Awake & Sing Reviews

I'm about to head out, but here's one or two. TalkinBroadway is Positive:

"So timeless are these subjects, and so forcefully does Odets present them, that Awake and Sing! still has the power to move and surprise. If the play's socialist and Marxist overtones have dated in the years following the Cold War and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the conflict as reflected in the play's primary ideological combatants, Bessie (Zoë Wanamaker) and her father Jacob (Ben Gazzara), still resonates with relevance.
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Schreiber must share the blame, with a clunky, modern performance that misses every waypoint along Ralph's road to maturation. Creating neither a starry-eyed dreamer nor a belittled son seeking emotional refuge, he's unable to ground the play; only the strong efforts of his castmates, including a superb Ned Eisenberg as Ralph's entrepreneurial uncle and Jonathan Hadary as his milquetoast father, keep the play from
flying off around him.
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His bustling, busy staging of the fifth-floor walk up family home perfectly situates the Bergers in locale and era, he treats them with great respect and poignancy, and his work with most of the actors (excepting Schreiber and a hysteric Richard Topol as Hennie's harried husband) results in a generally exquisite ensemble.

The standout, however, is Mark Ruffalo as Moe Axelrod, the racketeering boarder who arouses long-dormant feelings in both Ralph and Hennie. As Ruffalo plays him, he transcends the caricature of a man who's balanced the Bessies and Jacobs of the United States into a workable system, and becomes instead a man of immense sympathy and passion. He sees - and enables others to see - that aspirations, however unlikely, can be made a reality.
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Sher's modernist meddling doesn't help drive home Moe's encouraging sentiments. But Raffalo's charm and charisma, and that of his castmates, keep Odets's messages about the possibilities of life wide awake and singing melodiously.


http://www.talkinbroadway.com/world/AwakeAndSing.html

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Updated On: 4/17/06 at 06:57 PM

I agree with Newsweek much more than Talkin Broadway.

AP is Positive:

"Clifford Odets' "Awake and Sing!" is a clarion call to arms, a domestic drama that stands tall on a soapbox of personal and political activism.

And Lincoln Center Theater does full justice to this stirring, venerable work, a play very much of its original time and place, New York 1935, in the middle of the Depression and uncertainty around the world.

This clear-headed revival, skillfully directed by Bartlett Sher, opened Monday at Broadway's Belasco Theatre, the same theater where the play had its world premiere 71 years ago.
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Zoe Wanamaker gives a fierce, fireplug of a performance as the shrewd, practical Bessie. She's a woman driven by economic insecurity. Bessie idolizes her brother, Morty (Ned Eisenberg), a successful businessman in the garment trade, and she barely tolerates the family's grandfather, Jacob, portrayed with a graceful fragility by Ben Gazzara. He's an aging revolutionary who spouts diatribes against the capitalistic system and listens contentedly to opera recordings by Caruso.
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Odets' reputation has suffered over the years, and some of his later plays, such as "The Country Girl" and "The Flowering Peach," don't have the urgency of such quintessential 1930s works such as "Waiting for Lefty," "Golden Boy" and "Rocket to the Moon."

But "Awake and Sing!" is his masterpiece, a tough-minded, sentimental and, in the end, optimistic portrait of a family struggling to survive. It is the stuff of great all-American theater.
http://metromix.chicagotribune.com/news/celebrity/sns-ap-theater-awake-and-sing,0,7537039.story?coll=mmx-celebrity_heds

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NY Times seems mixed positive.
NY Times - Awake and Sing

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Broadway.com is mixed-to-positive. I thought I was the only one who really liked Zoe Wanamaker in this.

http://www.broadway.com/gen/Buzz_Story.aspx?ci=527629

It's rather surprising that this production works as well as it does considering the conflicting styles of acting onstage. Although Wanamaker's Bessie is an unqualified triumph, and Hadary's turn as her husband is impressively small-scaled, many of the other cast members seem to be in slightly differentiated times.

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Awake and Sing! may not earn too many new devotees with this production, but its existence is more than welcome and its two-and-a-half hour length is never unwarranted or overextended. There is so much in Odets' artistry that still rings true in our similarly run society where the almighty dollar is so crucial (especially in New York City) that it never feels like a steeped-in-mothballs anomaly. And Wanamaker's performance is so steely and captivating, awake is certainly how one feels exiting the Belasco Theatre.

I though Zoe Wanamaker was the only good thing about the production. I found it dull and interminable. Guess I have very different taste when it comes to this year's plays (compared to most people). I enjoyed Three Days of Rain, Festen, Rabbit Hole and hated Well, Awake and Sing and History Boys.

Hate to be the contrarian here, but I thought that Zoe Wanamaker was completely miscast as Bessie. She's much too sweet and maternal, and came off as sympathetic and lightweight in what is supposed to be a firebrand role. She does the best she can, but overall I was very underwhelmed.

Lauren Ambrose, on the other hand, I found to be extraordinary.

Jonathan Hadary grates me (always has), but he's very right for this role. I liked Schreiber too.

What did you think of Ruffalo?

I found Gazzara hard to hear as well, and I was sitting pretty close. He also sounded like he was in pain most of the time he was speaking.

I wish I had seen Wanamaker acting remotely the way you described her, Margo, because I've been a fan of her work for years. However, she came off more like Blanche DuBois than Bessie Berger when I saw it: She was flighty, neurotic and nowhere close to being grounded in realism. I kept thinking back to Tovah Feldshuh's galvanizing characterization of Bessie a decade ago, and found Wanamaker's rendering overwrought.

Different strokes, I guess. Maybe I saw her on an off night.

I saw it last night, Calvin.

I was very much looking forward to the show after having seen Zoe's incredible performance as Electra a few years back.

Found I could not get much into Odets' play, and I was not in a good mood, to boot, though I'm not sure that colored my impressions. I sure wasn't buying the Jewishness of the household, though I kept telling myself they must be secular or athiest Jews, but even then. Reminded myself that some Jews had followed Marx, that idealism had helped create the Kibbutzes in Israel, but even still.

Perhaps it was that I just didn't like most of the characters in this disfunctional family so I didn't care about them. I got so I actually wished the mother would shut up. The woman who was formerly my favorite stage actress! (I am passing the baton to Victoria Clark.) If only I could have seen her tear the boards as the Scottish Queen instead.

The only character in the play that was compelling to me was Ruffalo's as the haunting presence of the war-wounded soldier, compelled to live out the rest of his life maimed, with some of the daily reality and anger about that. That was the best statement about war the play could make. Yet Odets doesn't even give you this guy to like, since he doesn't give a damn about a baby getting left behind.

I found the Marxist prattle of the grandpere tiresome, though I'm sure Odets intended him to be the focus of the play given that it was the 30's and communist/socialist politics were on the agenda in The Great Depression.

The only character whom I thought had any nobility, and whom this crap family was doing their best to harm, was the poor shlep who was a kind man who unknowingly married the pregnant daughter/sister.

There was no moral or spiritual fiber under this play though the playwright was pretending to have it. And though Godless, it didn't at least attempt to ask the hard questions about purpose and meaning in life, which at least the existentialists agonized over. It just said, at the end, everybody just take what you want when you want it and damn the kind innocent people and the babies--oh, but always be a good boy and give the money to your mother, even if she's a total immoral b&tch who doesn't care if she ruins the life of a nice guy with her slut daughter and makes her Dad jump off the roof from her meanness.

Perhaps they should have tossed the mother and daughter off the roof at the beginning of the play and enjoyed a jovial game of cards for the rest of it, listening to Caruso and talking war stories.