Marc Blitzstein’s The Cradle Will Rock, a quintessential piece of 1930s Communist agitprop, was presented through May by John Houseman and The Acting Company at the American Place Theater in New York. It was neat and tightly paced, musically well performed, and clearly communicative. Despite its virtues, however, the event was an artistic failure, and even as an ideological enterprise it occasioned none of the political fervor Blitzstein must have hoped to inspire, only the smirks and snickers of an obviously knowing audience. The production’s importance lay elsewhere—in the realm of cultural politics, where Blitzstein himself has won such a considerable reputation.
Something in the nature of a myth now attaches to Marc Blitzstein as both creator and man. An assiduous propagator of that myth has been Blitzstein’s close friend and associate, Leonard Bernstein. A tribute from Bernstein is published in his new book, Findings, and is reprinted in the program for The Cradle Will Rock:
I was amazed at the slightness of this man I had imagined, through his music, to be a giant . . . . we walked, all afternoon, by the Charles River. Now that image leaps up in my mind: Marc lying on the banks of the Charles, talking, bequeathing to me his knowledge, insight, warmth—endlessly, with endless strength drawn, like that of Antaeus, from his contact with the earth. And gradually he became a giant again; and so he continued to be whenever he touched earth, sea,
