With the economy the way it is, what better way to cheer everyone up than a 61-year-old play about suicide starring Tom Cruise’s wife?
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.
The Dread Pirate Sausage! says
“…It has a little piano.”
At that point I envisioned KH temples pulsating Scanners-style and the interviewer’s head exploding.