Enchanted Evenings:The Broadway Musical from 'Show Boat' to Sondheim and Lloyd Webber (40 page)

Cradle Will Rock
, 1999 film. A closer view of Olive Stanton (Watson) singing the Moll’s song from the audience on opening night.

In addition to inventing or reinterpreting characters and situations, the film takes the artistic liberty of compressing and conflating historical events from the six years between 1932 and 1938 into the months between the time Blitzstein was finishing his
Cradle
(fall 1936) and the evening of its historic and dramatic premiere on June 16, 1937 (described simply as “Summer 1937” in the script). The commission (by Nelson Rockefeller) and destruction of a politically incendiary mural by Mexican artist Diego Rivera (played in the film by the brilliant Panamanian Harvard-educated attorney/actor/singer/songwriter Rubén Blades) in the new Rockefeller Center actually happened, but in 1932–33. Since the Dies Hearings took place in 1938, Huffman’s testimony did not actually play a role in the termination of federal funds and the closing of the
Cradle
’s scheduled theater. In Robbins’s film, Flanagan’s abbreviated hearing, the obliteration of Rivera’s mural commissioned and destroyed by Rockefeller (John Cusack), and the opening night drama of
Cradle
all take place on the same fateful summer day.

Robbins’s
Cradle Will Rock
does not attempt to present a performance of Blitzstein’s musical. Nevertheless, viewers hear more music from this show over the course of the film’s 134 minutes than in several of the putative adaptations previously discussed in this chapter. Early in the film we see Blitzstein (Hank Azaria) hard at work composing the opening, sung by Olive Stanton,
about whom little is known, as the Moll (Emily Watson). Olive is also the first person we see in the film. In an effective but by necessity speculative demonstration of life imitating art, the film begins as she wakes up in a theater, an unemployed homeless street person who goes up to strange men offering to sing a song for a nickel (early in the film viewers also see and hear the character Blitzstein trying out the song based on this idea, “Nickel under Your Foot”). The idea and the music come full circle when, during the performance that concludes the film, Moll (played by Olive), finally sings this plaintive melody. A sympathetic Huffman helps Olive find a job as a stagehand for Project 891, now about to embark on the production of
Cradle
. Although ineligible to act in the work, she is helped by John Adair (Jamey Sheridan). Later, Adair plays the Gent, the man the Moll solicits in the musical and Olive beds in the film. Olive’s first song, the “Moll’s Song” which opens with the words “I’m Checkin’ Home Now,” is heard again when she auditions and continues seamlessly in the film as the time shifts to five months later (where she sings the same song without improvement). Reinforcing Moll’s importance in the musical as well as dramatic components of the film, both of her songs will return in the filmed version of the opening night performance.

Before we arrive at this culminating moment, we also see and then hear Blitzstein in Union Square conceiving yet another song, “Joe Worker.” In a moment of magical realism, the song is overheard by the spirit of Bertolt Brecht, who had inspired Blitzstein when he played “Nickel” for Brecht in 1935, along with the ghost of Blitzstein’s wife and Brecht translator Eva Goldbeck, who died of anorexia earlier in the year. As he allegedly did in real life in 1935, Brecht in the film inspires Blitzstein to make his musical address the reality that none of us, artists included, are immune to at least metaphorical prostitution via moral dilemmas around money and patronage, encapsulated in the biblical adage, “the love of money is the root of all evil.”

During its last portion the film focuses mainly on the
Cradle
performance, albeit with occasional and brief cuts away to subplots. The film is faithful to the spirit and many of the details of what happened that night, including the banning of the performance onstage, and the twenty-block-long (one mile) march uptown to the Venice Theater. In addition to most of the Moll’s opening tune and her “Nickel under the Foot,” we hear announcements of sample scenes, portions of dialogue, fragments of solo songs, and a harmonious sextet belting out the phrase “We don’t want a union in Steeltown.” The performance concludes with Larry Foreman’s powerful refusal to be co-opted, or metaphorically prostituted, by Mr. Mister and the stirring title song that concludes the show.

Despite its historical and artistic veracities, those who were present do not completely concur with Robbins about what actually happened on the historic opening night. The actual proceedings began with some conciliatory remarks by Houseman, who wanted to make it clear that the production “was a gesture of artistic, not political, defiance.”
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Orson Welles then spoke about his admiration for Blitzstein’s musical, informed those present about what they would have seen if the scheduled theater “had not been taken over by the Cossacks of the WPA,” and introduced the scene and the characters.
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In the film, Houseman (Cary Elwes) does not appear here and the two introductions are reduced to a few sentences by the character playing Welles (Angus Macfadyen), who acknowledges the unusual circumstances of the performance, refers to the “sinister force at work” in the play that “frightens people in Washington,” and then ironically introduces “the monster behind
The Cradle Will Rock
: Mr. Marc Blitzstein.”
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Perhaps because what happened next was as dramatic as any fictional portrayal could be, the next part of the film follows life quite closely. This is how Houseman described these moments in his memoir,
Run-Through
:

The Cradle Will Rock
started cold, without an overture. A short vamp that sounded harsh and tinny on Jean Rosenthal’s rented, untuned upright, and Marc’s voice, clipped, precise and high-pitched: “A Street corner—Steeltown, U.S.A.” Then, the Moll’s opening lyrics: [first three lines]. It was a few seconds before we realized that to Marc’s strained tenor another voice—a faint, wavering soprano—had been added. It was not clear at first where it came from, as the two voices continued together for a few lines—[next three lines of lyrics]. Then, hearing the words taken out of his mouth, Marc paused, and at that moment the spotlight moved off the stage, past the proscenium arch into the house, and came to rest on the lower left box where a thin girl in a green dress with dyed red hair was standing, glassy-eyed, stiff with fear, only half audible at first in the huge theatre but gathering strength with every note.
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Houseman continues, relating that at the conclusion of the Moll’s song and Blitzstein’s introductory “Enter Gent,” “a young man with a long nose rose from a seat somewhere in the front section of the orchestra and addressed the girl in green in the stage box.”
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The producer does not identify the man as John Adair. This may be because the man cast as the Gent was actually George Fairchild; Adair played the role of the Druggist, a character who does not appear in the film. In the film, Blitzstein introduces the Gent with the direction, “Enter a well-dressed gentleman,” and after a shot of Adair
leaving
the theater, adds “on the make.” When there is no response, he then interjects, “Enter me.” Adair’s film departure follows an invented but nonetheless heated disagreement between Olive and Adair over whether she should challenge the actors’ union which, acting on federal instructions, forbade the actors to participate onstage in this production. When the Olive of the film sang her song, she was indeed once again on the street where we saw her in the opening scene, although now she is on the street in a performance as well as in real life. Adair’s departure from the theater confirmed his threat that if she defied the union she would have to sleep somewhere else.

His dramatic exit stands as shorthand for what happened with the other characters that evening. According to Blitzstein biographer Eric A. Gordon, the real Adair, described by cast member Will Geer as a “rather reactionary young man,” did not show up at all that night. Reverend Salvation, who was not, as in the film, played by the African-American actor Canada Lee, also did not sing.
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Houseman recalled that “Blitzstein played half a dozen roles [Gordon says eight roles] that night, to cover for those who ‘had not wished to take their lives, or rather, their living wage, into their hands.’ Other replacements were made spontaneously, on the spot.”
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The film treats a multitude of weighty political topics, including the conflict between unionism and management and communism and fascism. But the main issue is the complex relationships between art, artists, politics, and political theater. Although the political vantage point of the film leans leftward, it does make some effort to present other approaches to these issues. Just as
Cradle
continues to generate strong critical reactions pro and con, the film inspired a similarly wide span of responses ranging from positive reviews in the
New York Times, New Yorker
, and
National Review
to a spirited, unequivocally hostile attack by Terry Teachout in
Commentary
, a periodical with strong anti-communist roots.
³⁹
At the conclusion of his indictment of Robbins and Blitzstein, Teachout goes as far as to forge a link between this pair of creators and the evils of Stalinism:

Evidently, in Robbins’s moral calculus, prostituting one’s art in the name of the foremost mass murderer of modern times does not in the least derogate from one’s idealism and courage, any more than utter ignorance of the crosscurrents of cultural politics in the 30’s disqualifies one from making a relentlessly preachy movie about that decade’s complex history.
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Although the music of
Cradle
serves as a backdrop rather than the main event, surprisingly few songs from the musical go entirely unheard in Robbins’s film. And during the long credits, the soundtrack returns once again
to “Nickel under the Foot,” sung by Polly Jean Harvey and Bob Ellis, followed by a charming rendition of “Croon-Spoon,” unheard in the film, sung by Eddie Vedder (the lead singer of the Pacific Northwest band Pearl Jam) and Susan Sarandon (who in the film played Mussolini’s former mistress Margherita Sarfatti). At the end of the credits the last sound we hear is the bitter refrain of “Art for Art’s Sake.” It is not necessary to agree with Blitzstein or Robbins to be fascinated by their portrayals of an American world roiled by the economic and political crises of the 1930s, so similar in some ways to our own time.

Unfortunately, neither the film version of
Lady in the Dark
(Paramount 1944) nor that of
One Touch of Venus
(Universal 1948) did much to maintain the short-lived legacy of these two major contemporary Broadway successes. While both films preserved the basic plot structure, the scores in each case were severely truncated.

To compensate for time lost in largely preserving the play component in the film adaptation of
Lady in the Dark
, a film lasting only 100 minutes, the three dream sequences, half of the music of the stage show, were drastically cut. Only fractions of the Glamour Dream and Wedding Dream were retained. The latter dream also offers a new song interpolation not by Weill, “Suddenly It’s Spring” by Johnny Burke and Jimmy Van Heusen, as a replacement for “This Is New,” the dramatic center of the original stage dream. The Circus Dream was shorn of both Danny Kaye and “Tschaikowsky.”

Most egregious is the elimination of “My Ship.” Since its completion is necessary to resolve Liza Elliott’s dramatic conflicts, its fragmentary instrumental-only and hummed presentation throughout the film is never resolved nor explained. According to bruce d. mcclung, who offers the most substantial historical and critical overview of the film, the executive producer, B. G. (Buddy) DeSylva, who earlier co-wrote the lyrics for the hit show of the 1920s,
Good News!
as part of the team of DeSylva, Brown, and Henderson, did not like the song (or much of the score, for that matter) and overruled director Mitchell Leisen’s wishes.
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Despite its flaws, the film succeeded at the box office where “it racked up $4.3 million, making it the fourth-largest grossing film of 1944.”
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After that, its fate rivaled that of its stage successor by retreating even more deeply into darkness and near oblivion.

The initial idea was a film musical starring the original Venus, Mary Martin, and featuring the original dances of Agnes de Mille. Mary Pickford, a leading actress from the silent era and early talkies and a co-founder of United Artists in 1919, had purchased the screen rights while the hit show was still running in 1943. After a series of delays, the rights were sold to Universal in 1947 and the revamped film, directed by William A. Seiter and produced by Seiter and Lester Cowan, was released in 1948 without the services of either Martin or de Mille, or even much of Weill and Nash, a torso of the show’s full form as seen on the Broadway stage.
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Perhaps the greatest disappointment is that viewers of this adaptation hear only three songs from the tuneful score, “Speak Low,” “That’s Him,” and “Foolish Heart,” none of which are placed in their stage contexts and are only partially sung by their rightful owners. To add injury to insult, in the song last named, the words of Ogden Nash are replaced by those of Ann Ronell, including a new title (“Don’t Look Now but My Heart Is Showing”). Even though the total film length adds up to only eighty-two minutes, one will have to wait thirty-three minutes before hearing the first of these songs, “Speak Low.” “That’s Him” appears about forty-four minutes into the film, “Foolish Heart” (“Don’t Look Now”) about sixteen minutes later, and a reprise of “Speak Low” appears five minutes before the end.