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

subplots is the newly created Tommy Crickshaw (Bill Murray), a conservative vaudeville ventriloquist angry at the arty and (to him) shockingly socialistic Federal Theatre. The character he teams up with to fight the communists, Hazel Huffman (played by Joan Cusack), was based on an actual historical figure, an anti-communist clerk employed by the WPA who testified against the Theatre for three days. Hallie Flanagan, the real-life head of the Federal Theatre played by Cherry Jones, was granted only six hours to reply to Huffman’s marathon of testimony. The film points out this imbalance. Another invented character was Aldo Silvano (John Turturro), an Italian American who opposed Mussolini’s fascist regime and is consequently kicked out of his parents’ apartment where he is living with his wife and family. Casting Silvano as the principled Larry Foreman thus made an effective connection between life and art within the complex plot world of the film.31

Cradle Will Rock, 1999 film. Marc Blitzstein (Hank Azaria at the piano) is surprised to see Olive Stanton (Emily Watson) standing up from the audience to sing the Moll’s song on opening night.

Cradle Will Rock, 1999 film. A closer view of Olive Stanton (Watson) singing the Moll’s song from the audience on opening night.

In addition to inventing or reinterpreting characters and situations, the film takes the artistic liberty of compressing and conflating historical events from the six years between 1932 and 1938 into the months between the time Blitzstein was finishing his Cradle (fall 1936) and the evening of its historic and dramatic premiere on June 16, 1937 (described simply as “Summer 1937” in the script). The commission (by Nelson Rockefeller) and destruction of a politically incendiary mural by Mexican artist Diego Rivera (played in the film by the brilliant Panamanian Harvard-educated attorney/actor/singer/songwriter Rubén Blades) in the new Rockefeller Center actually happened, but in 1932–33. Since the Dies Hearings took place in 1938, Huffman’s testimony did not actually play a role in the termination of federal funds and the closing of the Cradle’s scheduled theater. In Robbins’s film, Flanagan’s abbreviated hearing, the obliteration of Rivera’s mural commissioned and destroyed by Rockefeller (John Cusack), and the opening night drama of Cradle all take place on the same fateful summer day.

Robbins’s Cradle Will Rock does not attempt to present a performance of Blitzstein’s musical. Nevertheless, viewers hear more music from this show over the course of the film’s 134 minutes than in several of the putative adaptations previously discussed in this chapter. Early in the film we see Blitzstein (Hank Azaria) hard at work composing the opening, sung by Olive Stanton, about whom little is known, as the Moll (Emily Watson). Olive is also the first person we see in the film. In an effective but by necessity speculative demonstration of life imitating art, the film begins as she wakes up in a theater, an unemployed homeless street person who goes up to strange men offering to sing a song for a nickel (early in the film viewers also see and hear the character Blitzstein trying out the song based on this idea, “Nickel under Your Foot”). The idea and the music come full circle when, during the performance that concludes the film, Moll (played by Olive), finally sings this plaintive melody. A sympathetic Huffman helps Olive find a job as a stagehand for Project 891, now about to embark on the production of Cradle. Although ineligible to act in the work, she is helped by John Adair (Jamey Sheridan). Later, Adair plays the Gent, the man the Moll solicits in the musical and Olive beds in the film. Olive’s first song, the “Moll’s Song” which opens with the words “I’m Checkin’ Home Now,” is heard again when she auditions and continues seamlessly in the film as the time shifts to five months later (where she sings the same song without improvement). Reinforcing Moll’s importance in the musical as well as dramatic components of the film, both of her songs will return in the filmed version of the opening night performance.

Before we arrive at this culminating moment, we also see and then hear Blitzstein in Union Square conceiving yet another song, “Joe Worker.” In a moment of magical realism, the song is overheard by the spirit of Bertolt Brecht, who had inspired Blitzstein when he played “Nickel” for Brecht in 1935, along with the ghost of Blitzstein’s wife and Brecht translator Eva Goldbeck, who died of anorexia earlier in the year. As he allegedly did in real life in 1935, Brecht in the film inspires Blitzstein to make his musical address the reality that none of us, artists included, are immune to at least metaphorical prostitution via moral dilemmas around money and patronage, encapsulated in the biblical adage, “the love of money is the root of all evil.”

During its last portion the film focuses mainly on the Cradle performance, albeit with occasional and brief cuts away to subplots. The film is faithful to the spirit and many of the details of what happened that night, including the banning of the performance onstage, and the twenty-block-long (one mile) march uptown to the Venice Theater. In addition to most of the Moll’s opening tune and her “Nickel under the Foot,” we hear announcements of sample scenes, portions of dialogue, fragments of solo songs, and a harmonious sextet belting out the phrase “We don’t want a union in Steeltown.” The performance concludes with Larry Foreman’s powerful refusal to be co-opted, or metaphorically prostituted, by Mr. Mister and the stirring title song that concludes the show.

Despite its historical and artistic veracities, those who were present do not completely concur with Robbins about what actually happened on the historic opening night. The actual proceedings began with some conciliatory remarks by Houseman, who wanted to make it clear that the production “was a gesture of artistic, not political, defiance.”32 Orson Welles then spoke about his admiration for Blitzstein’s musical, informed those present about what they would have seen if the scheduled theater