THE CRADLE WILL ROCK
at the Synergy Center
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Radical for their time and still unusual in ours, these two landmark musicals focus on the place of common folk in a society that preaches human equality and Christian charity but rewards ruthlessness and corruption. Threepenny uses the criminal underclass of Victorian London as a reflection of bourgeois pieties and pretensions. The hero, Macheath, is a murderer and rapist who wears white kid gloves and demands that his thugs know whether the furniture they’re stealing is Louis Quatorze or Chippendale; Macheath’s antagonist, J.J. Peachum, is a Bible-spouting hypocrite who licenses the city’s beggars (and orders the beating of any panhandler who hasn’t paid the license fee) and blackmails the police chief, Tiger Brown, into arresting Macheath, who just happens to be Brown’s best buddy. And in The Cradle Will Rock the heroine is a whore driven to her work by economic necessity. A group of pious patriots mock her until they learn they’re just as much prostitutes as she is; instead of selling sex for cash, they’ve sold their souls to the all-powerful steel magnate Mr. Mister. Neither work is a call to arms for the masses but both call to middle- and upper-class theatergoers–the traditional audience for the operas and operettas these shows spoof–to acknowledge their role in creating the crime they fear and to recognize their common humanity with hookers, hooligans, outlaws, and agitators.
This Cradle still rocks–but it creaks a bit too. Blitzstein’s dramaturgy is naive to say the least: the characters are two-dimensional good guys or bad guys, and there’s not a word about corrupt union bosses or the excesses of Stalinism. Nor does the script convey the full extent of antiunion violence; though one scene depicts an innocent Polish couple being killed by a bomb (set off by strikebreakers to discredit the union), nothing onstage approaches the scale of incidents like the Memorial Day 1937 demonstration in South Chicago, in which ten striking workers were shot to death–seven of them in the back.
Like Splinter Group’s Cradle, Magellan’s Threepenny features a terrific young cast who are for the most part equal to the musical and dramatic demands of the work. Especially effective are James Schneider’s insectlike Macheath, who verges at times on a Jewish vaudeville clown; Roscoe Fraser’s sanctimonious shit of a Peachum (like Lost in Space’s Dr. Smith with an operatic baritone); Rebecca Kolber’s infantile, over-the-top Lucy; and Kate Fry’s Polly, wonderfully dippy and carnal: her low-comedy version of “Pirate Jenny” is by far the most convincing alternative I’ve seen to the gutsy pathos Weill’s widow Lotte Lenya gave the song.
