Odets' popular early plays promoted social justice, including "Waiting for Lefty, " and "Awake and Sing!"
Clooney and company could have used Sturges or, even better, Clifford Odets when it came to rewrites.
Doug Hughes stages repeated dynamic moments during the period drama, smartly retaining much of Odets' stilted yet colorful dialogue.
Odets was a left-wing New Yorker eventually transplanted to Hollywood, where he churned out scripts within the Hollywood studio system.
Fink (John Turturro), the protagonist, is a left-wing New York playwright obviously based on Clifford Odets who signs a contract to write screenplays in Hollywood.
But by the dramatic conclusion, it's clear that Odets' script was informed both by sensational tabloid headlines and the tragic hubris found in great Russian literature.
By enacting his modern tragedy on the largest possible physical scale, Mr. Odets gave near-operatic scope to what might have ended up being an overobvious story of ambition gone astray.
WSJ: Theater Once Drew Crowds Onstage, Too | Sightings by Terry Teachout
Cannavale sensitively enacts Charlie's inner doubts about how he may have sold his soul to the devil in exchange for fame and fortune, while reciting Odets' overblown language with increasing brio.
Being true to oneself is a key issue in Clifford Odets' dark play, "The Big Knife, " written in 1948 during the flush of postwar success, when America's focus turned toward capitalism.
Most impressive of all was Lincoln Center Theater's revival of Clifford Odets's "Golden Boy, " a 19-character play about the rise and fall of an ambitious young boxer that was originally produced on Broadway in 1937.
WSJ: Theater Once Drew Crowds Onstage, Too | Sightings by Terry Teachout
The Group Theater, headed by Harold Clurman, who helped blaze the trail for Method acting, went to see Frances Farmer in the show and hired them both for the Broadway production of Clifford Odets's play "Golden Boy" in 1937.
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The revival of Clifford Odets' "Golden Boy, " a play about a young man torn between his natural talent as a violinist and the fast money and fame of being a boxer, earned eight nominations, the most for any play.
Yes, it's a free country, and Clifford Odets had a perfect right to sell himself to the highest bidder, just as we in turn have a right to roll our eyes when Charlie throws himself a pity party onstage.
WSJ: The Sellout | The Big Knife | The Assembled Parties | Theater Reviews by Terry Teachout
Sooner or later somebody, usually Charlie, gets around to saying or doing something embarrassingly pretentious, and all at once you remember the alchemic creativity with which the Odets of the 1930s turned working-class slang into poetry, and sigh at the thought of what the American stage lost when he turned his back on the world of "Golden Boy" and "Awake and Sing!"
WSJ: The Sellout | The Big Knife | The Assembled Parties | Theater Reviews by Terry Teachout
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