Did Awake and Sing! Speak to Critics?

Clifford Odets' Awake and Sing! is back on Broadway at the Belasco Theatre, the play's original home on the Great White Way in 1935. The revival, directed by Bartlett Sher, features a cast of well-known stage and screen stars including Mark Ruffalo, Lauren Ambrose, Ben Gazzara and Zoe Wanamaker. Was the production music to critics' ears?

Here is a sampling of what they had to say:

Jason Clark in his Broadway.com Review: "[It] hardly sounds like a high-spirited night at the theater especially in the age of perk and pep, but there are generous pockets of human comedy in Odets' tale. And best of all, this production retains the edginess of the text, providing so much shading to these characters that they never seem like cardboard mouthpieces for the poor and unfortunate... 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."

Charles Isherwood of The New York Times: "The messy give and take between ideologies and realities, and between hard fact and exuberant feeling, still thrums in Awake and Sing! It drives the play forward even when the energy dissipates in Bartlett Sher's sympathetic but occasionally faltering staging for Lincoln Center Theater. All of Mr. Sher's skilled performers manage to locate the dreaming centers of their characters, buried beneath layers of political sloganeering, everyday gripes or street slang. And even when the focus blurs, Odets's zesty dialogue, in which jazzy period colloquialisms are slung around like punches at a prizefight, is a joy to hear."

Clive Barnes of The New York Post: "This star-studded production, shrewdly staged at the Belasco by Bartlett Sher, with Ben Gazzara, Mark Ruffalo and one of Britain's greatest actresses, American-born Zoë Wanamaker, does Odets proud—or as proud as Odets can now be done… There is some lovely acting going on in this dull and sensible Bronx apartment… Still, no contemporary actor could re-create the white-hot images Odets' play must have suggested to cast and audience alike 71 years ago."

David Rooney of Variety: "Given that Awake and Sing! now plays as a history piece, it's surprising how the drama's power creeps up on you in Sher's meticulously detailed production. The play's radicalism dates it, but its rich evocation of a time and a particular social milieu are undimmed, as is its melancholy optimism about the human spirit. And the rough-hewn poetry of Odets' idiomatic language—so strange and beautiful to the ear, yet played with grounded naturalism—remains intoxicating."

Michael Kuchwara of The Associated Press: "Lincoln Center Theater does full justice to this stirring, venerable work… Awake and Sing! is his [Odets'] 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."

Linda Winer of Newsday: "Despite an intriguing cast, alas, Bartlett Sher's production is more conscientious than exciting, more respectful than galvanizing. This formation of the Bergers, the working-class Jewish family in the Bronx, seldom feels as if its members grew up on the same light and air. Odets' original three-act, two-intermission structure drains what little momentum gets built. His common-man poetry sounds more self-conscious than musical. Stranger still, the emotions feel dwarfed by the size of the theater."