Word: blitzstein
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...Threepenny Opera originated as a leftist diatribe, and is even more of one in John Dexter's snarly, airless staging. Michael Feingold's translation claims to reflect more authentically the 1928 Berlin debut than the Marc Blitzstein version popularized in the '50s. It is surely less effective. For example, it freights the naive scrubwoman anger of Pirate Jenny with sophisticated detail that is out of character, and enervatingly transforms the last syllable of the second-act finale from a strident long vowel to a swallowed short one. Jocelyn Herbert's cumbersome set obstructs movement, draining energy. But emotion intensifies after...
...which she rather portentously describes herself interviewing Welles. At the end, she writes about herself talking to Welles while he in turn is thinking about directing a movie about himself, a movie in which somebody else will play the 22-year-old Welles defying Washington opposition to stage Marc Blitzstein's radical opera The Cradle Will Rock. And he is already starting to change supposedly factual scenes around, to imagine new ones. "The way I want to do it is much more interesting than I was!" he says, then bursts into laughter. Once again anything is possible, and once again...
Houseman and Orson Welles were the co-producers of Marc Blitzstein's "labor opera" initially scheduled as an entry of the WPA'S Federal Theater Project. In one of those periodic bouts of political jitters, the Maxine Elliott Theater was closed to Cradle the day before the opening. Ironically, since the show is vociferously pro-union, the musicians' and actors' unions forbade them to play or go onstage...
...penultimate minute, another empty theater was found. Cast, friends and well-wishers trekked 21 blocks accompanied by an upright piano in a truck. Blitzstein and the piano took the sceneryless stage, and as the composer played the score, the actors, scattered through the house, stood up and delivered their lines. The event took the audience and the next day's front pages by storm...
...Today Blitzstein's work can be seen as period agitprop, analogous to Clifford Odets' Waiting for Lefty. It is colored with the lyric causticity of the Brecht-Weill collaborations. Yet it is always a mistake to deride the potency of stereotypes in the theater or the power of good-vs.-evil allegories, however simpleminded. Here the premise is that Mr. Mister (David Schramm), the boss of Steeltown, U.S.A., is a cigar-chomping tyrant, and his gutsy prole of a foe, Larry Foreman (Randle Mell), is a knight in blue-collar armor. We meet Mister's toadies: mousy...