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Even Miss Claire's fashionable audience gave up giggling during the second act and sat back to chat in peace. Broadway connoisseurs were waiting for the big actress scene that would explain why she had chosen the play. The scene never came.
The Cradle Will Rock (music and words by Marc Blitzstein; presented by the Mercury Theatre). To John Houseman and Orson Welles, the producers of Julius Caesar (TIME, Nov. 22), Marc Blitzstein's The Cradle Will Rock is an old problem. They tried to produce it in Manhattan last June for the WPA theatre, were stopped on dress rehearsal night by a mysterious order from above. Now, without benefit of Government, they present it on their own bare stage for special performances. Author Blitzstein sits on the stage, plays his music, occasionally joins the actors as they step forward to sing or speak his pieces. If this method is from necessity—the famous, misnamed Russian Realistic Theatre uses it from choice and with stunning effect—it proves, nevertheless, that if a playwright has enough to say he needs neither sets nor costumes to help him say it. What Mr. Blitzstein has to say concerns what happens to bosses and workers when a steel town goes on strike. If sometimes he uses stock characters and stock works, he more often uses bright, biting satire. The audience laughs out loud when the spoiled son and daughter of a steelmaster try to throw off their ill-natured boredom with a tinny song about spooning and crooning, when a college president and his professors shout mealy-mouthed patriotic jingo. There is good, contemptuous laughter behind The Cradle Witt Rock and that laughter gives the play its vigor.