A History of the American Musical Theatre: No Business Like It by Nathan Hurwitz

Author:Nathan Hurwitz [Hurwitz, Nathan]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: History, United States, 20th Century, Performing Arts, Theater, General, Direction & Production, Stagecraft & Scenography, Broadway & Musicals
ISBN: 9781317912057
Google: CP_pAwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2014-06-27T01:36:10+00:00

The WPA and The Cradle Will Rock

In 1935 President Franklin Roosevelt created a massive employment initiative called the Works Progress Administration (WPA). The WPA spent $13.4 billion dollars funding different projects, between 1935 and 1943, offering employment to three-million people in 1938 alone. One branch of the WPA, the Federal Theatre Project (FTP), funded theatre across the country – new works, touring productions, children’s theatre, “living newspapers” – it ran the gamut.

Perhaps the most notorious project supported by the FTP was Marc Blitzstein’s musical The Cradle Will Rock (1937). Produced by John Houseman, directed by Orson Welles, The Cradle Will Rock is an allegory of corporate greed and hypocrisy. The musical is set in “Steeltown, USA,” and revolves around the evil owner of the mill, the town and everything else, “Mr. Mister,” his wife “Mrs. Mister,” their children “Junior Mister” and “Sister Mister,” newspaper editor “Editor Daily,” the minister “Reverend Salvation,” the union organizer “Larry Foreman” and “the Moll,” a prostitute. The musical equates the Moll’s prostitution with the town fathers prostituting themselves for wealth and power.

The day before The Cradle Will Rock was scheduled to open, the WPA closed the production and shuttered the theater. Welles, Houseman and Blitzstein, along with the cast, met the opening night audience in front of the theater and paraded them uptown to another theater, procured at the last minute. Actors’ Equity had forbade their members from appearing onstage, as had the musicians’ union; but nobody could stop them from sitting in the house and chiming in with their parts when the time came. The curtain opened on Blitzstein sitting alone at the piano, and as he began to speak and sing the show by himself, the cast joined in from where they sat scattered throughout the house. The result was one of the most electric evenings in the history of the American musical. The buzz caused created a clamor for tickets, and the production ran for 108 performances – as it had been performed on that first night, from the audience, with Blitzstein alone onstage at the piano.

The Cradle Will Rock has received several off-Broadway revivals and many regional productions; it is customarily staged with just an onstage piano and a group of actors sitting in chairs lined up across the stage.

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