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A scene from The Cradle Will Rock. |
By Ed Rampell
Don’t miss The Cradle Will Rock. The Blank Theatre Company’s production of this proletarian theater classic is as timely today as it was when Marc Blitzstein’s musical premiered – uh, eventually – on Broadway during the last Depression, emerging out of a wave of working class organizing and sitdown strikes. Now, during the current Depression, workers in Wisconsin, Ohio and beyond are resisting attempts to overturn labor’s historic gains made during the New Deal such as collective bargaining, just as the masses are rising against tyranny across North Africa and the Western Asia.
The Cradle Will Rock opens with Tiffany C. Adams’ sultry streetwalker Moll trying to hustle a potential john, as they dicker over prices in Steeltown, USA. Adams delivers a moving, soulful rendition of Nickel Under the Foot, which inspired German playwright Bertolt Brecht to tell Blitzstein he should write an entire musical around this song, according to Eric Gordon’s Blitzstein biography Mark the Music (which, along with a CD of the score by the cast of the Blank’s 1995 Cradle production, is on sale at the Stella Adler Theatre). Adams (who, appropriately, hails from Toledo, Ohio, site of the 1934 mass strike co-led by A.J. Muste) holds her own as Moll, a role that Broadway luminary Patti LuPone has played on New York and London stages.
Adams’ hooker serves as a recurring leitmotif throughout the musical for the prostitution that the capitalist system forces many characters into. These include members of the Tea Party-like “Liberty Committee,” which industrialist Mr. Mister (Peter Van Doren reprises the role he first played in the Blank’s 1995 The Cradel Will Rock) and his “philanthropic” wife, Mrs. Mister (Gigi Bermingham), have recruited and bankroll to stem Steeltown’s rising tide of unionization. With great comic panache these sellouts depict what Karl Marx called “ruling class, ruling ideas,” just as Charlie Chaplin humorously portrayed Marx’s theory of the alienation of labor under an exploitive system in his 1936 masterpiece, Modern Times.
The portrayal of the Committee in this production skillfully and drolly directed by Blank Founder Daniel Henning verges on the Theatre of the Absurd, as the thesps skewer various members of the scientific, media, religious, academic and cultural elite: Dr. Specialist (Rob Roy Cesar), Editor Daily (David Trice), Reverend Salvation (Christopher Carroll), President Prexy (Matthew Patrick Davis) and musician Yasha (Jim Holdridge).
But can the Misters buy everyone? Have they met their match when they confront labor leader Larry Foreman (Rex Smith; back in 1937 Howard Da Silva originated the role)? Foreman sings the title number, and the rocking cradle refers to revolution, which American socialist Eugene V. Debs called, “The boldest word in an language.” When the stage explodes with mass revolt, the workers’ picket signs cleverly bear contemporary corporate references, as does the playbill’s cover.
The Cradle Will Rock was the number one “must see” play on my list of shows I hoped to experience one day. I missed it circa 1999 when it was presented at the Will Geer Theatricum Botanicum (Geer played Mr. Mister in the Broadway premiere). But Blank’s production not only doesn’t disappoint – it’s also well worth the wait. Henning’s humorous take on Blitzstein’s musical is surprisingly different from the version of it glimpsed in Tim Robbins’ stellar Cradle Will Rock (the best American feature film of 1999), which is more about the struggle to present the play than about the show itself, although scenes of the opera are glimpsed in rehearsal and performance sequences and seemingly more serious.
Except for a piano player tickling the ivories on stage right the current cast appears on a bare stage at the Stella Adler. Did scenic designer Kurt Boetcher botch the set design? Or is this a clever reference to the stirring events leading up to The Cradle Will Rock's 1937 Broadway debut – which, as Robbins revealed in his thoughtful movie, almost never occurred?
Almost 75 years later, as workers continue to fight for their rights, The Cradle Will Rock remains as relevant as ever. Rock on!
The Cradle Will Rock runs through March 20 at the Stella Adler Theatre, Main Stage, 6773 Hollywood Blvd., 2nd Floor, Hollywood, California, 90028. For more information: 323/661-9827; www.ovationtix.com/trs/pr/781235.
