Mark Ruffalo to Appear in Starry Awake and Sing! Revival

By: Feb. 01, 2006
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Film star Mark Ruffalo has signed on to join the starry cast of the upcoming revival of Clifford Odets' Awake and Sing!  He will join Lauren Ambrose, Ben Gazzara, Jonathan Hadary and Zoe Wanamaker and others in the drama, which will open on April 17th, 2006, after beginning previews on March 23rd.

While its hit production of the Tony Award-winning musical The Light in the Piazza continues uptown at the Vivian Beaumont Theater, Lincoln Center Theater will present the show at the Belasco Theatre (111 West 44th Street), the very theatre where the play had its world premiere in 1935. The production will celebrate Odets' Centenary.

Ned Eisenberg (The Green Bird), Peter Kybart (Judgment at Nuremberg, The Diary of Anne Frank), Pablo Schreiber (Mr. Marmalade) and Richard Topol (Julius Caesar, The School for Scandal) will join Ambrose ("Six Feet Under"), Gazzara (Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof), Hadary (All Shook Up, Gypsy), and Wanamaker (Electra, Piaf) in the play. Awake and Sing! will reunite The Light in the Piazza director Barlett Sher with that musical's Tony Award winning design team -- set designer Michael Yeargan, costume designer Catherine Zuber and lighting designer Christopher Akerlind.

"Awake and Sing!  is the story of a Jewish family in the Bronx who have fallen on hard times during the Depression. Widely considered Odets' masterpiece, the drama premiered on Broadway in 1935 and, a resounding hit, was the legendary Group Theatre's first Broadway production," according to press notes. The Flowering Peach was the last Odets show to be revived on Broadway; it was produced in 1994. A 1984 revival of Awake and Sing! starred Nancy Marchand, Harry Hamlin, Frances McDormand and Dick Latessa. Others were mounted in 1938 and 1939.

Known for plays that fought social injustice, Odets also wrote Waiting for Lefty, Golden Boy, Clash By Night, The Big Knife and The Country Girl, among others. Sweet Smell of Success was his most famous screenplay.

Ruffalo, who will play Moe Axelrod in the show, will make his Broadway debut in Awake and Sing!; he previously appeared off-Broadway in The Moment When and This Is Our Youth, and has also appeared in many other plays in New York and L.A. Best known as a film star, his screen credits include Rumor Has It, Collateral, 13 Going on 30, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, We Don't Live Here Anymore, In the Cut, You Can Count on Me, Ride with the Devil, 54 and Blood Money.

For more information, visit www.lincolncenter.org.



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