RECOMMENDED
It’s fashionable to treat the works of playwright Clifford Odets as out of fashion. Accordingly, productions are relatively rare for a writer who gave the social unrest coming out of the Great Depression its voice, the writer most associated with the legendary Group Theatre, one of the most influential theatrical ensembles in American history.
But times have changed of late, and the out-of-favor socialist notions espoused in Odets’ work suddenly have renewed relevance. After all, the day that Northlight’s well-crafted revival of his masterpiece, “Awake and Sing!” was to open, I turned on NPR to hear Mad Moneyman Jim Cramer telling the host that our recent economic meltdown proved Karl Marx right. Marx! Hell, Cramer even trotted out Trotsky for praise.
Today’s economic misfortunes are recurring echoes of the economic backdrop of this 1935 play, with one major exception: there was a progressive utopian ideal at work then, the idea that from the carnage a better world, a better economic system would emerge, as expressed to and through the character of Ralphie Berger (played with suitable earnestness by Keith Gallagher). These days, the doctrine of capitalism seems at little risk from either side of the politcal divide, and the great hope is not a better tomorrow but simply a return to a better-working yesterday. Read the rest of this entry »




Most Jukebox musicals come in one of two formats. Some take a compilation of well-known songs and use them to tell the life story of the songwriter or the performer who made them famous. And some create a fictional storyline within which they shoehorn a bunch of unrelated songs via a contrived plot. “The Marvelous Wonderettes,” the jukebox musical at Northlight Theatre featuring those gloriously groovy tunes of the fifties and sixties, may be the first to do both.
