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The Cradle Will Rock

Director: David Feldshuh
Scenic Designer: Kent Goetz
Costume Designer: Sarah Bernstein 

Q&A with Director David Feldshuh

What appeals to you as a director about this musical?

I like to direct unusual plays and/or try to find unique perspectives when I direct the classics. Cradle has a wonderful mix of hilarious satire, fiery protest and robust characters. It's rarely produced and that's a unique and irresistible challenge for any artistic team. It's also an opportunity to bring our enthusiastic audience a fine theatrical experience that they can't see anywhere else.
And then there's the Kiplinger Theatre. It's also exciting to mount a large musical in our proscenium theatre. The architecture of the theatre is modeled on an Italian opera house. We look forward to filling it with music as well as filling the stage with 36 cast members singing the unique music of Marc Blitstein. At the same time, this is an unusual, different and risky choice: a 1937 musical combining elements of vaudeville, political protest, high comedy and melodic ballads. A fun challenge for our artistic team.

Why did you feel, as Artistic Director of the Schwartz Center, that The Cradle Will Rock was a good choice for the first-ever musical to appear on the proscenium stage?

We try to find a wide variety a plays that our audience will find engaging and original. Sometimes these are regional premieres, sometimes new plays, sometimes revivals, sometimes plays that have found success in New York, London or other international theatre centers. Many of our presentations reach out to important areas of study at Cornell (in this case the numerous courses that focus on labor and business). As part of a land grant university, we also want what we do to interest audiences beyond the campus and we continually strive to create new audiences. Raisin in the Sun with Yolanda King, for example, brought new audiences from the community into our theatre. We hope that the subject matter and unique style of Cradle will also enlarge our audience to include those who may not have considered themselves theatregoers.

Set in the Depression amongst the turmoil of burgeoning labor unions, what makes The Cradle Will Rock relevant for today's audiences?

Labor unions and problems of workers are very much in evidence today nationally, internationally and right here in Ithaca. Issues of salary fairness, the minimum wage and the ongoing debates between labor and management in all kinds of "industries" still make headlines (the National Hockey League is a very obvious and public example) . The question of labor unions representing graduate students is another example. Each season we look for one or more plays that are not only theatrically exciting but also present issues that are important to contemporary, everyday life.

Describe this musical in four words:

Surprising, witty, passionate, comedic.

Program Notes

The Author
Marc Blitzstein was born March 2, 1905 into a wealthy family from Philadelphia. In his childhood, he took to music, a talent that his parents were eager to enrich. Blitzstein became a musical prodigy, performing at Mozart piano concerto at age 7 and debuting with the Philadelphia orchestra at 21. In 1933, Blitzstein married writer Eva Goldbeck despite his open homosexuality. Eva died three years later of breast cancer, and it was grief from her death that inspired Blitzstein to write The Cradle Will Rock. After the success of The Cradle, he continued to make his living as a composer for theatre. When called before the House Un-American Affairs Committee in 1958, he admitted former membership in the Communist Party but refused to name others. Although he was never called to testify publicly, he was blacklisted by Hollywood studios. Blitzstein's life ended abruptly: on a trip to Martinique in 1964, he was robbed and beaten to death by a group of soldiers.

Theatre during the Depression
Established under the Works Projects Administration (W.P.A.), the Federal Theatre Project launched the careers of some of the most famous artists of the 20th century: Orson Welles, Marc Blitzstein, Arthur Miller, Canada Lee, and Elmer Rice. Funding for the Federal Theatre Project died out in 1939, just a year after its director, Hallie Flanagan, was called to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee. During her testimony, the Committee embarrassed itself by demanding to know whether Christopher Marlowe, whose play Doctor Faustus was produced by the Federal Theatre Project, was a member of the Communist Party.

A Famous Opening Night
The Cradle Will Rock opened on June 17, 1937 despite the Works Projects Administration’s seizing of the Maxine Elliot Theatre, where the show was originally scheduled to be performed. Even though the production had no scenery, no orchestra, and a cast forbidden by their union to appear onstage in the musical, Orson Welles (director) and John Houseman (producer) determined that the show must go on. The following is Houseman’s description of the first performance at the Venice Theatre uptown:

“The curtain rose on Marc Blitzstein sitting pale, tense, but calm, at our eviscerated piano... We could hear Marc’s voice behind us setting the scene: Streetcorner, Steeltown, USA, followed by a short vamp that sounded harsh and tinny on our untuned upright. Then, a most amazing thing happened. Within a few seconds, Marc Blitzstein became aware that he was no longer singing alone. It took our handheld spotlight a few seconds to locate the source of that second voice. It came from a stage right box in which a frail girl in a green dress was standing glassy eyed and frozen with fear only half audible at first but gathering strength with every note. …Our actors had been forbidden to appear onstage. There was no ruling against their appearing in the theatre. And that’s what they did. They acted all over that house, improvising with amazing ingenuity. Spontaneously, unrehearsed, undirected, they played each scene in a different and unexpected part of that theatre. Between the seats, in the aisles, in stage boxes upper and lower, in the rear of the theatre, so that the audience sometimes had to turn and stand to see them. … It was a most glorious evening and the cheering and the applause lasted so long that the stagehands demanded an hour’s overtime, which we gladly paid them. We made the front page of every newspaper in the city and ran for eleven performances to packed houses.”

After the production, Welles and Houseman were fired from the W.P.A. Arts Project for “insubordination.” The duo opened their own theatre and produced The Cradle Will Rock on Broadway.

“Beyond Broadway: Cradle the Labor Movement” by Jefferson Cowie, Associate Professor in the School of Industrial and Labor Relations
Marc Blitzstein's "proletarian opera," The Cradle Will Rock burns with the urgency of the historical moment from which it was born. The problems that engulf "Steeltown, U.S.A."—industrial unionism, left-wing politics, prostitution (of various forms), and the wavering allegiance of the middle class—were central issues in civic and artistic life in the 1930s.

Blitzstein wrote the play when the drive to organize mass production industry began. Rehearsals started just as the Steel Workers' Organizing Committee achieved the dream, simmering for four decades, of organizing the thousands of workers of the largest business enterprise in the world, United States Steel. Finally, the play opened just two weeks after the notorious Memorial Day massacre of steelworkers in Chicago, in which forty marchers were shot—ten fatally, and mostly in the back—trying to unionize the smaller mills.

The production of the play was also a product of the volatile political moment. It was none other than Orson Welles' unit of the Federal Theater Project in New York City that agreed to stage the controversial play. His elaborate and massive production plans collapsed just days before opening night, however, as federal cutbacks—quite possibly targeted directly at The Cradle—demanded that the show be cancelled. With his theater padlocked and the restless audience waiting outside, Welles found another theater and led his opening-night crowd on a twenty-block march to the new location. There the play's stripped-down sets and simple piano accompaniment—necessary because the pit orchestra and elaborate sets could not be moved to the new space—ended up as the production's trademarks.

Although unions and radical groups staged performances of The Cradle in small industrial cities in the thirties, the play never managed to create a lasting vision for theater, workers, or radical politics. The Popular Front aesthetic dissolved in the political repression of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, and the unions delivered workers to unprecedented prosperity after World War II but not the revolution. Despite a few revivals of the play, most notably in 1947 and in Tim Robbins' 1999 cinematic adaptation, class relations have been too complex to be captured adequately in the black-and-white world of agit-prop theater. Social and artistic movements never disappear; the critical spirit of the thirties did return rather explicitly in the artistic productions of the civil rights and student movements of the 1960s. But faith in the collective power of the working class never fully returned to the stage, replaced instead by an uncomfortable silence on the issue of class.

In our own age of worshipping the "Mr. Misters" of the business world, it is difficult to recapture the artistic urgency and political power the masses held for so many artists of the Great Depression. We need to remain open to Blitzstein's attempt, as he put it, "to present a kind of heroism" out of the everyday workers who, in the words of the title song, would be responsible for the "storm that's going to last until / the final wind blows."

“Marc Blitzstein at Cornell” by Leonard J. Lehrman
Marc Blitzstein was, according to Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein, the father of American opera in the vernacular. The only American composer to have studied with both Nadia Boulanger and Arnold Schoenberg, he is remembered today primarily for his 1952 translation/adaptation of the Brecht/Weill THREEPENNY OPERA, which ran for seven years, breaking all records, and virtually creating Off Broadway. The most performed of his 128 original works, THE CRADLE WILL ROCK, was written "at white heat" in five weeks in the summer of 1936. The story of its courageous 1937 premiere, despite the efforts of reactionaries in the government to shut it down, is an American legend. The work combines crooning, blues, lullabies, Bach, Beethoven, belly-dance, buck and wing, college song, vaudeville, and mass song (which Blitzstein learned and wrote as Secretary of the Composers Collective of NY) into an irresistible amalgam of biting satire, wit, and powerful political message.

Leonard Bernstein conducted CRADLE from the piano at Harvard in 1939. Thirty years later, when Bernstein learned of Harvard's second production, which I directed and conducted, he remarked: "I'm glad somebody at Harvard still has taste."

In 1973, with Bernstein's blessing, I completed Blitzstein's unfinished
TALES OF MALAMUD and produced it in August 1974 concertante at Barnes Hall, sponsored by the Ithaca Opera Association and Cornell's Music
Department. (Two years later, the Music Department sponsored another
Barnes Hall concert, featuring excerpts from Blitzstein's REGINA and NO FOR AN ANSWER.) The incomplete SACCO AND VANZETTI, commissioned by the Ford Foundation for the Metropolitan Opera, had to wait another 27 years before I completed it, with the approval of the Blitzstein Estate, encouraged by Cornell Music Professor Emeritus Robert Palmer, who had known Blitzstein since 1941 and advised both him and me on the composition. Both works await their staged orchestral premiere.

The 100th known production (of 132) of CRADLE took place in October-November 1999 at Risley Theatre, here at Cornell.

The Cradle’s Lingo

Blaster: One who tends the process of smelting iron ore “blasting,” vis-à-vis “blast furnace.”

Cheese it: To be quiet and/or to run away.

Masher: A man who flirts with woman in public - especially one who is on the cusp of being violent.

Nerts: A slang interjection for “Nuts!” As used by Hemingway, “Nerts to you!”

Rougher: One who tends a roughing down set of rollers in a steel mill.

Critical Perspectives
“Written with extraordinary versatility and played with enormous gusto, the best thing militant labor has put into the theatre yet. [It] raises a theatregoer's metabolism and blows him out of the theatre on the thunder of the grand finale.” – Brooks Atkinson

“A forerunner of American opera.” – Leonard Bernstein

“The work is apparently indestructible. And what is more interesting, it is certainly entirely new. The arts of Music and the Play have had efficient business relationships in the past, an occasional partnership and a few happy marriages. Here, finally, is their first off-spring. It is a love-child, and besides being legitimate, it looks like both its parents, and it is called a "music drama." As a matter of fact, it isn't easy to find a title for a new art form. Just now of course this one has only one real name : The Cradle Will Rock.” – Orson Welles

“The theatre, when it's good, is always dangerous.” – Hallie Flanagan

These and more quotes can be found at The Marc Blitzstein Web Site: http://www.marcblitzstein.com/.

Play Synopsis: Moll, a prostitute in "Steeltown, USA," is arrested when a detective tries to extort her for sexual favors. In night court, she witnesses the arraignment of "The Liberty Committee," distinguished citizens who have been mistakenly arrested by a cop who mistook them for union organizers. The Steelworkers Union is scheduled to rally that night, and the Liberty Committee had appeared to oppose them. Harry Druggist, once a thriving pharmacist but now a drunken vagrant, tells Moll the story of the corruption of the Liberty Committee: how the minister, newspaper editor, doctor, college president, professors and artists all abandoned their principles for money and power, both offered by Steeltown's real boss, Mister Mister. Harry also tells how he himself was corrupted, leading to the death of his son and his current dereliction. Mister Mister, meanwhile, has everything his own way, with only the slight inconveniences posed by a vapid wife, a sex-obsessed daughter, and a foolish son. Finally the union organizer, Larry Foreman, is brought into court. He gives hope to the bitter prostitute and the cynical druggist, and when Mister Mister himself offers to buy Foreman's loyalties, he refuses. Suddenly, the sounds outside bring exciting news: the other unions have joined the Steelworkers. The Liberty Committee leaves Mister Mister alone; a coward, he realizes that he is finished.