Gutsy Proles

By T.E.K.

THE CRADLE WILL ROCK

by Marc Blitzstein

Standing behind a lectern, John Houseman delivers the prologue, and on a June night in 1937, he lived it. It is the saga of a show that very nearly did not go on.

Houseman and Orson Welles were the co-producers of Marc Blitzstein's "labor opera" initially scheduled as an entry of the WPA'S Federal Theater Project. In one of those periodic bouts of political jitters, the Maxine Elliott Theater was closed to Cradle the day before the opening. Ironically, since the show is vociferously pro-union, the musicians' and actors' unions forbade them to play or go onstage.

At the penultimate minute, another empty theater was found. Cast, friends and well-wishers trekked 21 blocks accompanied by an upright piano in a truck. Blitzstein and the piano took the sceneryless stage, and as the composer played the score, the actors, scattered through the house, stood up and delivered their lines. The event took the audience and the next day's front pages by storm.

Today Blitzstein's work can be seen as period agitprop, analogous to Clifford Odets' Waiting for Lefty. It is colored with the lyric causticity of the Brecht-Weill collaborations. Yet it is always a mistake to deride the potency of stereotypes in the theater or the power of good-vs.-evil allegories, however simpleminded. Here the premise is that Mr. Mister (David Schramm), the boss of Steeltown, U.S.A., is a cigar-chomping tyrant, and his gutsy prole of a foe, Larry Foreman (Randle Mell), is a knight in blue-collar armor. We meet Mister's toadies: mousy Reverend Salvation, sycophantic College President Prexy and craven Editor Daily. As a whore with a heart of tarnished nickel, Lisa Banes is achingly vulnerable, and Michele-Denise Woods keens a militant lament for her injured brother in Joe Worker Gets Gypped.

Thanks to Houseman's pitch-perfect direction and his cast's vibrancy, the evening at off-Broadway's Douglas Fairbanks Theater possesses a blazing vitality. Even bad old Depression days seem like the good old days.

--T.E.K. This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.