All That Glittered: The Golden Age of Drama on Broadway, 1919-1959 by Ethan Mordden

Author:Ethan Mordden [Mordden, Ethan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Performing Arts, Theater, Broadway & Musical Revue
ISBN: 9781466893290
Google: -XvIBgAAQBAJ
Amazon: B00TX8L8G0
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2015-04-07T07:00:00+00:00

Eight

We Are Not Here To Rehearse Your Play:

THE POLITICAL STAGE

I. J. Golden’s Precedent (1931) dramatized the Tom Mooney–Warren Billings case, in which the two men were convicted of throwing a bomb into a Preparedness Parade in San Francisco in 1916. To center his argument that, as some believed, the defendants were framed, Golden deleted Billings in favor of the more famous Mooney, but otherwise hewed closely to the original story, reset in fictional Queen City.

In Golden’s retelling, Mooney (renamed Delaney) is targeted because he tried to foment a strike of railroad workers. The bad guys are the railroad president and the district attorney, and the good guys are, mainly, a newspaper editor who reveals that Delaney was nowhere near the parade when the crime was committed. So, for once, an à clef piece was devoted not to the doings of Jeanne Eagels, Noël Coward, or Alexander Woollcott, but to a sociopolitical figure. Despite a cast of unknowns, the show moved from the Provincetown Playhouse to Broadway, ran 184 performances, and managed a respectable tour.

This is notable, for critics were not generally supportive of shows with left-wing politics, especially this early in the 1930s. John Wexley’s Steel (1931) ran two weeks after perhaps the worst reviews of its season—“so overwrought,” said Robert Garland of the World-Telegram, “so overwritten”; and John Mason Brown thought Wexley’s concept of Steel the Enemy of Man as irritating as O’Neill’s obsession with the “ole davil” sea in Anna Christie. Another unheralded cast (including future Hollywood heavy Barton MacLane and Precedent’s Delaney, Royal Dana Tracy) enacted the tale of another labor agitator, this one in “The Milltown of Ironton, U.S.A.” A Sweeney Todd factory whistle punctuated the action, and while Wexley troubled to avoid the propagandist’s easy diagnosis with a warts-and-all hero (who at one point seduces his sister-in-law), he capped his piece with an easy remedy: the hero’s sister shoots one of the cops who has come to arrest him. On opening night, someone in the balcony responded with “Bravo! Kill ’em all!”

Or consider Albert Maltz and George Sklar’s Merry-Go-Round (1932), on municipal corruption in a place that the public understood to be New York. Elisha Cook Jr., one year before he played the flaming youth of Ah, Wilderness! and later to be immortalized as the jittery “gunsel” Wilmer in John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon, appeared as a hotel bellboy who witnesses a gangland murder and ends up hanged in his cell. The “suicide” had been drawing attention to ties between crime and law enforcement.

Was Merry-Go-Round’s Mayor Manning an à clef portrayal of Mayor James J. Walker? Is this what goaded the city to treat the production to a real-life merry-go-round of harassment? Like Precedent, the play moved from the Provincetown to The Street, to the Avon (now demolished) on West Forty-fifth Street, one door west of the Imperial. On opening night, shortly before curtain time, the fire department arrived to padlock the house for an out-of-date license. This created a scandal, not least because plenty

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