The Cradle Will Rock: A Play in Music.
Mark Blitzstein.
New York: Random House, 1938.

Marc Blitzstein (1905-1964) was compared to both Weill and Brecht, the masters of world proletarian opera, with at least this justification: his facility enabled him to write text and music for a series of works whose commitment to a radical overturn of American Society was never in question. Received with enormous enthusiasm in 1937, after drama-laden attempts at suppression, The Cradle Will Rock takes place in Steeltown, U.S.A., where Larry, the union organizer, confronts Mr. Mister, the unscrupulous steel magnate who welds newspapers, citizens committees, unctuous clergy, and obsequious professors into a front to resist the labor drive in his plant. Brooks Atkinson wrote, "Written with extraordinary versatility and played with enormous gusto, it is the best thing militant labor has put in a theatre yet...What Waiting for Lefty was to the dramatic stage, The Cradle Will Rock is to the stage of the labor battle song...a triumph of the politically insurgent theater."

Breezy humor, more than the often heavy satire, has resulted in a number of revivals of The Cradle Will Rock, notably the 1947 direction of Leonard Bernstein and the memorial production of 1964. Blitzstein's love for the proletariat led to his being in the small number (with Leclair and Magnard) of composers who were murdered. The event was noted only tersely in 1964, but Truman Capote supplied the details in Music for Chameleons. The 1999 film version directed by Tim Robbins met with mixed reviews, but won awards at the Catalonian International Film Festival (2000), the Istanbul International Film Festival (2000), and the National Board of Review (1999).