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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).
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Introduction
