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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.

In the last issue of Ballet Review, Mimi Paul gave what I think is one of the most astute assessments of her ex-New York City Ballet colleague Maria Tallchief’s dancing:

“I liked how she read the music physically; she inscribed the text of the music with her body.  You saw her being moved by the music, invariably saw her answering the question, ‘Who are you in this piece?'”

The Spring 2013 issue of Ballet Review is now out, and contains a photo portfolio of Tallchief in a wide swath of her repertory, as well as a recollection by Larry Kaplan, who c-authored her memoirs.

And the issue contains a lot else!

Writing in the Times, Paul Krugman doesn’t want Detroit’s fiscal fail to become an excuse to scapegoat pensioners.

The old-time stage stars knew how to objectify themselves every moment they were on-stage, or perhaps it would be better to say, every time they were in front of an audience.  They were they own zoom lenses–they had to be.  Of course the intensity and clarify of the objectification varied from moment to moment according to what they were supposed to be doing and in what context.

Watch Tallulah on What’s My Line in 1961.

Yes I’m serious.

She said that listening was the whole secret of acting, and all the time that she’s actively listening to what is going on around her, she is in a perpetual state as well of apparent reflection.  She’s taking in and giving out simultaneously, with utmost economy of movement and facial expression.  Her re-appearance on What’s My Line four years later is also masterful, but in a different, physically looser and slinkier modality.

I  loved City Center Encores’ The Cradle Will Rock last week and want to write about it. The material still blazes and it was a cast of flame-fanners!

But first I do have to say that once again I realized how much I loathe the amplification that is now ubiquitous in Broadway and Broadway-scale productions.

It robs us of being able to experience what was once one of the most exciting things about live theater: the sound of a theatrically-projected singing or speaking voice.  We are no longer getting a full or accurate representation of these resonances.

And it does strike me as a form of cheating on the part of the performers.  In the old days, performers learned to project their voices to the last row of the second balcony without straining.  And they cultivated distinct, expressive vocal timbre.

Today at the theater we contend with an inevitable overlay of reverb and echo.  (Can’t the technology here at least be improved?)

I mean, if the opera singers can be heard above a Strauss or Wagner orchestration—surely musical comedy singers could be heard above a relatively puny Broadway pit band.  And yes, eight shows a week is rough, but so it was back in the day.  (Didn’t some musical comedy stars forego matinees for that reason?)

Today I ran into a woman who’d owned a small shop here in the West Village for several years beginning in the late-1980s.  She’d moved out West but is now back in NYC.  It would be impossible, she said, to pick up where she’d let off in Manhattan–commercial rents here have risen ten fold in two decades.

Thus the preponderance of banks and big-box druggists.

“We’re not celebrities anymore,” a leading ballet dancer said not too long ago.  “We’re just trying to survive.”

Representative Rush Holt of New Jersey breaks with the president on the subject of civil liberties, which have been squashed by the Obama administration with a might-as-well-be 4th-term-GW Bush-presidency alacrity.

Read Holt’s eloquent, forceful, unequivocal editorial.

I missed this piece by Linda Greenhouse in the Times from June 29:  “The Real John Roberts Emerges.”

It leaves no doubt that we now have a frightening take-the-law-into-its-own-hands right-wing majority on the Supreme Court.

Thanks, Dems, for once again failing to stand up to a charlatan.