Enchanted Evenings:The Broadway Musical from 'Show Boat' to Sondheim and Lloyd Webber Block, Geoffrey (large ebook reader .txt) 📖

nevertheless know something of the circumstances behind this work’s extraordinary premiere on June 16, 1937 (directed by Orson Welles). As reported on the front page of the New York Times the next day—and almost invariably whenever the work is mentioned for the next seventy years—the show, banned from a padlocked Maxine Elliot theater, its government sponsorship revoked, moved its forces and its assembled audience twenty blocks uptown to the Venice Theater. Once there, in conformance to the letter (if not the spirit) of the prohibitions placed upon its performance, cast members sang their parts from the audience while Blitzstein took the stage with his piano.8

After nineteen performances at the Venice, Cradle moved to the Mercury Theater for several months of Sunday evening performances. On January 3, 1938, the controversial show opened on Broadway at the Windsor for a short run of 108 performances (sixteen performances fewer than Porgy and Bess and in a smaller theater).9 The play was published a few months later by Random House, and the following year Cradle was anthologized in a volume that included Clifford Odets’s Waiting for Lefty, a play with which Cradle is frequently associated and compared.10 A recording of the original production issued in 1938 became the first Broadway cast album, a historical distinction almost invariably and incorrectly attributed to Oklahoma!11

Reviews were generally positive. Although he wrote that the “weak ending” was “hokum” and a “fairy-tale,” Thomson also concluded that after six months of the 1937 production “The Cradle was still a good show and its musical quality hasn’t worn thin” and that the work was “the most appealing operatic socialism since Louise” [Gustave Charpentier’s realistic opera that premiered in 1900].12 Brooks Atkinson considered the musical “a stirring success” and “the most versatile artistic triumph of the politically insurgent theatre.”13 Edith J. R. Isaac wrote that the work “introduces a persuasive new theatre form.”14 Somewhat less sympathetically, the notorious George Jean Nathan concluded his acerbic review with the often-quoted barb that Cradle was “little more than the kind of thing Cole Porter might have written if, God forbid, he had gone to Columbia instead of Yale.”15

In common with most of the musicals discussed in this survey Cradle has been revived with relative frequency, including a production in 1947 under the direction of Leonard Bernstein, who had presented the work at Harvard in 1939 while an undergraduate (playing the piano part from memory), a New York City Opera production in 1960 (the most successful work of their season), and an Off-Broadway production in 1964 that led to the first complete recorded performance of the work. In 1983, an Off-Broadway production and London run starring Evita superstar Patti Lupone (doubling as Moll and Sister Mister) and directed by John Houseman, who produced the premiere, generated a second complete recording and a television broadcast.16 Of all these performances, only the 1960 production resuscitated the orchestral score that Blitzstein had completed in May 1937 and Lehman Engel conducted at the dress rehearsal before the eventful opening night. The performances with Blitzstein alone on his piano launched a tradition that has long since become entrenched and seemingly irrevocable.17

Singing a Song of Social Significance

Authentic avant-garde works achieve their status in part by their continued ability to shock audiences out of their complacency and to bite the hand that feeds. For this reason, the purposeful retraction of government funding when the political wind began to blow in a different direction in 1937—even if the government was not initially targeting Cradle—arguably gives Cradle more credibility than those works that were ideologically safe, including Blitzstein’s earlier modernistic works. Cradle also joins other works of the 1930s, most notably the Gershwins’ Of Thee I Sing (1931) and Let ’Em Eat Cake (1933) and composer-lyricist Harold Rome’s Pins and Needles (1937), in its representation of politically satirical or antiestablishment themes.

Contributing to the continued problematic taxonomic status of The Cradle Will Rock is its musical incongruity with both the avant-garde and the conventional popular theater of the 1930s. Particularly jarring is Cradle’s conflicting allegiances to vernacular song forms and styles and modernistic characteristics and emblems, the latter including harsh dissonances and chords that thwart expectations. How many musicals would encourage the musically shrill hysteria of Mrs. Mister in the Mission Scene (scene 3) when she asks Reverend Salvation in 1917 to pray for war in order to support her husband’s military machine? What other musicals would permit the dissonance of the recurring gavel music that proclaims order in the Night Court before a new flashback? On the other hand, although the work is for the most part through-sung and contains proportionally far less talk than most Singspiels, including Mozart’s The Magic Flute, Cradle’s treatment of popular vernacular and its non-reliance on opera singers contributes further to the difficulty of placing the work with one genre or another.

In contrast to Gershwin, who began as a popular songwriter before transforming his popular music into art music, Blitzstein, like Copland and Weill, began his musical career as a modernist who then converted to populism. As a student of both Stravinsky-advocate Nadia Boulanger in Paris and Schoenberg in Berlin, Blitzstein became intimately acquainted early in his career with the two primary tributaries to the modernist mainstream and reflected their values in early works such as his Piano Sonata (1927) and Piano Concerto (1931). Blitzstein’s modernist phase prior to 1933 also embraces the “art for art’s sake” ideology that he would soon come to loathe and indict in his first major populist work, The Cradle Will Rock.

One month after he had completed Cradle, Blitzstein, a prolific essayist, published an article in the left-wing magazine New Masses on July 14 (Bastille Day) in 1936 in which he viewed modernism as an inevitable reaction against the excesses required of “a capitalist society turning imperialist.”18 Although Blitzstein thought that Schoenberg and Stravinsky wrote “the truth about the dreams of humanity in a world of war and violence,” he concluded this essay by asserting that these premier modernists were limited by their inability