“There is no reason why an artist of genius should not also be an astute businessman.”
Peter Ackroyd, J.M.W. Turner
Archives for February 2006
TT: New kid on Broadway
I wrote yesterday about how much I was looking forward to Lincoln Center Theatre’s upcoming revival of Clifford Odets’ Awake and Sing! Well, guess what? I’m looking forward to it even more today. Says Playbill:
Mark Ruffalo will star in Lincoln Center Theater’s spring 2006 revival of Clifford Odets’ Awake and Sing!, it was announced.
As previously reported, the show will also star Lauren Ambrose, Ned Eisenberg, Ben Gazzara, Jonathan Hadary, Peter Kybart, Pablo Schreiber, Richard Topol and Zoe Wanamaker.
Ruffalo, who will play Moe Axelrod, first garnered notice in the original Off-Broadway production of Kenneth Lonergan’s This Is Our Youth Soon after, he was discovered by Hollywood, and has appeared in such films as “You Can Count on Me,” “In the Cut,” “Just Like Heaven,” “Rumor Has It” and “The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.” This will be his Broadway debut.
Those of you who read my last film column for Crisis may recall that of all the films I wrote about between 1998 and 2005, Lonergan’s You Can Count on Me was my favorite:
Lonergan’s directorial debut [has] a novelistic richness that defies the simplifying art of the pitchman. To say that it is about Terry, an immature drifter (Mark Ruffalo), and Sammy, his stay-at-home older sister (Laura Linney), orphaned in childhood and desperately lonely as young adults, is to convey nothing of the moral complexity of Lonergan’s script, which pays the viewer the compliment of not making his mind up for him. Terry is never romanticized and Sammy is never treated with condescension: they are both treated as human beings, deeply flawed but not without virtue….
That was my introduction to Mark Ruffalo, who may not be a Hollywood star–yet–but whose on-screen presence has briefly brightened any number of movies (he also had a nice little bit in Collateral). I’ve never seen him on stage, alas, and for a time I feared I never would: he survived an operation for a benign brain tumor in 2001. So that’s all the more reason for me to look forward to Awake and Sing!, which goes into previews at the Belasco Theatre on March 24.
For more information, go here.