made her Broadway debut in Arthur Miller’s All My Sons. It’s a big career move for her – we’ll no longer see Katie Holmes as Tom Cruise’s wife, but as Tom Cruise’s wife who Tom Cruise occasionally lets star in plays so long as she promises to never get more famous than him.

All My Sons is, of course, a harsh critique of the American dream and an examination of culpability in the face of death. Or at least it was – we hear that Tom Cruise was at dress rehearsal last night, and as a result the finished play has got more atomic bombs and volcanoes and evil alien overlords in it. Plus the Katie Holmes character is now locked in something called a ‘Thetan Cage’ for the entire play. We don’t know why that is.

TV acting, film acting and stage acting are three very different disciplines and, now that Katie Holmes has managed to do all three, she’ll be able realise that stage acting is the most real. There are no hiding places, there’s an audience who will react to your every word and there’s enough repetition for you to explore the subtleties of your character.

Plus you can totally crawl out of your dressing room window and escape your lunatic controlling husband and his preposterous religious beliefs. If you have one, that is. Katie Holmes doesn’t, so she doesn’t have to worry.

Anyway, Katie Holmes will know this because her Broadway run of All My Sons opened in Broadway last night. Yes, technically we know that the play opened last month, but that was only for previews. Now it’s really open, so the world can really get to see what Katie Holmes is about, in her starring role as the girlfriend of a man whose father is the man who the play is really about. It literally doesn’t get any bigger than that.

But forget the play, because we want to know how Katie Holmes manages to juggle so many things at once, like having a minor role in an old play and being a mother and joylessly tramping around behind Tom Cruise in a pair of sunglasses all the time and trying to be friends with someone as pointless as Victoria Beckham.

But we must be the only ones, because People magazine had a quick Q&A with Katie Holmes directly after her performance about what was perhaps the most important and challenging theme of Arthur Miller’s play:

PEOPLE: Is it difficult balancing your theater work with being a mom?
KH: It’s a great schedule, because [Suri and I] get to spend the whole day together and then I go and do the play. Then I come home and we play some more!

PEOPLE: And Suri had her own dressing room at the theater?
KH: Yeah, we have a dressing room that is transformed into a playroom. It has a little piano.

Did you hear that noise? That was your mind blowing up.

However, Katie Holmes must have also been fairly excited ahead of her debut in All My Sons – not only would it teach her critics once and for all that she was an actress to contend with, but it’d also give her plenty of chances to blink out ‘HELP ME HELP ME HE KEEPS ME LOCKED IN A CAGE HELP ME’ in Morse code to a room of understanding strangers every night.

But, of course, Katie Holmes’ Broadway debut was also exciting for the members of anti-Scientology group Anonymous, who decided to bring down Scientology once and for all by getting about 20 people to stand outside the theatre holding some signs in a sort of semi-apologetic way. Yeah, take that, Scientology.

It’s hard to think of Katie Holmes as an actress these days, much less the actress who was once in Dawson’s Creek. Maybe that’s because she’s single-handedly been the worst thing in the – already mostly pretty terrible – films that she’s starred in lately, or maybe it’s because she seems to have given up acting for a life of glumly trudging three paces behind Tom Cruise with a weird boy’s haircut and her boobs taped down.

But either way, Katie Holmes recently realised that she needed to reassert her acting credentials and – having formally submitted the appropriate forms in triplicate to Tom Cruise’s Fresh Air Allowance clerk beforehand – was granted the temporary right to leave her hermetic dungeon on a regular basis to go and act in an Arthur Miller play.

It seemed so perfect at the time – nothing shows the public that an actor is serious about their craft like starring in an Arthur Miller play, the superb cast could take the strain if Katie Holmes ended up blowing, and Katie would get a few hours away from Tom Cruise marching up and down in his little Nazi eyepatch every night.

However, Katie Holmes hadn’t accounted for one thing – the thousands and thousands of anti-Scientologist protesters who’d blight her every move. Anonymous had long threatened to protest outside the opening night of All My Sons last night and, boy oh boy, did they ever come out in force to pour scorn on the Scientologists.

No, really, did they? Hardly any protesters turned up, you see, and we’re not sure if that was enough to pour scorn on anything, really. Especially if they keep excusing themselves as feebly as E! Online reports that they did:

More than two dozen protesters from the anti-Scientology group Anonymous joined the throng Thursday outside New York’s Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre. “We are not boycotting Katie, we are not boycotting the play, we are protesting Scientology,” a member of the group shouted. “It is evil. Scientology kills people. It follows you home at night. It is perverted.”

That’s it? A couple of people dressed up like Agent Smith in V For Vendetta comparing Scientology to Buffalo Bill from The Silence Of The Lambs? Why not go the whole hog and say that Scientology dances around to Goodbye Horses with its pecker tucked between its legs to make it look more like a lady? Huh? Huh, Anonymous? Why don’t you do that next time, yeah?

We’re just a little bitter because it seems like such a wasted opportunity for a protest. Diversify or die, that’s the way to go. Stand around with a couple of placards forever and you’ll end up like the bloke who stands outside the Houses Of Parliament with the display about the Iraq war that everyone pretends they can’t see. And what’s the point of that?

We just thought that the protest against Katie Holmes and Scientology was a bit artless. Why stand around outside shouting when you could gather everyone together, make them buy tickets for a performance of All My Sons and then silently sit in the theatre so that Katie Holmes has to perform to nothing but an unresponsive wall of V For Vendetta masks?

We’re just saying…

For the first time in what seems like an ice age, Katie has escaped the clutches of everybody’s favourite evil Nazi, Tom Cruise. Scampering away to New York City with daughter Suri in tow, Holmes was free to roam as she saw fit, without the watchful eye of the Cruiser looking over her shoulder.

The official story behind her visit to NYC is that Katie Holmes is about to star in the Broadway production of Arthur Miller’s All My Sons – but we know better. It’s an escape ploy from Katie – she’s clearly running back to the Creek: the one place she can feel truly safe from Maverick and his Scientology cronies.

Katie’s plan to flee from her Cruise-shaped captor had seen only two distinct steps: first she got the role in the aforementioned play, then she landed herself a cameo in some TV show that no one knows anything about.

By disguising herself to look like some kind of pixie-boy and finally escaping via helicopter to New York, Katie has enacted steps three and four of the epic plan of escape – sure to leave even someone with the keen magical senses of Tom Cruise (though he still can’t keep pizzas warm – the berk!) befuddled as to where she could have gone.

Though, to be fair, he will know where she is, as she’ll have set times to appear on stage. Hmm. Should have thought this through more carefully, Katie. And that’s not even taking into account the legions of Scientology spies that exist through the world – we all saw the Panorama documentary on it, we all know they exist.

But in what could well be the ultimate show of defiance in the face of her husband and his thetan chums, Katie decided against attending The Church of Scientology Celebrity Centre 39th Anniversary Gala – surely a massive slap in the face of the religion? And to make matters worse, what did she do instead of attending the annual shebang?

Katie Holmes took her daughter to see The Little Mermaid and Mary Poppins. That’s some textbook defiance right there.

Unfortunately it does look like Katie isn’t actually trying to escape any clutches – evil or otherwise – and is instead simply in another part of America to her husband. While we do like to both wildly speculate whilst at the same time encourage the poor girl to leg it as fast as she can, we can’t provide any actual facts backing up the claims that she is, in fact, doing a runner.

And, of course, you can prove anything with facts (copyright Stewart Lee).

We can, however, continue to encourage Katie Holmes to escape the clammy embrace of Tom Cruise and Scientology for her own good. Maybe then she’d get some life back into her eyes.

You know – those things on her face that look so, so dead.

And by a few people we mean everyone on planet Earth, and most of the aliens on planet Xenu.

But everyone should just shut up and leave them alone. Katie is a strong, free woman making brilliant career moves. She turned down the Batman sequel to do Mad Money with Queen Latifah, and now it looks as if she’s signed on for Broadway.

This is exciting news for Katie. Not only will she be able pursue new career venues, but the boundaries on her electric shock collar is said to include the Starbucks next to the theatre. Hello, Paul McCartney compilation CD!

We’ve just heard the exciting news about Katie Holmes signing on for the Broadway adaptation of Arthur Miller’s All My Sons for the role of Ann Deever, and we’re just tickled pink for several reasons:

1) It broadens her career base.

2) She may get to wear an eye patch and old timey pants with saddle bag looking pouches like her husband Tom Cruise does in the upcoming film Valkyrie.

3) It keeps her away from making any other utterly craptastic movies like Mad Money, with tag lines like “they’re having the crime of their lives”. Oh, wait… we get it! They’re put crime of their lives as opposed to time of their lives. Oh, that is rich!

But we can’t claim all of the excitement for Katie’s stage debut. The play’s producer, Eric Falkenstein, said some stuff about it, too:

“Katie is very well suited for the role of Ann. There is an additional layer of soul to Ann and from the work I’ve seen of Katie, she has always impressed with multi-faceted characters. She would nail it.”

Spot on, producer Eric Falkenstein. Spot on. As everyone knows, ‘multi-faceted’ is synonymous in showbusiness with ‘starring in blockbuster movies like Batman Begins and managing to not totally ruin the bloody thing’.

Plus, that additional layer of soul will come in handy for scene two in the second act of the play when the lights dim, a disco ball is lowered and the cast gathers on a rotating round bed for a soulful rendition of Sexual Healing.

We wish Katie the best of luck with the play, which is scheduled to preview in September. Stage performance requires overstated facial expressions and over-the-top displays of emotion.

Perhaps she could refer to every single photograph, video, and audio clip of every public appearance of herself and her husband over the past two years for a smidgen of inspiration.

Read more:

Katie Holmes Heads To Broadway – OK