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.
