“Awake and Sing!,” a 1935 play by Clifford Odets about the struggles and aspirations of a Depression-era Jewish family in the Bronx, will return to Broadway next winter for the first time in two decades.
The production will reunite a pair of Broadway veterans, Danny Burstein and Jessica Hecht, who previously starred together in a 2015 revival of “Fiddler on the Roof.” Hecht, a three-time Tony nominee currently featured in the Broadway production of “Dog Day Afternoon,” will play the family matriarch, Bessie Berger, who is trying to hold her family together under financial strain and tension over a variety of life choices. Her husband, Myron, will be played by Jeremy Shamos, also a previous Tony nominee.
Burstein, who this year became the most nominated male actor in Tonys history with his nomination for “Marjorie Prime” (he previously won a Tony for “Moulin Rouge!”), will play Bessie’s brother, Uncle Morty.
The revival will be the first Broadway play directed by Tyne Rafaeli, who has led a number of productions Off Broadway, and who was an associate director of the Broadway “Fiddler” production in which Burstein and Hecht starred.
“Awake and Sing!” will be produced by Manhattan Theater Club, one of four nonprofits with Broadway houses, with support from several of the commercial producers behind the current production of “Giant”: the husband and wife team Brian and Dayna Lee, and the mother-daughter team Stephanie Kramer and Nicole Kramer.
The production is to run at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater; previews are scheduled to begin in December, with an opening in January, but exact dates have not yet been determined.
The play, set in 1933, was initially produced by the pioneering collective called the Group Theater. The New York Times critic Brooks Atkinson gave that production an admiring but mixed review, calling it “a drama that is full of substance and vitality” but saying Odets “does not quite finish what he has started.”
The play has become an important part of the American canon. It has been revived four times on Broadway, mostly recently in 2006, when it won the Tony Award for best play revival. “As this moving revival reminds us, the song of human aspiration is always sweet to hear,” wrote the critic Charles Isherwood for The Times.
In 2015, the Public Theater presented an innovative staging reimagining the play with Asian American actors; in reviewing that production, from the National Asian American Theater Company, the critic Laura Collins-Hughes declared the play “a classic American story, and that means that it belongs to all of us.”
Michael Paulson is the theater reporter for The Times.
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