Revival of ‘The Women’ Slices, Dices and Entices

The claws are out, and they’re painted “Jungle Red.”

A filmed-for-TV performance of Roundabout Theatre’s hit 2001 revival of “The Women,” Clare Booth Luce’s cynical, witty, glam-slam at the female sex, airs tonight as part of PBS’ “Stage on Screen” series. It stars “Sex and the City’s” Cynthia Nixon, Kristen Johnson (“3rd Rock From the Sun”), Rue McClanahan, Jennifer Tilly, Mary Louise Wilson and Jennifer Coolidge.

Told through wicked bouts of slice-and-dice gossip among high-society matrons, servants, working girls and gold diggers, Luce’s play is about good but naive wife Mary (Nixon), whose well-to-do Park Avenue life is shattered by her straying husband and his hard-as-nails paramour (Tilly).

Mary’s helpful “friends” dish the dirt with orgiastic gasps of pleasure and persuade her to hit the divorce trail to Reno, where she finally learns her lesson: Pride is “a luxury a woman in love can’t afford.”

Though this version is naughtier than the slightly sanitized 1939 George Cukor film that starred Norma Shearer, Rosalind Russell, Joan Crawford, Paulette Goddard and Joan Fontaine, the play itself was considered misogynistic by some when first staged in 1936. That this almost nonstop catfight is beautifully gowned and loaded with rapid-fire comic wit, though, makes it a guilty pleasure still.

Directed for TV by Jay Sandrich (Scott Elliott directed the stage production), the filmed version has limitations. Close-ups and camera cuts detract from the ensemble’s interplay and diminish the effect of the sumptuous gloss and glow of designer Brian MacDevitt’s lighting and the fluid grace of Derek McLane’s beautiful set design.

The costumes alone are worth a look. Designer Isaac Mizrahi’s stunning 1930s dresses, coats, sportswear, hats, underwear and nightwear change with nearly every scene; in the curtain call, each character takes her bow in lingerie.

And though accents wander at times from Park Avenue to Brooklyn and parts unknown, the all-female cast is a kick. Nixon adds a spark to saintly Mary. Gravelly voiced Johnston’s imposing height, deliberately exaggerated by Mizrahi’s remarkable hats, and her ferocious comic chops bring poisonous pal Sylvia to hilarious life. Coolidge, as viperish, fecund Edith, reaches comic heights when demonstrating a singular lack of maternal feeling, as when, puffing a cigarette, she grudgingly nurses her latest newborn: “Dammit, this thing has jaws like a dinosaur.”

McClanahan, playing the much-married Countess who still believes in “L’amour,” despite her husbands’ penchants for arsenic and mountain-climbing accidents, is a hoot throughout. Tilly’s voluptuous Allen is almost too coarse to make her home-wrecking appeal believable. But then, subtlety isn’t what this fanged, retro object lesson is about.

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“The Women” can be seen at 9 tonight on KCET-TV. It has been rated TV-PG (may be inappropriate for young children.)