Old Musical Play in Manhattan

The Cradle Will Rock (by Marc Blitzstein; produced by Michael Myerberg) had trouble, ten years ago, finding a stage; Washington, for reasons never explained, ordered the original WPA production to "postpone" its opening. But once Orson Welles took it to Broadway, The Cradle had no trouble finding an audience. For if brash and biased, Marc Blitzstein's "play in music" about Steeltown's big bad boss, cringing sycophants and exulting strikers had zip and the Zeitgeist in its favor. It also had a good deal of theatrical novelty: a sceneryless stage that antedated Our Town's; Composer Blitzstein himself at the piano and, now & then, part of the play.

At last week's revival, instead of Blitzstein at a solitary piano, there was a white-tied Leonard Bernstein conducting a tiny orchestra. Bernstein did well by The Cradle's sometimes crude, sometimes clever music. But time had been less kind to The Cradle itself. It seemed more strident and less exciting; it had also become less topical. Its cockiness about labor-- which had led it to treat the bosses with contemptuous laughter rather than bitter words--seemed early New Deal, not postwar. The Cradle's stagecraft, far from seeming daring, almost seemed dated. Only where Blitzstein's best talent--for mimicking fashionable chatter and parodying popular songs--came into play, was The Cradle really fun.

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