Music: Postponed Cradle

Eight hundred and fifty grumbling New Yorkers crowded the sidewalk outside the Maxine Elliott Theatre one night last week. Inside actors and singers were telephoning anyone they could think of who might help them get permission from the U. S. Government to open the theatre and put on one of the most ambitious productions the WPA has attempted. Permission never came.

The Cradle Will Rock is an artistically and politically radical opera which has been in rehearsal two months. Because it had been written by talented composer Marc Blitzstein, directed by prodigious, 22-year-old Orson Welles and mounted with singular care and beauty, 18,000 people had bought tickets for the performances supposed to begin last week. When at the last minute the Federal Theatre cut down on its activity by postponing all openings beyond July 1, liberals like Archibald MacLeish, Sidney Howard, Lewis Mumford begged the Administration to make an exception for The Cradle Will Rock. At 8:30 p.m. on opening night it was fairly apparent that an exception would not be made, so a little man stepped up and offered to take everybody over to his theatre, the Venice, 20 blocks away. It required John Houseman only a minute to invite the crowd to an emergency performance. There would not be the 28-piece orchestra that Conductor Lehman Engel had spent six weeks rehearsing, only Composer Blitzstein and his piano. People who preferred to get their money back might do so. Only one man applied. Under similarly shabby circumstances Clifford Odets’ Waiting For Lefty was first shown. Not since then, in the opinion of most of the audience, had Manhattan seen a show so exciting.

The Cradle Will Rock reports, with controlled and eloquent class hatred, a steel strike. Mr. Mister is the mill owner. He corrupts a doctor, bulldozes an editor, terrorizes a college president and arranges for the assassination of a labor organizer. Mrs. Mister gives a clergyman his weekly dole and tells him what to say in his sermons. She keeps a painter and a musician on her string. The two sing a song which goes:

There’s something so damned low about the rich.

They’re fantastic, they’re farfetched, they’re just funny.

President Frank Gillmore of Actors’ Equity had forbidden Equity members of the cast to take part in the unsanctioned production. Singers got around Gillmore’s rule by singing their lines from the audience. A Negro chorus gave tongue beautifully from the back of the house. Somebody in a box helped out with an accordion and for an hour and a half people felt something of that sympathetic union with the actors that directors dream about. When the opera ended, three Broadway producers rushed backstage to angle for a contract. None was signed, but a hastily assembled committee raised $2,205, enough to assure the opera a two-week run.

In his ingenious mélange of recitative and revue-patter songs, suites, chorales, arias, Silly Symphony bits and lullaby music, Blitzstein exhibited the extraordinary technical control that made Arnold Schönberg regard him as his most talented U. S. pupil. Born 32 years ago in Philadelphia, Blitzstein studied at Curtis, with Nadia Boulanger in Paris, under Schönberg in Berlin. Blitzstein used to write for Querschnitt, the famed Berlin journal. He is U. S. correspondent for the Revue Musicale of Paris, has played piano solos with the Philadelphia Orchestra, heard them play for the world première of his little opera Triple-Sec which was later incorporated in the Garrick Gaieties of 1930.