That's thunder, that's lightning
On June 16, 1937, on a warm night in Manhattan, a crowd of more than a thousand people walked from the Maxine Elliot Theatre on West 39th Street to the Venice Theatre on Seventh Avenue. They were led by the cast and crew of The Cradle Will Rock, the latest production of the Federal Theatre Project—a triple-threat "play in music" written and composed by Marc Blitzstein, directed by Orson Welles, and produced by John Houseman. Five days before the premiere, in the midst of full-dress rehearsals and last-minute set and lighting adjustments, the production team had received word from the Works Progress Administration that all future arts projects were frozen until further notice; the official rationale was budget cuts, but not a few of the show's creators felt that its radical, pro-union, anti-capital plot, especially against a backdrop of recent labor strikes, might have had a little something to do with it. The Cradle Will Rock was locked out of its own theater. Guards from the WPA barred the removal of any "government property," the conductor's score and the leading man's toupée included. The actors were forbidden to appear onstage without new contracts, the orchestra to perform ditto. And so, half desperate improvisation, half coup de théâtre, amid an ever-gathering crowd of press agents and curious passersby, the production relocated itself on the night, intending to present the musical in the most skeletonized form possible, one composer, one piano, neither under the control of the WPA. Twenty-one blocks uptown. And the audience followed. Houseman later estimated that by the time they reached the Venice and its variety curtain and its one working spotlight, the first-night attendance of The Cradle Will Rock numbered around twenty-five hundred people. My grandfather was among them. He was sixteen years old. I don't know if he was one of the original six hundred ticket holders or one of the people swept up off the streets in the excitement, I don't know whether he got a seat or joined the great standing room only, I don't even know what he thought of the music, but he was there the night Marc Blitzstein began to perform the entire musical—sans sets, sans costumes, sans orchestration—by himself from a rather rackety upright piano and lead actress Olive Stanton rose unexpectedly from the audience to sing with him. Not onstage; that was the loophole. But the rest of the cast joined her from the house, across rows, in the aisles, playing their parts anywhere but on the boards of the Venice Theatre, and to this day it is the rule rather than the exception to perform The Cradle Will Rock black box Brecht-style, in honor of that first, extraordinary, fourth-wall-shattering performance.
The Boston Conservatory's production of The Cradle Will Rock, which I saw this afternoon with![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
spatch and my mother, had lighting changes and costumes, a bugle as well as a piano, and a couple of bare-bones sets, but it was very good all the same.
Actually it was great. I had wanted to see this musical ever since hearing my grandfather's story as a teenager, ever since seeing Tim Robbins' Cradle Will Rock (1999) in high school, ever since discovering the original cast recording—the very first original cast recording of any Broadway musical—a few years ago, and this student cast under the direction of Doug Lockwood fully justified its reputation. The play is a legendary piece of historical agitprop. It was dedicated to Bertolt Brecht. Its setting of "Steeltown, U.S.A." and its symbolic naming of characters, the prostitute Moll, the union organizer Larry Foreman, the fat-cat town boss Mr. Mister and his hyper-patriotic, fawningly anti-union "Liberty Committee" of purchased institutions like Reverend Salvation, Dr. Specialist, and Editor Daily, are satirical rather than subtle. (However forced by circumstance, the stripping down of the original production may have been the best thing to happen to it: the idea of placing these archetypes in any kind of realistic frame now looks as absurd as rendering a Thurber character in loving oils.) But that doesn't mean it's all poker-faced social realism, humorlessly or naïvely smashing ideological dolls together. Especially as staged rather than just heard, The Cradle Will Rock is a very funny angry musical, whose allegorical names are animated by very real personal and political issues and who communicate in naturally idiomatic, unpretentiously poetic lyrics and a crazy quilt of musical styles that can twist from crooner parody to protest chant sooner than the hand that feeds—when it can turn a profit from it—can be bitten. I'm not going to argue that "Nickel Under the Foot" couldn't pass for an outtake from The Threepenny Opera. But I wasn't expecting the rhythmically spoken choral passages that rattle out like presentiments of Meredith Willson or the intricate internal rhymes that point forward to Sondheim and the sheer go-for-broke storytelling of the piece, the scene-by-scene unity of music, lyrics, and plot, left me wondering why Oklahoma! (1943) is considered the landmark in the development of the American musical rather than The Cradle Will Rock.
Maybe it was the politics. The politics are unmistakable, unapologetic, and ferociously refreshing; the title number is not a child's lullaby but the promise of a storm coming, to shake down from the tree all the profiteers, the one-percenters, the exploiters and oppressors and all who enable them out of greed or fear or convention. That's thunder, that's lightning, and it's going to surround you! No wonder those storm-birds seem to circle around you! Well, you can't climb down and you can't sit still; that's a storm that's going to last until the final wind blows . . . and when the wind blows . . . the cradle will rock! It's frightening, exhilarating music, a call to arms and a warning not to wind up on the wrong side of history, and it's all the more impressive because it caps a plot in which, dramatically speaking, not very much happens. The action takes place in ten scenes, most of them flashbacks, played out in Steeltown's jail on the night of a union drive. Moll (Caitlin Rose, blonde in a tight red dress and spitting like a cat with it) gets run in not because she's soliciting—though she is, from a cheapskate of a gent who whistles like a hundred dollars but only wants to part with thirty cents—but because she won't give the arresting cop a freebie. Harry Druggist (Elliot Lazar, not without dignity in the glasses of a man who didn't use to sleep in gutters; his Yiddish accent was a tip of the hat to family history as well as previous productions) has been picked up for vagrancy and drunkenness, his usual ever since he lost first his son and then his store. Larry Foreman (Paul Watt-Morse, a long-limbed live wire with the unstarry appeal specified in the stage directions) was brought in for inciting a riot, which as he explains with self-deprecating drama means handing out labor literature: "I come up to you . . . very slow . . . very snaky; and with one fell gesture—I tuck a leaflet in your hand. And then, one, two, three—There's a riot. You're the riot. I incited you. I'm terrific, I am!" And the Liberty Committee (Luke Robert Guidinger, Matthew Balkum, Makenzie Schaefer, Zane Sipotz, Thomas Purvis, and Colin Budzyna, each a perfect incarnation of hypocrisy across the professions—the church, the press, the arts, academia, medicine) have all been accidentally rolled up as rioters and are just nauseated at the thought of being mistaken for a union. Everyone is dressed appropriately for the spring of 1937; the spare sets are steps and risers, a rolling steel stairway and in the sole concession to semi-realism a druggist's counter with bar stools; the stage lights wash various colors over tableaux inspired by the murals of Thomas Hart Benton. The piano occupies various points on the stage, played by Marc Blitzstein (guest artist Mike Stapleton) who also reads the stage directions until they are taken over by Harry and Larry, ushering Moll through the history of Steeltown's capitulation to Mr. Mister (Peter Michael Jordan, a three-piece suit and a raccoon coat and a smile that would be easier to take if it looked mean) and Mrs. Mister (Emily Matt, a dab hand with the prevailing winds and a riding crop), one pillar of the community after another falling under their strong-arming, palm-greasing spell until the steelworkers are left fending for themselves in an "open shop" where they can be demoted, fired, even killed without remedy or recompense. We observe the frame-up murders of union man Gus and his wife Sadie (Kean Petrello and Kristen Ivy Haynes, ordinary and tragic), the foiled efforts of Ella Hammer (Calliope Koutsouleris, an eleven o'clock powerhouse) to obtain justice for her brother, a machinist gruesomely injured on the job. Junior Mister and Sister Mister (Gabriel Lucas Hutson and Lillie Reising, aaaaaaaaaaaagh) are the kind of appallingly spoilt offspring that are funny right until their father installs them in positions of power. All this cautionary build-up pays off with the arrival of Mr. Mister, come to bail out his "pet committee" and make this inconvenient agitator disappear—and with an amount of money on the line so huge it can only be whispered, with Moll and Harry on one shoulder and Mr. Mister and the Liberty Committee on the other, Larry has a long, silent moment to decide whether he'll sell out or stick fast, a test we've already seen sympathetic characters in this story fail.
That there's any suspense at this moment rather than the marking time of a parable is a testament to Blitzstein's writing, but also the acting which has to make human beings out of labels and ideas. On the original cast recording, Howard Da Silva breaks the tie with deceptive gentleness, as if he's laughing softly at a man who thinks he's such a fool as to sell out his fellow workers for a few square meals and a chuck under the chin. Watt-Morse, whose sharp, giddy sass has stilled for just these few seconds as if he's really considering whether he could do more good with the backing of Mr. Mister than with the union he's not even sure has succeeded in forming, bursts out in his broadest, most gleeful repudiation of Mr. Mister and all his works yet, so tickled he doesn't even need to swear. (There is profanity in this musical, in case you're curious. Once again I am reminded of the difference between what went into the movies and what went on in real life.) He got Mr. Mister to blink first. Now the workers know how badly a union will hurt him. And there is the sound of a bugle, and the piano picks up, and the chorus who I hadn't been confident existed begin marching down through the aisles, all the people we haven't seen, not some mythical undifferentiated proletariat but all the citizens of Steeltown who have voices and are using them, the rollers and the roughers and the machinists and the blasters and the boilermakers and their children, the union in their thousands. Don't worry, that's not for you. That's just my Aunt Jessie and her committee. I had wondered if this production was going to use the audience. People all across the theater started standing up, joining in the singing. I don't know if some of them were ringers. The man who rose in front of us turned out to be the director, which I guess is a yes. But my mother saw one of the chorus motioning excitedly to the nearest row to take their feet and she stood up; I stood and sang. What else? That's the most authentic version of the show: a piano and voices and somewhere to stand. The director in the talkback afterward alluded to budget constraints in this production. That, too, felt right. If The Cradle Will Rock is anything but minimalist and heartfelt, Mr. Mister is probably in the list of special thanks somewhere.
I wish I could encourage everyone reading toward the box office of the Boston Conservatory Theater, but I am afraid we saw the last performance: it was only the weekend and I am sure that if anyone recorded it, it's no good to me. I do not know whether it's a consolation that there are likely to be more productions of The Cradle Will Rock in the near future, as there have been others in recent years: its themes are rather in the zeitgeist at the moment. ("Why is this relevant?" I yelled at Rob. "What was the point of the twentieth century?") I think it is the show I am happiest so far this year to have seen and I do not think its value is purely historical, or coincidental, or sentimental. Nothing in it has stopped echoing. Moll mocking the vice cop's make-nice overtures. Reverend Salvation flipping from sanctimony to saber-rattling based on his percentage of the international steel market. Editor Daily selling the tropical paradise of Honolulu, which Blitzstein knew had been shadily annexed and Junior Mister can't spell. Proof that the fine arts are just as buyable as the next racket. Ella tearing into the audience with the mean, mundane, bone-wearying facts of class struggle. That final chorus, the wind still rising. I would have liked to take my grandfather. Next time, I'll take my niece. When the storm breaks—
The Boston Conservatory's production of The Cradle Will Rock, which I saw this afternoon with
spatch and my mother, had lighting changes and costumes, a bugle as well as a piano, and a couple of bare-bones sets, but it was very good all the same.Actually it was great. I had wanted to see this musical ever since hearing my grandfather's story as a teenager, ever since seeing Tim Robbins' Cradle Will Rock (1999) in high school, ever since discovering the original cast recording—the very first original cast recording of any Broadway musical—a few years ago, and this student cast under the direction of Doug Lockwood fully justified its reputation. The play is a legendary piece of historical agitprop. It was dedicated to Bertolt Brecht. Its setting of "Steeltown, U.S.A." and its symbolic naming of characters, the prostitute Moll, the union organizer Larry Foreman, the fat-cat town boss Mr. Mister and his hyper-patriotic, fawningly anti-union "Liberty Committee" of purchased institutions like Reverend Salvation, Dr. Specialist, and Editor Daily, are satirical rather than subtle. (However forced by circumstance, the stripping down of the original production may have been the best thing to happen to it: the idea of placing these archetypes in any kind of realistic frame now looks as absurd as rendering a Thurber character in loving oils.) But that doesn't mean it's all poker-faced social realism, humorlessly or naïvely smashing ideological dolls together. Especially as staged rather than just heard, The Cradle Will Rock is a very funny angry musical, whose allegorical names are animated by very real personal and political issues and who communicate in naturally idiomatic, unpretentiously poetic lyrics and a crazy quilt of musical styles that can twist from crooner parody to protest chant sooner than the hand that feeds—when it can turn a profit from it—can be bitten. I'm not going to argue that "Nickel Under the Foot" couldn't pass for an outtake from The Threepenny Opera. But I wasn't expecting the rhythmically spoken choral passages that rattle out like presentiments of Meredith Willson or the intricate internal rhymes that point forward to Sondheim and the sheer go-for-broke storytelling of the piece, the scene-by-scene unity of music, lyrics, and plot, left me wondering why Oklahoma! (1943) is considered the landmark in the development of the American musical rather than The Cradle Will Rock.
Maybe it was the politics. The politics are unmistakable, unapologetic, and ferociously refreshing; the title number is not a child's lullaby but the promise of a storm coming, to shake down from the tree all the profiteers, the one-percenters, the exploiters and oppressors and all who enable them out of greed or fear or convention. That's thunder, that's lightning, and it's going to surround you! No wonder those storm-birds seem to circle around you! Well, you can't climb down and you can't sit still; that's a storm that's going to last until the final wind blows . . . and when the wind blows . . . the cradle will rock! It's frightening, exhilarating music, a call to arms and a warning not to wind up on the wrong side of history, and it's all the more impressive because it caps a plot in which, dramatically speaking, not very much happens. The action takes place in ten scenes, most of them flashbacks, played out in Steeltown's jail on the night of a union drive. Moll (Caitlin Rose, blonde in a tight red dress and spitting like a cat with it) gets run in not because she's soliciting—though she is, from a cheapskate of a gent who whistles like a hundred dollars but only wants to part with thirty cents—but because she won't give the arresting cop a freebie. Harry Druggist (Elliot Lazar, not without dignity in the glasses of a man who didn't use to sleep in gutters; his Yiddish accent was a tip of the hat to family history as well as previous productions) has been picked up for vagrancy and drunkenness, his usual ever since he lost first his son and then his store. Larry Foreman (Paul Watt-Morse, a long-limbed live wire with the unstarry appeal specified in the stage directions) was brought in for inciting a riot, which as he explains with self-deprecating drama means handing out labor literature: "I come up to you . . . very slow . . . very snaky; and with one fell gesture—I tuck a leaflet in your hand. And then, one, two, three—There's a riot. You're the riot. I incited you. I'm terrific, I am!" And the Liberty Committee (Luke Robert Guidinger, Matthew Balkum, Makenzie Schaefer, Zane Sipotz, Thomas Purvis, and Colin Budzyna, each a perfect incarnation of hypocrisy across the professions—the church, the press, the arts, academia, medicine) have all been accidentally rolled up as rioters and are just nauseated at the thought of being mistaken for a union. Everyone is dressed appropriately for the spring of 1937; the spare sets are steps and risers, a rolling steel stairway and in the sole concession to semi-realism a druggist's counter with bar stools; the stage lights wash various colors over tableaux inspired by the murals of Thomas Hart Benton. The piano occupies various points on the stage, played by Marc Blitzstein (guest artist Mike Stapleton) who also reads the stage directions until they are taken over by Harry and Larry, ushering Moll through the history of Steeltown's capitulation to Mr. Mister (Peter Michael Jordan, a three-piece suit and a raccoon coat and a smile that would be easier to take if it looked mean) and Mrs. Mister (Emily Matt, a dab hand with the prevailing winds and a riding crop), one pillar of the community after another falling under their strong-arming, palm-greasing spell until the steelworkers are left fending for themselves in an "open shop" where they can be demoted, fired, even killed without remedy or recompense. We observe the frame-up murders of union man Gus and his wife Sadie (Kean Petrello and Kristen Ivy Haynes, ordinary and tragic), the foiled efforts of Ella Hammer (Calliope Koutsouleris, an eleven o'clock powerhouse) to obtain justice for her brother, a machinist gruesomely injured on the job. Junior Mister and Sister Mister (Gabriel Lucas Hutson and Lillie Reising, aaaaaaaaaaaagh) are the kind of appallingly spoilt offspring that are funny right until their father installs them in positions of power. All this cautionary build-up pays off with the arrival of Mr. Mister, come to bail out his "pet committee" and make this inconvenient agitator disappear—and with an amount of money on the line so huge it can only be whispered, with Moll and Harry on one shoulder and Mr. Mister and the Liberty Committee on the other, Larry has a long, silent moment to decide whether he'll sell out or stick fast, a test we've already seen sympathetic characters in this story fail.
That there's any suspense at this moment rather than the marking time of a parable is a testament to Blitzstein's writing, but also the acting which has to make human beings out of labels and ideas. On the original cast recording, Howard Da Silva breaks the tie with deceptive gentleness, as if he's laughing softly at a man who thinks he's such a fool as to sell out his fellow workers for a few square meals and a chuck under the chin. Watt-Morse, whose sharp, giddy sass has stilled for just these few seconds as if he's really considering whether he could do more good with the backing of Mr. Mister than with the union he's not even sure has succeeded in forming, bursts out in his broadest, most gleeful repudiation of Mr. Mister and all his works yet, so tickled he doesn't even need to swear. (There is profanity in this musical, in case you're curious. Once again I am reminded of the difference between what went into the movies and what went on in real life.) He got Mr. Mister to blink first. Now the workers know how badly a union will hurt him. And there is the sound of a bugle, and the piano picks up, and the chorus who I hadn't been confident existed begin marching down through the aisles, all the people we haven't seen, not some mythical undifferentiated proletariat but all the citizens of Steeltown who have voices and are using them, the rollers and the roughers and the machinists and the blasters and the boilermakers and their children, the union in their thousands. Don't worry, that's not for you. That's just my Aunt Jessie and her committee. I had wondered if this production was going to use the audience. People all across the theater started standing up, joining in the singing. I don't know if some of them were ringers. The man who rose in front of us turned out to be the director, which I guess is a yes. But my mother saw one of the chorus motioning excitedly to the nearest row to take their feet and she stood up; I stood and sang. What else? That's the most authentic version of the show: a piano and voices and somewhere to stand. The director in the talkback afterward alluded to budget constraints in this production. That, too, felt right. If The Cradle Will Rock is anything but minimalist and heartfelt, Mr. Mister is probably in the list of special thanks somewhere.
I wish I could encourage everyone reading toward the box office of the Boston Conservatory Theater, but I am afraid we saw the last performance: it was only the weekend and I am sure that if anyone recorded it, it's no good to me. I do not know whether it's a consolation that there are likely to be more productions of The Cradle Will Rock in the near future, as there have been others in recent years: its themes are rather in the zeitgeist at the moment. ("Why is this relevant?" I yelled at Rob. "What was the point of the twentieth century?") I think it is the show I am happiest so far this year to have seen and I do not think its value is purely historical, or coincidental, or sentimental. Nothing in it has stopped echoing. Moll mocking the vice cop's make-nice overtures. Reverend Salvation flipping from sanctimony to saber-rattling based on his percentage of the international steel market. Editor Daily selling the tropical paradise of Honolulu, which Blitzstein knew had been shadily annexed and Junior Mister can't spell. Proof that the fine arts are just as buyable as the next racket. Ella tearing into the audience with the mean, mundane, bone-wearying facts of class struggle. That final chorus, the wind still rising. I would have liked to take my grandfather. Next time, I'll take my niece. When the storm breaks—
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Stand up for justice. Stand up and sing! I hope your grandfather, somewhere, is smiling.
Nine
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Thank you.
I think both of my grandparents—my grandmother who was acting with the Cherry Lane Playhouse from the time she was sixteen—would have approved.
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This.
Nine
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It did give us some very good art. And a lot of people whose existence was demonstrably good for the world. I'm holding on to that.
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Upstops on roller coasters.
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I can't argue with that.
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Thank you for sharing! ^_^
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You're welcome! I wanted to say something.
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If this musical has to be in the zeitgeist, I hope it makes it to the part of the zeitgeist near you. It should travel well. I think so long as you don't futz around too much with the conceit (and the tone, sarcastic and sincere at the same time: a cartoon way of saying it, a real anger coming through), it should honestly be very hard to break.
I envy your grandfather his part in history.
I was glad to be part of its echo.
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I think if you get a good one, the production itself bridges time.
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You're welcome. Thank you for telling me. I hope your passport is where it should be.
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re: Tim Robbins' film, I had just one problem with it, and that's not about the central content at all; I thought his take on Welles had all the temper tantrums and none of the energy and charm that made people not just put up with him but do whatever he wanted them to do with devotion at that point. Also, as is the case with practically everyone playing young OW, the actor is too old, and that does make a difference, because being bossed around by someone in their late 30s or 40s is par the course for the theatre; taking directions from someone who is 20, then 21, with only two members of the company younger than that and everyone else older and more experienced - well, it does take a wunderkind to pull that off.
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I had bought the tickets figuring it would be worthwhile no matter what. It was wonderful.
I'd read about the original production in Simon Callow's biography of Orson Welles and in Houseman's memoirs, and wished I could watch a production since, but alas, no luck so far.
I wish you a local production. As I was saying to
re: Tim Robbins' film, I had just one problem with it, and that's not about the central content at all; I thought his take on Welles had all the temper tantrums and none of the energy and charm that made people not just put up with him but do whatever he wanted them to do with devotion at that point.
That's fair. My major problem with it is idiosyncratic: I really mind that a movie with a majority of historical characters represented most of the Cradle cast under their own names but replaced Howard Da Silva with John Turturro's Aldo Silvano. I understand the character's Italian family gave the script an opportunity to address American fascism, but Da Silva was Midwestern Jewish and had really worked in a steel mill and identified strongly with Larry Foreman and was later blacklisted; it's not like there were no resonances there. Otherwise I remember loving the film and keep meaning to see it again.
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I think so!
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It was for me. I suspect that if it's done at all well, it will be wherever it's staged, and I hope that's near you.
I should rewatch the film.
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It was! I'm sorry I didn't get more people together! I wish they'd had a second weekend!
(I don't know why they didn't have a second weekend. They were a professionally directed student mainstage production; they should at least have gotten a heads-up in the Globe. The ways of the conservatory are mysterious to me.)
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Thank you. It was like seeing a piece of my family history as well as the show itself. It was good.
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I had hoped it would be good; it was better.
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I know about the play, but haven't ever seen the movie (although I know Eric likes it) -- I should add it to my list.
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You're welcome! I should have mentioned it earlier, but this month has been weird.
I know about the play, but haven't ever seen the movie (although I know Eric likes it) -- I should add it to my list.
I remember really liking it. I have one major argument with the script—see reply to
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It was. I wish it had gotten more attention!
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You are very welcome. It was a pleasure to be part of it.
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It worked beautifully: 1937 and now. I think it may be a show you can't see passively.
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You're welcome. I'm glad to; I think it should be remembered.