News on your favorite shows, specials & more!

Odets' Awake and Sing! Receives Spring 2006 Lincoln Center Revival

By: Oct. 18, 2005
Get Show Info Info
Cast
Photos
Videos
Enter Your Email to Unlock This Article

Plus, get the best of BroadwayWorld delivered to your inbox, and unlimited access to our editorial content across the globe.




Existing user? Just click login.

Clifford Odets, the fervidly left-wing playwright whose works have been absent from Broadway for over ten years, will be represented by Lincoln Center Theatre's upcoming revival of his 1935 classic Awake and Sing! The play 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.

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. No casting has been announced yet.

"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.

Born July 18, 1906 in Philadelphia, Clifford Odets dropped out of high school at the age of 17 to become an actor. As one of the original members of the New York City-based left-wing ensemble, the Group Theatre, Odets found his true calling as a playwright who explored the pressing social issues of the day. He used a taxi drivers' strike as the inspiration for his (and the Group Theatre's) first breakout success, Waiting For Lefty. This first play was followed by Awake and Sing!, Till The Day I Die, Paradise Lost, Golden Boy, Rocket To The Moon, Night Music, Clash By Night, The Big Knife and The Country Girl. He also wrote many screenplays including the film adaptation of the novel Sweet Smell of Success. Odets died of cancer in 1963 at the age of 57
.




Videos