Category: Daily Dispatch

Marc Blitzstein was born in Philadelphia on this date in 1905. He is probably best remembered for two things: for supplying the fine English translation/adaptation of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s “The Threepenny Opera;” and for being the composer of the incendiary “The Cradle Will Rock.”

Not long before its scheduled premiere on June 16, 1937, the Brechtian, pro-labor musical was shut down by the Works Progress Administration, allegedly due to budget cuts. However, the padlocks on the theatre, the security guards, and the unwillingness to release props or costumes seemed to bolster assertions that the play was censored for being too radical.

One must never toss a bone like that to Orson Welles. Welles turned it into a publicity coup by leading a 21-block march to a much larger theatre, where “The Cradle Will Rock” skirted union concerns by scrapping the orchestra and having the actors perform their parts from the audience, while Welles and Blitzstein presided from the stage.

The stunt worked so well that the show was able to secure a private backer and all subsequent performances were done in the same manner, with the actors in the audience. The producer, John Houseman, was elated that such a practical solution should prove to be the key to the show’s success.

“There has always been the question of how to produce a labor show so the audience feels like it is a part of the performance,” he commented. “This technique seems to solve that problem and is exactly the right one for this particular piece.”

The success of “The Cradle Will Rock” led Welles and Houseman to form the Mercury Theatre.

Though Blitzstein was American through-and-through (he enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Corps during World War II), he seemed always to be perceived as a threat to the establishment. Raised in a nonreligious Russian Jewish Marxist family, he wore his leftist sympathies on his sleeve. He was called before the U.S. House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1958, when he admitted former membership in the Communist Party. He declined, however, to name names.

Blitzstein was nothing if not true to himself. Openly gay, he was beaten to death by three sailors in Martinique in 1964. He was 58 years old.

Leonard Bernstein, who adored “The Cradle Will Rock” and mounted his own production while still a student at Harvard, called Blitzstein “the greatest master of the setting of the American language in music.”

Be that as it may, much of his output went unperformed for decades after his death. 50 years later, we are rediscovering him still.

Happy birthday, Marc Blitzstein.

PHOTO: Blitzstein, surrounded by the cast of “The Cradle Will Rock”