I left City Center after The Cradle Will Rock elated and optimistic! The societal reality it presents is certainly chilling, but the singing and telling of it and its exhortation to action something else altogether.
Marc Blitzstein’s theater event wears its didactic colors on its mast; it is not only frankly didactic, but a virtuoso exercise in techniques of didacticism. Blitzstein’s debt to Brecht was re-affirmed by director Sam Gold: cross-dressing and age-inappropriate casting put as much sunlight as possible between role and interpreter.
What’s demonstrated too is that the audience can still be not one whit less receptive to the contours of the character being evoked even as our perceptual faculties are bifurcated this way.
The pretext of Cradle hinges on an outlandish and strategic reversal, in which the uppermost layer of economic crust have mistakenly been arrested instead of the union agitators targeted by the local plutocrat.
Blitzstein of course, intended no mistake: so much the better to put the toffs behind bars so that they can face the indictment Blitzstein wants to level against them.
The performance was so tight and so full of conviction.
And really, what difference does it make what Raul Esparza really sounds like? His friends know. But he gave a great performance.
It’s interesting that in 1937, when the Cradle first swung, FDR was in the process of saving capitalism by putting a matrix of controls in places. In our time, we’ve seen those controls revoked one by one, by Dems and Repubs alike–with economic, societal havoc the result.
Esparza’s big number provided what is thus an even more relevant cautionary rattle today: when the wind blows, the cradle will rock. . .There is a tipping point, something that the myopic greed and selfishness of our one percent apparently do not grasp.