Musical comedies in general, like their nonmusical stage counterparts, stand unfairly as poor relations to tragedies—musicals that aspire to nineteenth-century tragic operas filled with thematic transformations and conspicuous organicism. Pal Joey is a brilliant musical comedy that has not lost its relevance or its punch since its arrival in 1940. Despite its many virtues, however, this first musical in “long pants,” as Rodgers described it in 1952, and the first major musical to feature an anti-hero, lacks the great themes of Show Boat and Porgy and Bess and their correspondingly ambitious and complex dramatic transformations of musical motives. The transformation of “Bewitched” in Joey’s ballet from a ballad in duple meter to a fast waltz in triple meter—an idea that likely originated with the dance arranger rather than Rodgers—for example, does not convey the dramatic meaning inherent in Kern’s transformations of Magnolia’s piano theme, nor does it come close to attaining Gershwin’s dramatic application of his melodic and rhythmic transformations and paraphrases.
In contrast to Porter’s Anything Goes and Rodgers and Hart’s On Your Toes, however, Pal Joey possesses a book that could be revived in nearly its original state (even though some modern productions, including its 2008 Broadway revival, tend to treat the work as though it were Anything Goes). Its songs, nearly all gems, grow naturally from the dramatic action and tell us something important about the characters who sing them. For some, including Lehman Engel, if by no means most discerning critics, the bewitching Pal Joey deserves a chance to survive on its own terms as an enduring Broadway classic of its genre and of its time.
CHAPTER SIX
THE CRADLE WILL ROCK
A Labor Musical for Art’s Sake
Marc Blitzstein (1905–1964) remains an obscure figure. With few exceptions his music either was never published or is only gradually coming into print. As late as the early 1980s, one decade before her company, under new leadership, revived the work, Beverly Sills of the New York City Opera was rejecting Regina, Blitzstein’s 1949 adaptation of Lillian Hellman’s Little Foxes, as “too old-fashioned” for present-day tastes.1 Bertolt Brecht scholar Martin Esslin had already dismissed Blitzstein’s “sugar-coated” English translation of Brecht and Weill’s The Threepenny Opera—the version that during the years 1954–1960 became the longest Off-Broadway musical of its era and Blitzstein’s best-known achievement—as unworthy of Brecht’s vision.2
Although he is seldom treated as a major figure, the authors of most comprehensive histories of American music, as well as more idiosyncratic surveys, offer Blitzstein some space and a generally good press.3 Aaron Copland gives Blitzstein equal billing with Virgil Thomson in a chapter in Our New Music.4 Wilfrid Mellers presents Blitzstein along with Ives and Copland as one of three distinguished and representative American composers in Music and Society (1950).5 In Music in a New Found Land, published the year of Blitzstein’s death and dedicated to his memory, Mellers focuses on Regina in a laudatory chapter which pairs it with Bernstein’s West Side Story.6 Blitzstein’s Broadway opera Regina (1949), successfully revived and recorded in 1992 by the New York City Opera, was poised for the possibility of future enshrinement. Several years earlier the composer of The Cradle Will Rock was the subject of the longest biography up until that time of an American composer.7
Marc Blitzstein. © AL HIRSCHFELD. Reproduced by arrangement with Hirschfeld’s exclusive representative, the MARGO FEIDEN GALLERIES LTD., NEW YORK. WWW.ALHIRSCHFELD.COM
Historians and Broadway enthusiasts relatively unfamiliar with either Blitzstein or The Cradle Will Rock may nevertheless know something of the circumstances behind this work’s extraordinary premiere on June 16, 1937 (directed by Orson Welles). As reported on the front page of the New York Times the next day—and almost invariably whenever the work is mentioned for the next seventy years—the show, banned from a padlocked Maxine Elliot theater, its government sponsorship revoked, moved its forces and its assembled audience twenty blocks uptown to the Venice Theater. Once there, in conformance to the letter (if not the spirit) of the prohibitions placed upon its performance, cast members sang their parts from the audience while Blitzstein took the stage with his piano.8
After nineteen performances at the Venice, Cradle moved to the Mercury Theater for several months of Sunday evening performances. On January 3, 1938, the controversial show opened on Broadway at the Windsor for a short run of 108 performances (sixteen performances fewer than Porgy and Bess and in a smaller theater).9 The play was published a few months later by Random House, and the following year Cradle was anthologized in a volume that included Clifford Odets’s Waiting for Lefty, a play with which Cradle is frequently associated and compared.10 A recording of the original production issued in 1938 became the first Broadway cast album, a historical distinction almost invariably and incorrectly attributed to Oklahoma!11
Reviews were generally positive. Although he wrote that the “weak ending” was “hokum” and a “fairy-tale,” Thomson also concluded that after six months of the 1937 production “The Cradle was still a good show and its musical quality hasn’t worn thin” and that the work was “the most appealing operatic socialism since Louise” [Gustave Charpentier’s realistic opera that premiered in 1900].12 Brooks Atkinson considered the musical “a stirring success” and “the most versatile artistic triumph of the politically insurgent theatre.”13 Edith J. R. Isaac wrote that the work “introduces a persuasive new theatre form.”14 Somewhat less sympathetically, the notorious George Jean Nathan concluded his acerbic review with the often-quoted barb that Cradle was “little more than the kind of thing Cole Porter might have written if, God forbid, he had gone to Columbia instead of Yale.”15
In common with most of the musicals discussed in this survey Cradle has been revived with relative frequency, including a production in 1947 under the direction of Leonard Bernstein, who had presented the work at Harvard in 1939 while an undergraduate (playing the piano part from memory), a New York City Opera production in 1960 (the most successful work of their season), and an Off-Broadway production in 1964 that led to the first complete recorded performance of the work. In 1983, an Off-Broadway production and London run starring Evita superstar Patti Lupone (doubling as Moll and Sister Mister) and directed by John Houseman, who produced the premiere, generated a second complete recording and a television broadcast.16 Of all these performances, only the 1960 production resuscitated the orchestral score that Blitzstein had completed in May 1937 and Lehman Engel conducted at the dress rehearsal before the eventful opening night. The performances with Blitzstein alone on his piano launched a tradition that has long since become entrenched and seemingly irrevocable.17
Singing a Song of Social Significance
Authentic avant-garde works achieve their status in part by their continued ability to shock audiences out of their complacency and to bite the hand that feeds. For this reason, the purposeful retraction of government funding when the political wind began to blow in a different direction in 1937—even if the government was not initially targeting Cradle—arguably gives Cradle more credibility than those works that were ideologically safe, including Blitzstein’s earlier modernistic works. Cradle also joins other works of the 1930s, most notably the Gershwins’ Of Thee I Sing (1931) and Let ’Em Eat Cake (1933) and composer-lyricist Harold Rome’s Pins and Needles (1937), in its representation of politically satirical or antiestablishment themes.
Contributing to the continued problematic taxonomic status of The Cradle Will Rock is its musical incongruity with both the avant-garde and the conventional popular theater of the 1930s. Particularly jarring is Cradle’s conflicting allegiances to vernacular song forms and styles and modernistic characteristics and emblems, the latter including harsh dissonances and chords that thwart expectations. How many musicals would encourage the musically shrill hysteria of Mrs. Mister in the Mission Scene (scene 3) when she asks Reverend Salvation in 1917 to pray for war in order to support her husband’s military machine? What other musicals would permit
the dissonance of the recurring gavel music that proclaims order in the Night Court before a new flashback? On the other hand, although the work is for the most part through-sung and contains proportionally far less talk than most Singspiels, including Mozart’s The Magic Flute, Cradle’s treatment of popular vernacular and its non-reliance on opera singers contributes further to the difficulty of placing the work with one genre or another.
In contrast to Gershwin, who began as a popular songwriter before transforming his popular music into art music, Blitzstein, like Copland and Weill, began his musical career as a modernist who then converted to populism. As a student of both Stravinsky-advocate Nadia Boulanger in Paris and Schoenberg in Berlin, Blitzstein became intimately acquainted early in his career with the two primary tributaries to the modernist mainstream and reflected their values in early works such as his Piano Sonata (1927) and Piano Concerto (1931). Blitzstein’s modernist phase prior to 1933 also embraces the “art for art’s sake” ideology that he would soon come to loathe and indict in his first major populist work, The Cradle Will Rock.
One month after he had completed Cradle, Blitzstein, a prolific essayist, published an article in the left-wing magazine New Masses on July 14 (Bastille Day) in 1936 in which he viewed modernism as an inevitable reaction against the excesses required of “a capitalist society turning imperialist.”18 Although Blitzstein thought that Schoenberg and Stravinsky wrote “the truth about the dreams of humanity in a world of war and violence,” he concluded this essay by asserting that these premier modernists were limited by their inability to confront the social issues of their time: “It is too much to say that the new men sought deliberately and fundamentally to battle the whole conception. They were still the ‘art-for-art’s-sake’ boys, they didn’t see much beyond their artistic vision.”19
One week later, in New Masses, Blitzstein praised the Gebrauchsmusik movement (variously translated as “utility music” or “music for use”) for its sense of direction and its topicality. At the same time, he faulted it because its exponents—principally Paul Hindemith, who at that time was only slightly less highly regarded than Schoenberg and Stravinsky—“had little political or social education.”20 The value of Gebrauchsmusik for Blitzstein was its spawning of men such as Brecht who possessed the necessary education and who “saw the need for education through poetry, through music.”21
Earlier in 1936, in an article published in Modern Music, Blitzstein concluded that Hanns Eisler and Weill, two of Brecht’s musical collaborators, “write the same kind of music, although their purposes are completely at variance.… Weill is flaccid (he wants to ‘entertain’); Eisler has spine and nerves (he wants to ‘educate’).”22 By the time he composed Cradle, Blitzstein revealed in print that he shared Eisler’s ideology and had become a card-carrying member of the musical-theater proletariat led by Brecht. He ends his New Masses manifesto with a call to political action. Blitzstein himself had taken such action the previous month when he had completed his Cradle after five weeks of composing at “white heat.” “The composer is now willing, eager, to trade in his sanctified post as Vestal Virgin before the altar of Immutable and Undefilable Art, for the post of an honest workman among workmen, who has a job to do, a job which wonderfully gives other people joy. His music is aimed at the masses; he knows what he wants to say to them.”23
Contributing to the changes in Blitzstein’s thinking was his meeting several months earlier (probably in December 1935) with Brecht, at which the playwright and poet shared his response to Blitzstein’s song “Nickel under the Foot.” The scene was reported by Minna Lederman, the editor of Modern Music: “Marc said to Brecht, ‘I want you to hear something I’ve written,’ and, sitting at his piano, played and sang ‘The Nickel under the Foot.’ This immediately excited Brecht. He rose, and I can still hear his high, shrill voice, almost a falsetto, exclaiming, ‘Why don’t you write a piece about all kinds of prostitution—the press, the church, the courts, the arts, the whole system?’”24Cradle’s dramatic structure follows Brecht’s suggestion to the letter, and most of the work’s ten scenes in “Steeltown, U.S.A. on the night of a union drive” focus on the metaphoric prostitution of various prototypes.25 The only incorruptible figures are Moll, who literally prostitutes herself but does not metaphorically sell out to Mr. Mister and at least has something genuine to sell, and Larry Foreman, who refuses to be corrupted by Mr. Mister and eventually leads the unions to thwart the union buster’s corrupt use of power.
Undoubtedly, the ideological nature of The Cradle Will Rock has obscured its artistic significance. That the work deserves its frequently designated status as an agit-prop musical is evident by the degree to which it was imitated by life. Only a few months after its opening, America seemed to heed its call to action with the formation of a strong national steel union, Little Steel. If Cradle’s pro-unionist and anti-capitalist stance now seems dated, its central Brechtian theme, the indictment of a passive middle class that sells out to the highest bidder, continues to haunt and disturb. As Blitzstein wrote: “‘The Cradle Will Rock’ is about unions but only incidentally about unions. What I really wanted to talk about was the middleclass. Unions, unionism as a subject, are used as a symbol of something in the way of a solution for the plight of that middleclass.”26
With the exception of “Nickel under the Foot,” which observes Brecht’s call for an epic theater and “the strict separation of the music from all the other elements of entertainment offered,” Blitzstein, in contrast to Brecht and Weill, created a work in which music and words were inseparable from the axis of the work.27 Despite this aesthetic discrepancy, the integrated songs of The Cradle Will Rock remain faithful to Brecht’s larger social artistic vision. Consequently, the Cradle songs, like those of Brecht and Weill, both embrace the didactic element espoused by Brecht’s epic theater and reject the “hedonistic approach” and “senselessness” common to operas (and of course musicals as well) before The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny of 1930.28
Two Scenes: Lawn of Mr. Mister and Hotel Lobby
Lawn of Mr. Mister: “Croon-Spoon”
Scene Four, which contains four songs (“Croon-Spoon,” “The Freedom of the Press,” “Let’s Do Something,” and “Honolulu”) opens on the lawn of Mr. Mister’s home, where his children, Junior and Sister Mister, are lounging on hammocks.29 The stage directions describe Junior as “sluggish, collegiate and vacant; Sister is smartly gotten up and peevish.” Unlike most of the characters in Blitzstein’s morality tale, Junior and Sister Mister have nothing to sell and therefore cannot be indicted for selling out. But they do possess vacuous middle-class values that Blitzstein targets for ridicule in their duet that opens the scene, “Croon–Spoon” (Examples 6.1 and 6.2), a spoof of the type of trivial and ephemeral popular song on recordings, dance halls, and non-didactic Broadway shows.
Blitzstein’s opinion of the idle rich, who spend their time singing songs that do not convey a message of social significance, is apparent from the opening lyrics to “Croon–Spoon” when Junior sings, “Croon, Croon till it hurts, baby, / Croon, My heart asserts, baby, / Croonin’ in spurts, baby, / Is just the nerts for a tune!”30 True, Blitzstein permits Junior to begin on a note that belongs to a chord in the key of the song, an F (the third of the tonic D major triad). But this F is the last note in a tonic chord that Junior manages to assert in his opening seven-measure phrase (one measure less than the nearly ubiquitous eight of Tin Pan Alley and Broadway songs). The “conventional” theater song (e.g., “Anything Goes”) would present four eight-measure phrases to create an A-A-B-A or thirty-two-bar song form. Blitzstein’s altered phrase lengths (A[7]-A[7]-B[6+6+2]-A[7+4] measures) within the A-A-B-A structure manage to acknowledge convention at the same time he defies and ridicules it.
In contrast to Junior Mister, who concludes his first A section a half-step too low for the accompanying harmony (E against a D-major chord), Sister Mister, in her complementary seven-measure phrase (the second A of the askew A-A-
B-A), manages to conclude correctly on a tonic D in the melody. Blitzstein, however, subverts the harmonic implication of Sister’s more self-assured D (again on the word “spoon”) with harmony that will rapidly depart from the home tonic. The B section, which begins in F minor (Example 6.2) and consists of two nearly melodically identical six-bar phrases followed by Sister Mister’s two-bar patter that leads back to the final A section, is remarkable for the C in measure 17 (on “-la-” of “pop-u-la-tion”) and measure 23 (on “nev-” of “nev-er”), a lowered or blue fifth that is relatively rare in Broadway songs (and even somewhat unusual in jazz before the 1940s).
Example 6.1. “Croon-Spoon” (beginning)
The punch line of the final A derives from the inability of either Junior or Sister Mister to successfully resolve the harmony. After six measures, Junior should be ready to conclude the song one measure later to preserve the odd but symmetrical seven-bar units of the first two A sections. Instead, Sister Mister, after a fermata (a hold of indefinite length), repeats her brother’s last three measures and Junior, after another fermata, repeats the third measure one more time before the siblings screech out the original tonic to conclude the thirty-nine-measure tune.
Following Brecht and his own evolution as a reformed modernist with a social agenda, Blitzstein is of course telling us to avoid singing what he considers to be vapid songs about croon, spoon, and June, even as Junior tells us in the bridge of this song that “Oh, the crooner’s life is a blessed one, / He makes the population happy.” Junior concludes his song with his own didactic message directed toward the poor who are “not immune” to the wonders of croon spoon. “If they’re [the poor] without a suit, / They shouldn’t give a hoot, / When they can substitute—CROON!” In Pins and Needles, the inspired and phenomenally popular revue presented by the International Garment Workers Union the same year as Cradle, Rome asks his audience to “Sing a Song of Social Significance.” “Croon–Spoon,” a song far removed from social significance, serves as a forum in which Blitzstein can lambaste songs that do not respond to his call for social action and provides the composer-lyricist with an irresistible opportunity to ridicule performers who sing socially useless songs.31
Enchanted Evenings:The Broadway Musical from 'Show Boat' to Sondheim and Lloyd Webber Page 17
