'The Cradle Will Rock' (Classic Stage Company)

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.)

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.”

'The Cradle Will Rock' (Encores!)

Now and then, I get the impulse to see a show not because of the play, the plot, the writers, the company, the actors, the director, or even the theater. ‘ What’s left, then?’ you ask.  The historical context.  I can’t off hand think of the last show I saw because of its history, but on Friday evening, 12 June, my friend Diana and I went to New York City Center to see the Encores! concert production of Marc Blitzstein’s 1937 musical The Cradle Will Rock.  As Diana pointed out when she broached the idea of seeing Cradle, it’s a play we’ve read about (most notably in my case in Run-Through, John Houseman’s 1972 autobiography) but never actually seen.  (As it happens, I saw the Tim Robbins 1999 film, Cradle Will Rock, that recounts the semi-fictionalized story of the play’s politically-infused première production, but I don’t have much of a memory of it.)

Cradle was Blitzstein’s first musical play even though the author, already 32, was an internationally respected classical composer. The play’s set in Steeltown, U.S.A., where greedy puppetmaster Mr. Mister controls the factory, the newspaper, the church, the college, the arts, and the social establishment.  His only opposition comes from Larry Foreman, the working-class hero, who’s trying to unionize the plant workers.  Foreman has been arrested at a union rally for “inciting to riot” after having been beaten by the police.  The plot reveals how Mr. Mister has tried to subvert Larry’s activities.  At the same time, Moll, a prostitute, had been rousted for rejecting a police officer’s advances.  In night court, she meets Harry Druggist, arrested for vagrancy.  Because of a mistake by a cop, the Liberty Committee, a board of prominent citizens formed by Mr. Mister to block the union, have also been brought in.  Harry tells Moll that the Liberty Committee are worse whores than she is.  In a series of flashback scenes, the druggist shows Moll how each of them, and he himself, has sold out to Mr. Mister, who finally arrives himself to release the Liberty Committee.  Mr. Mister proposes to buy Foreman out and offers him a seat on the Liberty Committee.  Foreman refuses, and everyone hears the music of the union meeting outside, organizing to oppose Mr. Mister.  By the end of the play, the victory of the workers over their avaricious boss has been won.

The characters in The Cradle Will Rock, as well as other aspects of the setting, are allegorical in name—like Steeltown, U.S.A., itself: along with Mr. Mister, the boss, and Larry Foreman, the union organizer, the town’s physician’s name is Dr. Specialist, the pharmacist is Harry Druggist, the painter is Dauber, the minister is the Reverend Salvation, the newspaper editor is Editor Daily, and the president of College University is President Prexy.  But Blitzstein hasn’t treated the characters as mere archetypes; he's given each of them a distinct, if somewhat one-dimensional, personality and, in a few cases, backstory.  (For instance, Harry Druggist’s young son was killed in a bombing arranged by Mr. Mister’s henchmen to which Harry is coerced into turning a blind eye in order to keep his drugstore.)  In the end, Cradle, in the words of New York Times reviewer Charles Isherwood, “is nothing if not schematic in its mechanical dissection of how thoroughly the desire to get ahead of the other guy poisons society.”

A word or two about the play’s period: I’m not positive, but from some lines and lyrics, the play seems to be set during or just after World War I rather on the eve of World War II.  As far as I can find, no critic or analyst makes a point of this and the published script doesn’t set a year for the story.  However, the few dates that are mentioned in the text are all around the First World War and there are several references to “The Hun,” the derogatory name Allied soldiers called the Germans in that conflict.  (By World War II, the German enemy was more likely to be called “Jerry” or “Kraut.”)  Though Cradle is predominantly an anti-capitalist and pro-unionist drama, there’s a unmistakable strain of anti-militarism and anti-war running through the script as well.  (In “Faculty Room,” Scene 8, the professors sing a song about military training at Steeltown’s College University and Professor Scoot loses his post because he doesn’t support the course, which Mr. Mister wants to expand.)  Incidentally, Cradle wouldn’t be the only Second World War-era anti-war musical set during the Great War.  In 1936, the year before Blitzstein’s musical had its historic début, the Group Theatre staged Paul Green and Kurt Weill’s Johnny Johnson (the company’s only musical) on Broadway.  (I’ve never posted it on ROT, but I have published a reconstruction of “The Group Theatre’s Johnny Johnson” in The Drama Review of winter 1984.)  The years around World War I were also the period when unions and the labor movement were making their first important inroads into America’s capitalist economic structure, meeting with strenuous and often violent resistance from industrialists; by World War II, unions were fairly well established (until, that is, recent attempts to disenfranchise them again).

Blitzstein identified The Cradle Will Rock, the first American musical written from a working-class point of view and the first to address the controversial subject of the labor movement which was becoming part of the American political landscape, often in the midst of bloody conflicts, as “a labor opera composed in a style that falls somewhere between realism, romance, vaudeville, comic strip, Gilbert & Sullivan, Brecht, and agitprop.”  Like his theatrical model, Bertolt Brecht, to whom the composer had dedicated Cradle (“[T]o Bert Brecht: first because I think him the most admirable theatre-writer of our time“), Blitzstein rejected the concept of “art for art’s sake.”  (Blitzstein’s wife, Berlin-born writer Eva Goldbeck, had been a translator of Brecht’s works and introduced her husband to them.  The composer, who studied in Berlin under Arnold Schoenberg, later translated and adapted the Off-Broadway version of The Threepenny Opera as well as English versions of Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny and of Brecht's play Mother Courage and Her Children.)  Blitzstein’s feelings about this notion are clearly laid out in the song “Art for Art’s Sake” in Cradle, sung by the characters Dauber, a painter, and Sasha, a musician.  He believed theater, music, and the other art forms should take on important social issues and not simply entertain.  As demonstrated in Cradle, a piece of unabashed agitprop theater (which some compare to a musical Waiting for Lefty, presented by the Group Theatre two years earlier), the composer wasn’t afraid to create a play that’s preachy and brimming with stark political and social commentary.  The script takes on a number of wonkish labor issues head on, including, for instance , the distinction between a “closed shop” and an “open shop.”)

The original version of Cradle, directed by Orson Welles and produced by Houseman, was a production by Project #891 of the Federal Theatre Project.  It was supposed to open at the Maxine Elliott Theatre on West 39th Street between 6th and 7th Avenue on 16 June 1937.  But the show was tied up with labor and theater politics involving Blitzstein, the fear of communism (which in a decade would break out in the HUAC witch-hunts and the Hollywood blacklist), and suspicion among conservatives that the FTP itself was a hotbed of leftists, and the Works Progress Administration, the parent agency of the FTP, judged the show too pro-unionist and politically radical and cancelled the production four days before the scheduled previews.  (The stated reason was budget cuts.)  Forbidden from performing on the stage—the Elliott, which had been leased by the FTP and was therefore government property, was padlocked and security guards were posted at the entrances—Welles and Houseman looked around for another house to accommodate the spectators who’d already bought tickets. 

On the spur of the moment, Welles, Houseman, and Blitzstein rented a piano and the Venice Theatre on 7th Avenue at 58th Street just in time for the 16 June preview and walked the gathered audience and the cast the 20 blocks (about a mile) from the Elliott over to the Venice.  The musicians’ union wouldn’t allow its members to play without a guarantee of their full salaries and Actors’ Equity forbade its members to appear on stage unless the show’s producers, which is to say the federal government, agreed.  Houseman and Welles planned for Blitzstein (not an AFM member) to play the whole score on the piano, but made no other arrangements.  Spontaneously, however, the actress playing Moll stood at her seat in the house and began to sing her role.  Little by little, as the composer continued to play the music, other actors joined in from the auditorium and the company performed the whole play from their seats in the audience to the accompaniment of a lone piano.  Blitzstein gave an oral commentary and Welles filled in with narration for actors who didn’t appear and action that couldn’t be presented.  The New York Post reported the next day, “About 1,000 persons, including 100 standees, listened in mild astonishment but with frequent applause at this method of play production.”  Unlike the standard Encores! stagings, Welles’s production of The Cradle Will Rock had been conceived with an elaborate set and lighting scheme, as well as full orchestrations, which were never used.  The sets, along with the costumes and props, were, of course, locked inside the Maxine Elliott.  But the effort had been so successful that the company repeated the impromptu performance 13 more times (and then at the Mercury Theatre on West 41st Street for five more performances in December), attempting to recreate for a short run what they had done spontaneously on the night of 16 June.

Houseman determined that there was no legal prohibition to another production of Cradle with an independent producer and set about putting one together.  Under the auspices of the Mercury Theatre, which Welles and Houseman had formed after Houseman was fired by the FTP and Welles resigned over the outcome of the Project #891 Cradle production, members of the original cast, directed by Blitzstein, remounted the show at the Windsor Theatre on West 48th Street for 108 performances from January to April 1938. The play was revived  a decade later at the Mansfield Theatre (16 Dec. 1947-10 Jan. 1948) and the Broadway Theatre (28 Jan.-7 Feb. 1948) for 34 performances.  The ’40s production, directed by original lead actor Howard Da Silva (who played Larry Foreman) starred Broadway superstar Alfred Drake (Foreman) and Will Geer (who reprised his role of Mr. Mister from 1937 and ’38).  Other members of the cast included Vivian Vance and Jack Albertson; Leonard Bernstein, who conducted the pit orchestra, appeared on stage in a small role.

The Cradle Will Rock was revived Off-Broadway twice, once in 1964-65 at Theatre Four on West 55th Street in Hell’s Kitchen, directed once again by Da Silva.  With Jerry Orbach (fresh from his Off-Broadway breakout role as El Gallo in The Fantasticks) as the play’s labor hero, the production ran 82 performances and won the Obie for best musical.  In 1983, the Acting Company, the traveling troupe made up of graduates of the Juilliard theater division established by John Houseman, staged the play for a 24-performance run at the American Place Theatre on West 44th Street.  (The presentation premièred the summer before at the Chautauqua Institution in upstate New York.)  Directed by Houseman with a cast that included Randle Mell (Foreman) and Patti LuPone (Moll), the Acting Company tried to recreate the atmosphere of the 1937 performance at the Venice, with a bare stage and minimal props and no formal period costumes.  (Many of the Acting Company cast revived the play in London in 1985, winning an Olivier for LuPone.  Another London staging was mounted in 2010 in one of the city’s Off-Broadway-level theaters.)  In 1964, the Off-Broadway staging was televised  on Camera Three on CBS, and in 1985, PBS broadcast the Acting Company production as a segment of American Musical Theater. 

Despite its renown as an artifact of theater history, the play is seldom performed and even Blitzstein’s music is rarely heard.  (In his New York Times review, Charles Isherwood described Blitzstein’s play as “more revered for its status as a stormy passage in theatrical (and social) history than performed.”)  The New York City Opera did a radio broadcast of the score with Tammy Grimes in 1960 and it’s been recorded about a half dozen times, including the first cast album ever made, a recording of the 1937 FTP company.

The Encores! hour-and-forty-minute, intermissionless presentation of the historic musical had a very brief run at City Center on West 55th Street: Wednesday, 10, to Saturday, 13 July—five performances in all (including a Saturday matinee).  Directed by Sam Gold, it was presented as part of Encores! Off-Center, the concert-theater producer’s new summer series of Off-Broadway musicals.  The company also tied Cradle to current political and social movements, namely the Occupy Wall Street “rebellion against corporate greed.”  With that activism as background, “Marc Blitzstein’s 1937 battle hymn to the proletariat,” as the company’s publicity characterized the play, “is a powerful political document, a funny, potent satire, and an extraordinary piece of theater history.”  (Encores! Off-Center, directed by Jeanine Tesori, presented three musicals in the 2013 season, of which Cradle was the inaugural production.  It was followed by Tesori and Brian Crawley’s Violet, 17 July; and Gretchen Cryer and Nancy Ford’s I'm Getting My Act Together and Taking It On the Road, 24-27 July.  Tesori is a veteran musical theater composer and a four-time Tony and five-time Drama Desk Award nominee; she won Drama Desks twice.  Her credits include Shrek, Thoroughly Modern Millie, Caroline or Change, and the new Fun Home, which opens at the Public Theater in October.  Tesori has signed on as artistic director of Encores! Off-Center for three years.)

The production at City Center was stripped down even by Encores! standards.  There were no sets or props and Mark Barton’s lighting was entirely straightforward and pragmatic.  (For whatever reason, the program did credit Andrew Lieberman with the scenic design.)  The actors, who sat across the proscenium in simple black chairs and carried black-bound scripts, wore evening clothes: the men in black tie and tuxes and the women in brightly-colored long gowns.  (There were three exceptions in costume designer Clint Ramos’s scheme: Danny Burstein’s Mr. Mister was dressed in white tie and tails; Eisa Davis, who played Dr. Specialist, the court’s clerk, and Professor Scoot, was wearing black tights, stilettoes, and a bolero-style tux jacket with a white blouse and a black bowtie; and 10-year-old Aidan Gemme, who played a cop—yes, that’s right!—among other roles, was dressed as . . . well, a uniformed policeman.)  The attire made no nod to the ’30s or any other period other than our own.  As each of the ten scenes, announced in Brechtian style with a placard that tiny Gemme carried across the proscenium (almost entirely obscured by the signboard!), the actors stepped up to mics down front on stands (which they occasionally removed to hold in their hands for mobile bits).  They sometimes shared mics or one actor would shift from one stand to another to suggest movement.  A few non-musical scenes were read from the seats, but all the songs were performed completely presentationally, standing center looking out at the audience.  Props, if necessary for a scene, were mimed.  In other words, Gold made no attempt to approximate realistic acting or behavior.

Of course, the first performance of Cradle was famously without props or staging, as you’ve heard, but I doubt Gold was making a deliberate reference to the Houseman-Welles presentation.  Aside from the obvious fact that this company was on stage, not in the audience, they were wearing (admittedly non-character and non-period) costumes rather than street clothes.  (I have to admit that the idea of the working-class characters dressed in evening clothes, evoking the 1%, was disconcerting.  The multiple casting—most actors played more than one role—may have made any kind of class-specific attire impossible, but I wonder if Ramos couldn’t have devised a more neutral unit design.  If this was an attempt at irony, I missed it.  Maybe it was just me.)  In the 1983 Acting Company revival, which deliberately tried to recreate the atmosphere of the 1937 presentation, Houseman didn’t use period-accurate costumes, either; instead he asked the cast to look for suitable apparel for their roles and the nature of the production.  The 1983 revival also performed with a single piano like Blitzstein’s in ’37, but Gold employed 14 musicians under the direction of music director and conductor Chris Fenwick.  (The orchestra at City Center was positioned on stage above the actors on a slightly raised platform.)  So, it seemed that Gold made a vague allusion to the 1937 presentation (which, along with some of the prominent revivals and derivations, was described in the program) without actually emulating it.  (On the other hand, though, this could just have been the inauguration of what will soon be recognized as the Encores! Off Center concert style.)

Gold’s directing was mostly efficient and non-invasive.  (In my opinion, Cradle is one of those shows that won’t stand up well under idiosyncratic directorial interpretation.  It’s innate style, part Brecht-Weill-Eisler, part Odets, part Schoenberg-Boulanger, part jazz-infused ’30s pop, is too unique and embedded in the script to allow tampering with impunity.  Brecht’s and Ibsen’s plays are in this category, too, I think.)  His staging for the most part was perfectly straightforward, without frills or furbelows.  He did make a couple of decisions about which I wonder, though they hardly had much impact one way or the other.  Why, for instance, did he close the curtain in Scene 6 (“Hotel Lobby”) so that Moll sang “Nickel Under the Foot” on the apron?  There’s no set to change behind the drape and outside of that instance, he never used the curtain anywhere else in the production.  At the end of the play, the stage hands start dismantling the mic stands and other performance equipment and carrying them off stage.  Does this have something to do with the fact that stage hands are all union workers?  (So are actors, of course—100% of them in this production, as a program insert proudly notes—as well as musicians.)  If that’s what was going on, the significance went by me, though Joe Dziemianowicz of the Daily News seemed to find this Gold’s “sly last bite” (it wasn’t clear what the News reviewer was referring to): “a nod to what life minus union workers looks like.”  Of course, I say that if there weren’t a union, IATSE in this case, then there wouldn’t have been a stage set-up at all—or if there had been, it would have just sat there until long after the actors and musicians had left the theater!

As you probably caught, Gold used some peculiar non-traditional casting.  One cop and Professor Mamie were played by a young boy, and Professor Scoot and Dr. Specialist were played by a woman—but without altering the script to reflect the gender switch.  Editor Daily was also portrayed by an actress, Judy Kuhn, who mannishly smoked a big cheroot (making a kind of joke I don’t think was either intended or necessary, but which did no real harm).  Sister Mister, Mr. Mister’s daughter and Junior Mister’s . . . umm, sister, was played by Martin Moran in drag (he wore a pink evening dress—until he and Henry Stram, as Junior Mister, exchange clothes in one scene).  Okay, I get that drag is funny—but I don’t think this was the kind of caricaturish gag Blitzstein had in mind even if it, too, did no damage.  I can only add that Blitzstein’s script has enough innate humor and satire, including outrageous characters, that adding extraneous jokes is completely unnecessary.  For example, in the number “The Rich” (also in “Hotel Lobby”), artist Dauber and musician Yasha (Moran), wearing bowler hats, did a vaudeville-inspired soft-shoe shuffle that so contradicted the message of the song (“Oh, there’s something so damned low about the rich!”) that it’s brilliant comedy even without embellishment.  (The clever and spot-on choreography at City Center was by Chase Brock who used the limited space and pared-down circumstances perfectly.)

I can’t say much about the musical performance in Cradle because my music background is nil, but I can affirm that it seemed fine in all respects.  Blitzstein’s score, in a new orchestration by Josh Clayton, is reminiscent of Kurt Weill, as I’ve said, as well as another Brecht collaborator, Hanns Eisler.  Linda Winer noted in Long Island’s Newsday that Blitzstein’s “score turns out to be a missing link between the distancing grip of Brecht/Weill and the sentimentality of Leonard Bernstein,” which I found an interesting take. (Bernstein served as musical director for several revivals of the play.)  The review-writer went on to affirm that the songs, “driven by unsettling rhythms, play ironically and lusciously with popular tunes and dance forms,” which was accurate to my musically-uneducated  ear.  The play is almost entirely sung, making it operatic.  (Apparently you can’t call it an opera, however, because Blitzstein incorporated too much pop and jazz influence in the music.  I don’t get that really.  I mean, Porgy and Bess is a folk opera, Treemonisha is a ragtime opera, and Tommy is a rock opera, but The Cradle Will Rock can’t be a jazz-and-pop opera?  Who makes these rules?  Ultimately, as with the question of who wrote Shakespeare’s plays, the label doesn’t matter because, like the Gershwin-Heyward, Joplin, and Who pieces, the work still exists and we can enjoy it—or not, as we wish.)  In any case, the orchestra carried the performance along like the string holding the beads, and the actors all executed Blitzstein’s songs with both personality and technical skill.  What little I know about music suggested that Blitzstein’s compositions range from relatively easy, like a good pop tune, to pretty hard, like some of his mentors’ innovative works.  I should also add that because there’s so little spoken dialogue in Cradle, the song lyrics have to carry the whole plot.  That means the company has to make them all clear and intelligible—which this cast did admirably.  (I did come out of the show with the desire to read the libretto.  But that’s not because I couldn’t follow the singing well enough.  It’s because, though the plot is basically simple, Blitzstein’s poetic lyrics are complex and I want to read them to catch the subtleties that passed by too fast in performance.)

The acting, too, was first rate.  Though the doubling sometimes made it hard to catch who was singing, without the help of costume changes to distinguish one character from another (though sometimes a hat or other accessory did the trick), Blitzstein’s script usually makes it obvious what character was on stage and the cast kept each one individual enough to make it clear quickly enough.  Even the director’s gimmick casting was well-carried out, including Kuhn’s cigar-chomping editor and Gemme’s diminutive cop and professor.  (Gemme, already a Broadway and film vet, displayed no sense of irony or self-consciousness playing adult characters.  Gold’s casting motivation may be questionable—the actor also plays the druggist’s young son—but Gemme went about his task “without guile,” as Linda Winer wrote.  If it hadn’t been for his stature—Gemme really looked tiny among all those adults; his feet didn’t even touch the floor when he sat down—it would have seemed perfectly ordinary.  Still, Encores! isn’t the Wooster Group.)  In an odd way, it seemed as if the best way to attack these roles is to play them perfectly straight and let Blitzstein’s writing, both his plotting and his lyrics, take care of the individual quirks and outrageous behavior, and Gold and the actors seem to have gotten this.  Among the standouts were Burstein’s Mr. Mister, who wielded his power over everyone in such an understated manner that it was truly sinister (TheaterMania’s Zachary Stewart called him “David Koch incarnate”); Raúl Esaparza’s Larry Foreman, with a clear, strong tenor, everyman looks, and unshakable self-confidence; Peter Friedman’s anguished, self-punishing Harry Druggist, and Anika Noni Rose’s naïve survivor, Moll.  Moran’s and Stram’s Yasha and Dauber, in the scene I noted earlier, performed a wonderful Tweedledum-and-Tweedledee routine (they reminded me a little of Bill Irwin and David Shiner of Old Hats—see my report of 22 March) while simultaneously conveying the condition of the arts under a capitalistic oligarchy, and David Margulies presented a President Prexy as obsequious and sycophantic as any toady ever depicted on stage.    

In a way, these actors stand out principally because their roles were salient.  All the performers did fine work and I can’t fault any of them in the least.  But though all the actors sang outstandingly, it was obvious that Da’Vine Joy Randolph was cast as Ella Hammer just so she could bring down the house in her unsettling rendition of “Joe Worker,” her chilling lament for her steelworker husband whose death under suspicious circumstances has been covered up.  It was even a little sneaky in a way since Randolph has almost nothing to do in the performance until Scene 9 (“Dr. Specialist’s Office”) when she steps up and wallops the number out of the theater.  In the song, Ella sings, “It takes a lot of Joes to make a sound you can hear,” but, as the New York Post’s Elisabeth Vincentelli declared, “[I]t only takes one actor to stop a show.”

(Stram, incidentally, is a veteran of the Acting Company revival of Candle, having appeared as Junior Mister both on stage in 1983 and in the 1985 PBS broadcast.  Margulies, whom I’ve seen quite a number of times in recent years, is, as ROTters will remember, a former acting teacher of mine.  He’s featured in two ROT play reports: “Chasing Manet,” 30 April 2009, and “The Illusion,” 1 July 2011.  Two other cast members have been in productions on which I’ve reported in the last season: Moran was in the John Guare trilogy of one-acts, 3 Kinds of Exile, on ROT on 27 June, and Randolph appeared in Melissa James Gibson’s What Rhymes With America, posted on 3 January.) 

With such a short run and no previews, the press coverage at this writing was minimal.  None of the weeklies, including the theater press, had published yet.  (As it was, the print dailies only came out the day before the final performances and the on-line press came out a day earlier.)  In the Post, Vincentelli opened her notice by raising the same quibble I had about the attire: “Nothing says jarring like people in tuxes and gowns praising unions . . . .”  Nevertheless, Vincentelli assured us, “even in black tie, the musical’s radical spirit occasionally burns through.”  Of the casting gimmickry, the Postwoman observed that “the ploy feels distracting” but she concludes that “the cast is in fine voice and some great moments make up for the weaknesses.”  Joe Dziemianowicz of the Daily News called the concert revival “impeccably performed and richly satisfying,” though he, too, alluded to the “unmistakable feeling of posh celebration.”  Dziemianowicz linked this air to Gold’s “canny move” of hanging a backdrop upstage that read, “In the rich man’s house the only place to spit is in his face,” a quotation, a program insert explained, from Diogenes.  That “elegant invitation” inscribed “in a fancy font” turned Blitzstein’s “storied—but rarely seen” show from a “party” to a “bash” and the Newsman asserted that the play is “as timely as ever” in this day of “the 1% versus the 99%.”  “The show isn’t subtle,” affirmed Dziemianowicz, but “the cast consistently finds nuance in Blitzstein’s score.” 

In the Times, Isherwood dubbed the Encores! Cradle “vibrantly sung if sometimes fuzzy-headed” but noted that it “clearly establishes that Blitzstein’s book retains a biting humor, which helps to soften the stern message mongering.”  Acknowledging Blitzstein’s “debt to Kurt Weill,” the Times reviewer described the score as “supple, eclectic and consistently engaging” whose “skillful blending of musical flavors has its own peppery appeal.”  Though Isherwood felt the score “riffs” comically on the classics of Beethoven and Bach, it “has a jaunty, driving appeal that ultimately owes more to jazz and other pop music forms.”  Though he labeled the cast “across-the-board excellent,” the Timesman also commented on the “jokey” casting that bothered me, concluding that the tactic “sends the conflicting message that we’re not to take things too seriously—an assertion hardly in tune with the otherwise furrowed brow of the production, and for that matter the show itself.”  That’s precisely how I felt, as was Isherwood’s admonition that “embroidering” the composer’s satire “is hardly necessary.”    Newsday’s Winer praised Encores! Off Center which “justified its existence” with “the bar set very high by” The Cradle Will Rock.  She described the performance of “Blitzstein's marvelous score and his surprisingly witty fist of a book” as “wonderfully cast, passionate and simply presented.”  In the end, Winer asserted, “If the production seems a bit slick for the style, a devastating finale catapults us back to the real gritty business.” 

The cyber press was generally in the same vein as the print medium.  On BroadwayWorld, Michael Dale used most of his space to recover the historical backstory (a common thread even among the print reviews), but he did state that although “several of Sam Gold's directorial decisions serve to diminish the musical's power,” the “singing and acting is of consistently high quality,” while the musicians “nicely emulate a period sound.”  Dale also felt that “[d]espite staging choices that keep the actors from emotionally connecting, instances where it's hard to tell exactly who's talking and awkward transitions through the musical's various styles, the talented company . . . allows Blitzstein's moments of brilliance and sharp commentary to burst through.”  The BWW reviewer finished up by observing: “The Cradle Will Rock helped change American theatre, but many will leave the Encores! production thinking little has changed in American politics.”  Talkin’ Broadway’s Matthew Murray asked, “Is The Cradle Will Rock better history than it is a musical?”  His answer was that “its edges no longer seem as sharp as once they may have.”  (Ironically, when Murray commented that in 2013, Cradle doesn’t sting the way, say, Brecht and Weill’s Threepenny Opera still does, because our current salient labor dispute is over “right-to-work” laws, which is “a bit beyond Blitzstein's scope,” he appears to have overlooked one fact.  Cradle does tackle “right to work” in Larry Foreman’s title song—though I’m not certain that wasn’t an insertion by Gold and Encores!)  The Talkin’ Broadway writer named the same “heavy-handed” directorial decisions that irked me and declared that Gold’s enhancement “ultimately detracts from absorbing what's on offer.”  “Blitzstein wasn't Brecht,” admonished Murray, and trying to make them “identical artists” meant that “you're not experiencing the show in anything like the way Blitzstein intended it.”  Giving the cast its due praise all around, Murray summed up, “When [Blitzstein’s] songs and scenes are allowed to flourish unadorned . . ., they have no trouble holding their own.”  Finally, in TheaterMania, Zachary Stewart characterized the Encores! Cradle as ”an uncommonly powerful concert production.”  Even as he pointed out some of the incongruities of the City Center presentation, Stewart ended feeling “like we were engaging in something forbidden, hearing truths that aren't allowed to be spoken in polite society.”  Curiously, while Talkin’ Broadway’s Murray felt that despite the director’s decisions “to bring you ‘closer,’ then, Gold pushes you further away,” Stewart thought that Gold’s staging “made the social and political themes of the work that much more present.”  The TM review-writer pronounced, “The takeaway: In 2013, Blitzstein's show feels more relevant than ever.” 

I’m not sure I’d go as far as Zachary Stewart—Cradle’s still a period artifact, irrespective of its artistic achievements—but I also have to report that I was thrilled to have seen it even in Encores! pared-down revival.  I acknowledged earlier that I came out of the performance with the desire to read the libretto, but I had two impulses when I left the theater.  The other is to see a fully-staged production of Cradle some time.  (The Acting Company’s 1985 TV version is on video, but that production was stripped down, too.)  I suppose it’s obvious that my wish to see a complete production of Cradle comes directly from the high quality of this concert version, which was like theatrical foreplay.  I’m now ready for the full monty!  It’s not hard to put myself back into the days of the labor struggle depicted in Blitzstein’s play; as so many of the reviewers and commentators pointed out, we’re not too far from a parallel situation now—just less violence these days perhaps (at least for now).  Like many good allegories, The Cradle Will Rock engaged and engrossed me both artistically and circumstantially.  (I contrast this response with my reaction to the labor background of Tony Kushner’s The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide, on which I reported for ROT on 6 June 2011.  It seemed tacked on in that play, despite the centrality of unionism to the plot, and it confused me more than engaged me.)  Although I went to City Center because of the historical significance of The Cradle Will Rock, I’m glad I saw it for its own sake, as a piece of American theater art.  Blitzstein died young—he was murdered in 1964 at age 58—but I wonder what he might have gone on to create for the musical theater after having had a taste of it.  Michael Dale on BroadwayWorld felt that “in many ways Cradle can be thought of as the 1930s answer to” 1996’s Rent in the sense that both Jonathan Larson and Blitzstein (who was younger when Cradle had its début than the Rent composer was when his break-out musical opened) created shows “infused with raw energy that makes a loud statement about a rebellious class of Americans.”  Like Larson, who raised hopes of launching a new surge of American musicals for the generation of the ’90s and beyond (but never lived to fulfill the hope), Blitzstein might have reinvigorated the American musical stage with his mix of jazz, pop, classical, politics, social comment, and contemporary sensibilities.  We’ll never know, of course, any more than we can know what Larson might have accomplished if he’d lived, but Cradle, like Rent, is such a palpable achievement that I have to wonder—and be thankful I finally got a taste of it, even if it was something of a tease.