In the latest of my Wall Street Journal reports from the road, I review Main Street Theater’s revival of Awake and Sing! in Houston and Theatre Three’s revival of Lost in the Stars in Dallas. Here’s an excerpt.
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Why is Clifford Odets’s “Awake and Sing!” performed so rarely? It’s one of the greatest of all American plays, a wrenching kitchen-sink drama of Depression-era family life, and by all rights it ought to be as popular as “Our Town” or “The Glass Menagerie.” But revivals of “Awake and Sing!” are few and far between–Lincoln Center Theater’s 2006 production was the first time the show had been done on Broadway since 1984–which is why I flew to Houston to see a new staging of an underappreciated masterpiece….
The special excellence of “Awake and Sing!” lies not in its standard-issue plot, whose climax is frankly melodramatic, but in Odets’s golden ear for the tangy, Yiddish-flavored everyday speech of the Russian-Jewish immigrant community into which he, like the Bergers, was born. It’s as though he’d spent his childhood with a notebook in his hand, scribbling down homely phrases that he would later use with the lapidary exactitude of a poet (“Never mind laughing. It’s time you already had in your head a serious thought”). Not until August Wilson came along a half-century later would an American playwright make such effective use of the language of the streets on which he grew up.
I confess to not having expected a stageful of Houston-based actors to speak Odets’s dialogue with the idiomatic snap that you’d take for granted from a New York cast. Was I wrong! Not only is Main Street Theater’s ensemble cast at home with every line, but they put across the play’s angry warmth so believably that you’d think you were sitting at the table with them….
Today Kurt Weill is mainly remembered for “The Threepenny Opera,” but in his lifetime he was best known for the musicals that he wrote after he immigrated to America in 1935 and retrofitted himself as a Broadway songsmith. Yet none of them has been successfully revived in New York, and Theatre Three’s production of “Lost in the Stars,” Weill’s 1949 musical version of Alan Paton’s novel “Cry, the Beloved Country,” appears to be the first full-scale staging of that show to be seen anywhere in the past two decades. I wondered whether a 60-year-old musical about life under apartheid would make sense in the 21st century, but “Lost in the Stars” proves to be a fresh and compelling piece of work that is long overdue for a second chance on Broadway.
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Read the whole thing here.
Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City
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