After having seen the 2013 concert rendering of Marc Blitzstein’s agitprop “play in music,” The Cradle Will Rock, I wanted to see a “full production” of it. So when the Classic Stage Company announced its production for this spring, I signed up. What CSC is presenting, directed by the company’s artistic director, John Doyle, isn’t a concert version of Cradle, but it’s still pared down—even without Doyle’s hollowed-out staging. (Doyle also “designed” the set, with the assistance of David L. Arsenault.) I guess I’ll still have to wait for a production of what Blitzstein originally intended: two acts with a full set, costumes, and orchestrations.
In my 1 August 2013 blog report (https://rickontheater.blogspot.com/2013/08/the-cradle-will-rock.html),
I provided a background of the play, particularly its abortive and theater
history-making début on 16 June 1937.
There’s also a wrap-up of the play’s production history up to the 21st
century. I’m not going to repeat that
here, so I suggest interested readers click on the link above and skim the old
report. I’ll focus on the new revival in
the East Village.
First, the details of the presentation: Doyle’s revival is
the first New York City production of Cradle
since the presentation by Encores! Off-Center—a summer concert series for Off-Broadway musicals—at
the New York City Center in Mid-town.
The CSC revival started previews at the Lynn F. Angelson Theater on East
13th Street just west of 3rd Avenue on 21 March 2019 and opened on 3 April; it’s
scheduled to close on 19 May. My friend
Diana and I caught the Thursday evening performance at 7 p.m. on 4 April.
My earlier report also includes a plot rundown, so I won’t
add a full one here. The Cradle Will
Rock is set in Steeltown, USA.
Mr. Mister’s hand-picked, anti-union Liberty Committee, which includes
the town’s leading citizens—Dr. Specialist (Eddie Cooper), Editor Daily (Ken
Barnett), President Prexy (Barnett), and Reverend Salvation (Benjamin Eakeley),
and, representing the arts, violinist Yasha (Ian Lowe) and artist Dauber (Rema
Webb)—have all been arrested by the police by mistake, having been ordered by
Mr. Mister (David Garrison), the steel mogul who owns the mill, most of the company
town, and pretty much everyone in it, to roust anyone rousing the pro-union
rabble.
Another prisoner, Harry Druggist (Tony Yazbeck), explains to
Moll (Lara Pulver), a young streetwalker, what the Liberty Committee is and how
it was established. (Blitzstein wasn’t
subtle about alluding to such big wigs of 1930s America as evangelist Billy
Sunday, newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, and the Du Pont family of
tycoons.) The play then unfolds as a
series of back stories, shifting from the courtroom where all the prisoners
await night court and scenes from the recent past that reveal how Mr. Mister
cowed everyone in town and bought them all off.
Everyone in town takes Mr. Mister’s cash, which he literally
throws around in wads to overcome any resistance from, say, the church,
academia, or the press. For instance, to
keep Junior Mister (Cooper), the money man’s slacker son (echoes of Eric Trump,
d’ya think?) out of trouble, Mr. Mister bribes Editor Daily to hire the boob as
a correspondent—in Hawaii! Dauber and
Yasha mock Mrs. Mister (Sally Ann Triplett) and her insipid artistic taste;
nonetheless, they take her money and revel in how much they love doing so. Sister Mister (Kara Mikula), the tycoon’s
daughter, is a privileged party girl and loves to spend daddy’s dough on sexy
clothes (not seen in the CSC staging, by the way) and eye-candy beaux.
Only incorruptible Larry Foreman (Yazbeck), a stalwart young
labor organizer, resists the pull of Mr. Mister’s bribery. Foreman has also been arrested and exhorts
the other prisoners to support labor unions and to rise up and defeat the
capitalist robber barons. One day soon, he warns Mr. Mister. “the cradle will
rock” and the cushy capitalist cocoon will fall.
(By the way, CSC seems to be trying out a very annoying new
practice: no printed programs. It’s on
line, but not in the theater—except on your smart phone. Boy, I hope that doesn’t catch on! I keep mine—since I came to New York City in ‘74—and
I often find myself using them for reference later.)
The original Federal Theatre Project cast at the
nearly-abortive première was about 17 actors (covering about 36 roles, many of
them bits; there are seven principal singing characters) and subsequent
Broadway revivals (’37 and ’47) cast as many as 35 actors; Sam Gold, who
directed the Encores! concert, pared that down to 14. Doyle’s gone even further, staging his
revival with 10 actors—four of whom play the sole piano as well (they rotate as
accompanist). Gold’s production had no
set, but Doyle’s cast also shifts the “scenery.” (I’ll get to those quotation marks
shortly—the ones above concerning the set design as well.)
Blitzstein wrote Cradle
for a full orchestra of a minimum of 25 players, though it was débuted after
the historic shut-down with just the composer playing the piano. Subsequent productions have often tried to
emulate this event in various ways (including productions with two or three
pianos), and Gold used a 14-piece orchestra on a large platform upstage from
the actors. Doyle, however, not only
reverts to the single upright piano accompaniment (the music supervisor is Greg
Jarrett), but has four of the actors (Barnett, Eakeley, Lowe, Mikula) alternate
at the keyboard even as they shout lines from the script’s dialogue, backs to
the audience or over their shoulders, from the bench. (This tactic sort of operates in concert with
the cast-as-stagehands decision.)
The Angelson’s not built for musicals, and the acoustics are
lousy. The lyrics at CSC were hard to understand a lot of the time, drowned
out by the piano or just lost in the flyspace. (It’s not great for
dialogue, either, but not as bad—and there’s less competition from the piano as
well.)
(Gold’s Encores! concert presentation, which ran an hour and 45 minutes, was performed as a
series of discrete songs, like the score of any traditional musical. What I learned at CSC, where Doyle trimmed
the script to 90 intermissionless minutes, is that Blitzstein’s score is almost
entirely sung through, with what seems like recitative linking dialogue to
songs and songs to songs. The play’s not
an opera—although several opera companies have presented it—but Blitzstein did
subtitle Cradle “A Play In Music,”
not, you’ll notice, “A Play With
Music.”)
As set designer, Doyle has split the difference between no
set at all (Encores! and the 1937 Virginia Theatre première) and the full set
the composer conceived and which was used in the New York City Opera mounting
in 1960 (ironically, at the same City Center as the Encores! concert in
2013). His “design” for CSC’s small,
square space in the Angelson consists of small yellow metal drums (containing
industrial waste, maybe?) which the actors carry around and reset in different
configurations for each scene. (A bunch are arranged in a cross in the
middle of the acting area for a church scene, for example, and rearranged as a
soda-fountain counter in Harry Druggist’s shop.
Sort of like cylindrical Legos.)
This isn’t so much “scenery” in any common sense—hence all
those quotation marks—but I guess, in the broadest sense of the term, it’s a
visual environment for the actors to play against. Not that it evokes “steel” or “factory,” but
I suppose it suggests “labor,” considering how much the actors heft the drums
around. Except for wads of greenbacks
that Mr. Mister tosses around, the barrels are the only props Doyle uses in the
show.
Overhead is a spider’s web of telephone or telegraph wires;
I only call it that because the wires all seem to emanate from a tall, wooden
pole with cross pieces that looks like an old-fashioned telephone pole.
What it’s supposed to signify or symbolize, I have no idea. One reviewer observed, “In revolution, those
who rule the airwaves rule all,” but no mention of this notion or anything
similar occurs in the production. (The
closest Blitzstein comes is his implication that Editor Daily and his newspaper
is for sale to Mr. Mister when he tells the tycoon, “You’ve only got to hint
whatever’s fit to print; If something’s wrong with it, why then we’ll print to
fit. For whichever side will pay the
best.”)
The Angelson’s house, which is reconfigured from production
to production (it was a compete arena for the Spring 2018 revival of Tennessee
Williams’s Summer and Smoke), is
arranged as a thrust with spectators on the north, east, and west sides of the
playing area; the south side is the “backstage” area where the piano is and
where the actors hang out when not on stage.
Some dialogue, as well as singing, includes performers in the off-stage
area, and as I’ve said, the piano-players deliver some lines while
playing.
Only David Garrison, as Mr. Mister, plays just a single
character; some actors have as many as three roles, plus incidental parts. Actors sometimes switch roles while on stage
and without changes in costume or other visual or vocal clues, it’s sometimes
hard to realize which character is talking or singing. Everyone is dressed in factory-worker garb
(designed by Ann Hould-Ward), so there’s also no distinction between the
one-percenters and the laborers. (Ironically,
this is the reverse of the Encores! concert version in which everyone, workers
and toffs alike, wore evening clothes. I
have no inkling why either director chose these homogenized costume schemes.)
The performance starts stealthily—no noticeable change in
lighting, no sound cue, nothing—as first one then small groups of actors wander
into the performing area and cross to the south side neutral area. Some carry a drum on their shoulder and as
the cast assembles, some stop in gaggles in the acting area, which is
essentially empty except for the shadows from the tangle of wires above. (The lighting is designed by Jane Cox and
Tess James.)
The first scene, which begins in the off-stage space, shows a cop rousting a bunch of citizens as laborite demonstrators as they protest that they’re actually Mr. Mister’s Liberty Community and that the cops are there to arrest the worker’s demonstrating for the union. (If I hadn’t already seen a version of Cradle, I might have had a hard time figuring out what was happening, given that everyone was dressed like a steel worker.)
The first scene, which begins in the off-stage space, shows a cop rousting a bunch of citizens as laborite demonstrators as they protest that they’re actually Mr. Mister’s Liberty Community and that the cops are there to arrest the worker’s demonstrating for the union. (If I hadn’t already seen a version of Cradle, I might have had a hard time figuring out what was happening, given that everyone was dressed like a steel worker.)
Though some
well-known actors have appeared in productions (Howard Da Silva, Will Geer, Jack
Albertson, Alfred Drake, Vivian Vance, Jerry Orbach, Lauri Peters, Patti
LuPone, Randle Mell, Tammy Grimes), The Cradle Will Rock is the ultimate
ensemble play, so I’m going to critique the performance in toto. That works out rather well, since no single
performance stood out at CSC in any case.
Timesman Jesse Green
called the production “wan,” but that’s not the word I’d have chosen. The
performances were all right, but I remember the Encores! concert being both
funnier and more forcefully agitprop. I’d say, Doyle’s performance style
was too soft-pedaled, as if the director were afraid today’s right wing would
point and shout “Socialism!” and shut them down. From Garrison’s Mr.
Mister to Yazbeck’s Larry Foreman, not one of the characters came off as
staunchly defending his or her position.
Not even Rema Webb, as Ella Hammer, whose machinist husband was injured in
a suspicious accident at the plant, sings “Joe Worker” like the show-stopping
number I remember from the 2013 concert.
With today’s record of union-busting and the growing income
gap between workers and bosses, not to forget the disparity between men’s pay
and women’s for the same work and the current administration’s drive to strip
away safety regulations (not to mention health care), The Cradle Will Rock should speak as loudly to a 2019 audience
as it did to one in 1937—and I’d think that actors and directors, who are also
members of unions, would feel this as intensely as any citizen. But Doyle and his cast seem to have put a lid
on the expression of strong feelings.
Perhaps they were over-Brechtifying the presentation—eschewing any
emotional connection between the actors and their characters. (Blitzstein dedicated Cradle to Bertolt Brecht, “first because I think him the
most admirable theatre-writer of our time; secondly because an extended
conversation with him was partly responsible for writing the piece.”)
The press coverage of The
Cradle Will Rock was
middling, especially for a historically significant and seldom-produced
play—and so was the critical response.
As of 11 April, Show-Score tallied 28 published
notices with an average score of only 65.
Fifty percent of the reviews were positive, 32% were mixed, and 18% were
negative. Show-Score’s highest
rating was one 90 for the website Musical
Theater Review followed by two 85’s for Carole
Di Tosti and StageBiz.com; the
lowest score was a 35 for Talkin’ Broadway, backed by two
40’s for TheaterMania and New York Stage Review. My review round-up will cover 20 published
notices.
In the Wall Street Journal, Terry Teachout declared, “Theatrical
politics being what they are, it was both inevitable that ‘The Cradle Will
Rock,’ Marc Blitzstein’s 1937 pro-labor musical, would receive a major
off-Broadway production in the Age of Trump, and desirable that it is being
done by Classic Stage Company.” Teachout
added that director Doyle “is exceptionally good at staging small-scale musical
revivals, and he knows exactly what to do with shows like this.” He assessed the production as “spare, vital,
perfectly legible and almost entirely satisfying.” The Journalist
did “have a caveat, and it is, alas, a substantial one: This production is sung without amplification,
and Mr. Doyle has cast actors who can sing rather than singers who can act.”
Teachout observed
that “it’s important that you be able to hear the lyrics in order to follow the
action, and you will often find that hard to do.” He further contended that Blitzstein’s “red-hot
Stalinis[m] . . . is what keeps ‘Cradle’ from being the American ‘Threepenny
Opera’ that Blitzstein longed to write: He shared Bertolt Brecht’s politics but
lacked his rich dramatic imagination.” In
contrast, “The score is another matter. Not
only are Blitzstein’s clear-cut tunes full of off-center harmonies that light
up every phrase, but his lyrics are as sharp as a switchblade.” In conclusion, Teachout asserted, “The songs
are what has kept ‘The Cradle Will Rock’ alive, and I expect they’ll keep on doing
so for a long time to come.”
In the New York Times, Green expressed the opinion that:
musical theater is last on the
list of mediums suited to agitprop. At
its best, it is too complex, too cosmopolitan and too pleasure-seeking to pass
loyalty tests. What goes into the machinery as revolutionary rage comes out as
“Les Miz.”
“And yet there’s ‘The Cradle Will Rock,’” continued Green,
which its 1930s audience “would have understood . . . as a leftist rallying cry
and a satire of unfettered capitalism’s enablers.” Then he asked, “But what is it now?” His half-answer: “John Doyle’s revival . . . is
too wan to answer the question.” Of the
director’s work, Green felt, “Though his stripped-down approach often enhances
richly conceived works . . . it makes others, severe to begin with, seem cold
and underfed.” The Times reviewer explained:
The simplicity that has felt
clarifying in Mr. Doyle’s best work feels stingy here. The piano accompaniment strips “The Cradle
Will Rock” of much of its sostenuto beauty; what’s left is further eroded by
singing that sometimes grates the ears. The
staging, in one 90-minute act, is largely static and, where musical theater
razzmatazz is called for, totally underwhelming. Too much of the acting seems deliberately
wooden.
Green found, however, that after an hour, “the production
coalesces” and “you begin to feel the tension between propaganda and
entertainment as Blitzstein evidently intended.” The review-writer warned, though, “It’s only
a start, but I’m not sure any production could manage the contradictions much
better.”
Calling the CSC Cradle
revival “plodding,” Sara Holdren
of New York magazine and Vulture, its website, contended:
There’s a strong sense of déjà vu
hanging over the cozy bricks-and-boards thrust at Classic Stage Company right
now, and not in a good way. It’s a
wonderful setting—intimate without feeling cramped, textured and a little
gritty but still spare and elegant—and it’s just right for the kind of
democratic, fourth-wall-breaking, we’re-all-in-this-together vibe that’s often
distinguishes stripped-down stagings of the kinds of plays from which the
theater takes its name. But artistic
director John Doyle . . . seems to be approaching his current production by
rote.
“There’s a fine line between a distinctive directorial
signature and a bag of tricks,” asserted Holdren, “and with The Cradle
Will Rock—already a blunt instrument of agitprop that requires lots of
sharpening if it’s really going to sing or sting—Doyle seems, more than
anything else, to be tired, resorting to his tool belt without honing the
tools.” Holdren seems to have agreed
with WSJ’s Teachout when she found,
The problem with too frequent an
application of the adjective “Brechtian” is that, while it might accurately
call to mind a certain aesthetic, it doesn’t necessarily bring along with it
any of that writer’s distinctive brilliance. . . . Blitzstein was no
Brecht, and . . . The Cradle Will Rock comes off as wooden and
ineffectually hammy. It’s got a point to
make—over and over again—but no sparkle, no true wit, and, here, not even much
sense of playfulness.
Director and designer Doyle “keeps the production
characteristically spare . . . use of his purposefully limited aesthetic
vocabulary here seems mechanical rather than ingenious.” Holdren bemoaned that “[t]here’s something
deflated under the defiance” of the workers, especially in the rendition of the
title number, “The Cradle Will Rock.” She reminded us, though, that “a play’s worth
should [not] be determined by a simplistic debate over whether or not it’s capable
of sparking social change—but the cradle aside, plays do need to rock us,
and this one leaves its audience right where it found them.”
The cyber press
gave the show the most coverage. On Stage
Buddy, Elyse Trevers praised the cast as “talented and versatile” but
reported that Blitzstein’s “songs tell the story, but little is memorable and
at times the stories are plodding and uninspiring.” Trevers felt that despite “a few
earnestly-moving moments, especially with Yazbeck as the struggling druggist
and Lara Pulver as Moll . . . the show is little more than a series of events—interactions
between Mister Mister and the people he controls.” Our Stage Buddy concluded, “Although the
economy is better today, the themes still resonate as the wealthy classes and
big business continue to hold sway over all facets of the economy. Foreman’s message, one of hope for the masses,
still seems naive and unobtainable.”
Eugene Paul of TheaterScene.com
characterized CSC’s Cradle as “[c]ool,
attractive, more an homage than a fiery presentation” but observed that “the
times have radically changed” (have they?) and the CSC cast “does not project
the fire-[i]n-the-belly fervor” of the 1937 original company. Paul continued, “Without that inner
conviction and turmoil, Blitzstein’s stereotypical caricatures lose their power
to shock, to convince, to persuade, making them uncomfortable to perform with
conviction.” Furthermore, Paul
complained, “the piano [is] too thin in presenting Blitzstein’s powerful music”
and found the director’s shifting metal-drum environment “a highly clever
series of procedures, worthy of our admiration but fatal to Blitzstein’s cause. We admire what is going on,” the reviewer
felt, “but remain at a cool Brechtian remove.” He added, “If that is in Doyle’s design, it is
a miscalculation. We want to, we need to
be fired up.” Paul’s bottom line was: “It’s
all very college little theatre.”
On The Wrap,
Robert Hofler (who was even more annoyed with CSC for not providing paper
programs than I am) complained that
Doyle’s patented minimalist
approach worked best for Oscar Hammerstein II’s take on Bizet; the narrative is
stronger and more linear in “Carmen Jones.” Brecht’s “Arturo Ui” and Blitzstein’s “Cradle”
aren’t only more episodic; the scenes are piled on top of each other, the
connective tissue of a story being much less obvious. When the actors aren’t switching roles,
they’re busy rearranging the stage furniture, which, in the case of “Cradle,”
amounts to a few barrels.
“Blitzstein isn’t subtle,” Hofler reminded us, “and neither
is Doyle, who has Mr. Mister throw around an increasingly large roll of dollar
bills whenever he wants to buy someone off. At show’s end,” The Wrap’s reviewer reported, “the actors here are knee-deep in
paper money.” The review-writer praised Pulver
as Moll and Sadie Pollock (that’s not like Jackson Pollock, by the way, but Polack,
as in a slur for a Polish person), Eakeley as Reverend Salvation, Cooper as Junior
Mister and Dr. Specialist, and the four piano players.
Ron Cohen, in Show-Score’s highest-rated review (90),
gave CSC’s Cradle five stars on the
website Musical Theatre Review
and labeled the production “triumphantly alive” with an “ensemble bringing
passion, immediacy and theatrical acuity to the script’s thesis, its music and
sardonic, bitter humour [sic].” Acknowledging that the current political
times make Cradle relevant, Cohen
applauds, “What Doyle and company succeed in doing is making it thrillingly
relevant.” The MTR writer interpreted the uniform factory-worker costume scheme as
appearing “as if a company of everyday (but sumptuously talented) workers are
putting on the show for us.” With this,
however, “the storytelling can get a little muddled now and then,” Cohen
reported. With respect to the music,
though, Cohen cautioned that “it may take a while for ears to adjust to the
emphatic rhythms and seeming tunelessness of Blitzstein’s” score, but “it’s all
handled superbly by the company.”
Carole Di Tosti on the blog Carole Di Tosti, in one
of the two notices that scored 85, the second-highest rating on Show-Score,
labeled the show, “which employed no elaborate spectacle,” “sleek.” She described the play as “sung as a quasi
opera, in a Bertolt Brecht style with ferocity and near didacticism,” which Di
Tosti found “certainly speaks for our
time.” She praised “the minimalism of
props which the actors use seamlessly,” including “the use of greenbacks which
dominate the scenes.” The “talented
actors” of the company produced “a fine production,” Di Tosti felt, and “Doyle’s
direction/staging/design is spot-on.” In
the end, however, the reviewer reported that CSC’s Cradle is “a potentially stunning production which fell a bit short”
because the singers “[a]t times . . . were imprecise” in their
enunciation. “Nevertheless,” she
declared in the end, the revival “is a must-see as a trenchant allegory for our
time.”
On CurtainUp, Elyse Sommer declared that Doyle’s cast “will pull you into
the power of the gritty score” and “the finely sung songs make up for” the fact
that “The Cradle Will Rock tends to come off as a sermon more than
an entertainment.” As her final word,
Sommer admitted, “Ultimately, my biggest disappointment was that it wasn't
hopelessly dated, but undeniably relevant.”
Steven Suskin acknowledged on New York Stage Review, in one of the site’s two reviews, “The
CSC Cradle doesn’t rock quite so well, but it is an admirable
presentation of an historically important musical.” Suskin thought, “Doyle and his denizens blow
the accumulated dust off the piece, bringing out the strengths in this most
uncompromising work.” The NYSR writer found that Doyle’s “intimate
production places full attention on the cast, revealing some fine performances.” He allowed that “Doyle and CSC do not
reveal The Cradle Will Rock to be an all-time masterwork, no. But it is a compelling production of a
compelling piece of writing.”
In the second NYSR
notice, which received a Show-Score score of 40, one of the
two second-lowest for Cradle, Michael
Sommers complained at the outset that “Doyle [is] not at all at his
considerable best” and “the result is less than impressive.” Labeling the play a “mostly sung-through
musical cartoon,” Sommers lamented, “It’s too bad that this often fevered,
entirely fascinating work’s proletarian and musical charms are muffled in Doyle’s
misjudged, under-performed production.”
Of Doyle and Arsenault’s set, NYSR
number two caviled, “Such visuals do not suggest a Steeltown so much as an Oil
City,” but Sommers had a more pointed criticism of the performing: he was
displeased with “performers who more or less sing (and more or less act, alas)”
and “the not entirely resonant sound of music they make.” (He was harshest on Yazbeck.) Summing up, Sommers found, “Generally, there’s
too little zest to their group effort, however, and the show merely plods along
rather than rouses the audience. Sad to say, this rendition of The Cradle Will Rock scarcely rocks at
all.”
On TheaterScene.net,
David Kaufman complained, “Without voice or costume changes, it’s difficult to
know when Ken Barnett is Editor Daily or when he’s President Prexy.” Kaufman found that “what’s missing from
Blitzstein’s The Cradle Will Rock is the heart and/or soul
that every musical requires,” which he blamed partly on “Doyle’s
direction.” Kaufman dubbed Cradle “a wannabe musical or opera that,
ironically, lacks substance, given its heavy-hitting intentions.”
Donna Herman of New
York Theatre Guide, reminding us of the nearly-abortive début, remarked
that “it makes perfect sense that, with the swamp returned to Washington, DC
where another conservative congress is making headlines with corruption
scandals, The Cradle Will Rock is being revived.” The NYTG
reviewer observed that “Blitzstein’s modern style of music that could almost be
described as harsh, at times defying easy melody, fits [Doyle’s] kind of
stripped-down presentation.” Herman felt
that the talented cast . . . all manage to nimbly navigate their multiple roles”
but also found that “[w]ith almost everyone dressed in some form of overalls or
factory worker garb, the early scene in the jail before you understand that
everyone will have multiple roles is very confusing.” Like me, Herman longs to see a fully mounted
production of Cradle, but concluded:
“I wouldn’t have missed this chance to see a full production of The
Cradle Will Rock.”
“Though there’s the
occasional lack of tension that makes the 90-minute production tend to lag at
times,” reported Broadway
World’s Michael Dale, “individual
performances are quite good, and the clima[c]tic confrontation . . . is fiercely
played.” On Theater Pizzazz,
Joseph Pisano noted that while the history of Cradle is “a great story of art fighting against censorship, that doesn’t necessarily
mean the art itself was great.” At CSC, though, as “[l]ed by director
John Doyle . . ., the ten actors, each of whom portray multiple roles, give
affecting allegorical life to Blitzstein’s Steeltown, USA.”
Steven Ross of Front
Mezz Junkies dubbed Cradle a “mesmerizingly sing-song sonata of a
play” and the CSC production an “interesting and thought provoking revival
solidly directed by John Doyle.” Oddly,
Ross suggested that “the passion and emotional depth of what dance might have
brought to the thesis on corruption and resistance is what this CSC production
is lacking.” He felt, “The blood of the
desperate isn’t pounding in [the characters’] veins.” (All this seems to come from the fact that
Ross longed to see Yazbeck dance because the actor’s a Broadway hoofer.) In the end, the FMJ reviewer lamented,
“The singing registers beautifully, the dance of the staging entertains . . .,
the enthusiasm of the cast resonates, but the heart of the piece never pumps
with the same power of . . . that first rebellious production.”
Characterizing CSC’s revival as “solid.” Cititour’s Brian Scott Lipton found that
“Blitzstein’s bare-bones script . . . doesn’t quite make the stakes feel high
enough.” Nonetheless, countered Lipton,
“Still, the entire cast . . . works very hard to flesh out their fictional
counterparts.” Though “sometimes
engaging,” CT’s reviewer found that “the
songs are also a bit one-note.” Doyle, however, “adds enough choreography to
make the numbers more than just ‘park and bark’ solos.” The director’s “ultra-minimalist” style,
though, “has the effect of either forcing audiences to really pay attention . .
. or allowing them to get distracted by their own thoughts.” Lipton sums up by adding that “as a work of
stagecraft, it still feels too much a piece of its time to make the same impact
it did 82 years ago.”
On TheaterMania, Zachary Stewart, in
another review that scored only a 40, proclaimed the history of Cradle’s 1937 opening “a joyous tale of
regular people defying fearsome institutions, and singing in the face of power.” Then he lamented, “It’s a pity none of that
comes through in John Doyle’s dispassionate, soporific revival at Classic Stage
Company. The cradle rocks all right.” The TM
reviewer argued, “There’s never been a better time to revive The Cradle
Will Rock,” as he recalled the
Jussie Smollett embarrassment, the Varsity Blues college admissions scandal,
and the Sackler art-funding disgrace. “With
the audience bringing so much pent-up rage into the theater, there’s no reason
that a play like this should feel frozen in time.”
Stewart criticized
all of Doyle’s production choices, including the unit costuming, the
non-representational set, the pared-down cast and consequent multiple casting,
and even the unamplified singing, asserting that Doyle “does his production no
favors by falling back on old tricks.”
The TM writer continued: “With this semi-intelligible production,
Doyle seems to assume that his audience already knows this rarely revived play,
robbing newcomers of the opportunity to discover the work in its full
clarity.” In conclusion, Stewart
proclaimed, “Blunt by design and rarely hummable, The Cradle Will Rock still
has the power to shake audiences awake . . ., but it takes a firmer hand than
this to really push us out of our bassinets.”
Talkin’ Broadway’s David Hurst, whose notice was Show-Score’s lowest-rated at 35, reveled
in the prospect of a revival of The Cradle Will Rock at this auspicious (“Trumpian”) moment, particularly
one staged by Doyle and produced at CSC.
“Imagine my surprise,” sighed Hurst, “then to encounter a lifeless
production which, despite an abundance of talent at his disposal, never
explodes with rage under Doyle’s flaccid direction.” Complaining that “there’s no energy or
vitality propelling the storytelling of Doyle’s production.” Hurst declared, “The
cast is terrific,” praising all 10 of Doyle’s company, especially “triple-threat
Yazbeck,” as the TB reviewer insists, “who tries mightily to bring Doyle’s
production to life with the rousing title song.” In the end, however, not even “mighty” Yazbeck
“can save this revival.” Hurst’s final
assessment is that “whether you call it an allegorical play in music or
proletariat agitprop, The Cradle Will Rock deserves better
than its current mounting at Classic Stage.”
On his blog, Theatre’s Leiter Side, Samuel L.
Leiter dubbed the CSC revival of Cradle “problematic.”
He warned, “If you don’t know the script, or can’t make out the lyrics as
they’re being overpowered by the piano pounding . . ., you’ll have considerable
difficulty in making out who’s the plutocrat, the cop, the druggist, the
hooker, the foreman, and so on.” He
added, “Nor will it be easy to separate the different characters played by
actors wearing the same garments for each.”
Leiter reported, “There’s a lot of talent involved in the ensemble,"
and “[s]everal moments are imaginatively staged but Doyle overdoes a few things”
like the way Mr. Mister throws his cash around to make those he’s paying off
crawl for it. The revival lacked “nuance
and character expression . . . in Doyle's fast-paced but monotonous production,
so one-note that my plus-one couldn't help saying: ‘It had a certain ring. Bo-ring.’”
The blogger-reviewer concluded, “The wind is blowing at the CSC but down
has come baby, The Cradle Will Rock and all.”
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