Rock-A-Bye Stalin

...What Robbins has done is take this story and make it the core of a Stalinist pageant in which capitalist bosses and radical right-wing politicians, working in cahoots with Mussolini and Hitler, use their power and influence to destroy a revolutionary artistic workers' movement...

...Celebrate the Matisses...

...Blitzstein's Stalinism was so dogmatic that his "labor opera" supported only one kind of union—the kind that belonged to the Communist-dominated Congress of Industrial Organizations...

...he even blames the tunelessness of the first number on the fact that the actress who performs it, Emily Watson, can't sing on key...

...During the New Deal, the Works Progress Administration— FDR's grandiloquent effort to offer direct employment to out-of-work Americans—had set up an organization called the Federal Theater Project as a relief program for stage professionals like Welles (who, like 40,000 other artisans, received the grand sum of $23.86 a week for his labors...

...By the time the evening was over, the story was on the front page of five of the city's eleven newspapers, and a legend was born...

...This was deemed an intolerable act of artistic suppression by Welles and his producer, John Houseman (the same John Houseman who would years later tell the world that the investment firm of Smith Barney makes "money the old-fashioned way, they earn it...

...Welles was the director of the piece, though in being so he was working as an employee of the federal government...

...Celebrate color...

...Undaunted by his own illiteracy, Starnes pressed on: "Of course we had what some people call Communists back in the days of the Greek theater, and I believe Mr...

...The cast and crew retreated from the guards they called "the Cossacks" to a velour-lined honey trap in the theater that had been used as a trysting spot by J.I...

...Lenin does not appear anywhere in the approved sketch...

...This covered scenery, musical scores and costumes, including our actors' underwear and our leading man's toupee...

...Happily, the movie stinks...

...This exchange is straight out of the Congressional Record of 1938, and it reveals both the dangers and the occasional hilarities when philistine politicians attempt to address issues of art...

...That irony is lost on Robbins, as is the fact that The Cradle Will Rock received such an ecstatic reception from the Federal Theater Project because of its Stalinism...

...Those were "something new and better" that "dealt with content, social issues, dramatic themes"—"rein-venting musical theater...

...Tim Robbins's movie shows its own,truly Stalinist intentions in the ridiculously overdrawn depiction of the scandal surrounding Diego Rivera (Ruben Blades) and his aborted mural for the lobby of Rockefeller Center...

...One of the reasons that the actors' and musicians' unions refused to allow their members to perform in The Cradle Will Rock was that they were part of the non-Communist-dominated American Federation of Labor, then waging vicious battles with the CIO to keep the American labor movement from becoming part of an effort to seek a violent revolution in the United States...

...That left only Blitzstein— and there wasn't even a piano for him to play on, not to mention a theater in which to put the show up...

...BY JOHN PODHORETZ The world of the theater has ever been the source of great and wacky backstage stories, and one of the greatest and wackiest came about in 1937, when a twenty-two-year-old impresario named Orson Welles marched several thousand people waiting to see the premiere of a new musical twenty-one blocks uptown from a padlocked New York City theater to a dumpy venue off Central Park where a lone man sat on stage in front of an upright piano...

...Morgan and his favorite actress, there to figure out how to stage the show...

...One certainly hopes so...

...The show ended with the raised fist that was the symbol of the CIO...

...When Welles sat down to write his screenplay in 1983 and listened anew to the score, he realized it was so awful that he would have to work around it—offer as little of Blitzstein's work as he could while depicting the backstage shenanigans...

...This is preposterous...

...Then," Houseman said, "a most amazing thing happened...

...Then Welles and Houseman commenced the parade uptown to the new theater, in which a rollicking time was had by all...

...Jack and Jill lead the class revolution...

...Ten years after the fall of the Wall, eight years after the statues of Lenin were pulled down, a Hollywood studio has made the first neo-Sta-linist epic just in time for the new millennium...

...At one point in her testimony, Flanagan (played superbly by the great stage actress Cherry Jones) is asked by Rep...

...Here we have it...

...In doing so, he offers a conscious parallel to the incredibly crude plot of Blitzstein's The Cradle Will Rock, which depicts the downtrodden condition of the proletariat living in a city called Steeltown, U.S.A., run by a capitalist dog named Mr...

...Robbins does, however, get right one of the low-comedy moments in the history of HUAC...

...Blitzstein was an unregenerate Stalinist, a slavish follower of the man whose ideology resulted in the murder of more people in the history of the world than any other...

...Joseph Starnes to defend something she had said about Christopher Marlowe...

...The only thing that made The Cradle Will Rock "new and better" was its Stalinism...

...In the movie, Robbins has Flanagan say, "Never before, to my knowledge, has an American musical dealt with content, social issues, dramatic themes...

...Both men insisted The Cradle Will Rock would have its opening night five days later as scheduled...

...Robbins, following the standard myth, portrays its destruction as an act of cultural desecration more horrifying in its way than the padlocking of Cradle...

...Blitzstein said he "specifically conceived" The Cradle Will Rock "as a Marxist work that addressed itself to the bourgeoisie...

...Euripides was guilty of teaching class consciousness also, wasn't he...

...Hallie Flanagan, who in the movie contemptuously insists the show is only about beavers, in fact had to cancel Revolt of the Beavers to deal with the outrage...

...To insist on the inclusion of Lenin was absurd, even adolescent...

...They occupied the box office and the front of the house, also backstage and the dressing rooms to make sure that no federal property was used or removed...

...It's an amazing tale, and a great movie could be made of it...

...That's a lie...

...Robbins depicts another controversial Federal Theater Project undertaking, a children's show called Revolt of the Beavers, and makes fun of the criticism it came under for attempting to indoctrinate children into the precepts of Communist ideology...

...Which proves that, like many other works undertaken by the Federal Theater Project, The Cradle Will Rock was an affirmative-action show—given special attention, respect, and care not because of the content of its character, but because of the color of its politics...

...This is the moment in the film when capitalism really shows its vicious power in the seemingly benign person of the young Nelson Rockefeller (John Cusack), who is (an opening title assures us) making billions selling goods to Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy...

...Blitzstein began by speaking the words "Scene One" and commencing the first song, a ballad sung by a prostitute...

...Mister—he controls the newspapers, the police force, and even the prostitution rack-ets—who is finally laid low by a workers' uprising...

...Only the last word is true...

...Nonetheless, after six months of hearings, HUAC spoke the truth when it reported to the House of Representatives that "we are convinced that a rather large number of the employees on the Federal Theater Project are either members of the Communist party or sympathetic to the Communist party...

...It's important to understand what that employment meant—it meant that U.S...

...In his sympathetic and intelligent critical study of Rivera, Pete Hamill writes, "Rivera's defiant exercise in Communist idealism came up against one huge legal problem...

...Now, the actor-writer-director Tim Robbins has made a film about it, called Cradle Will Rock (no "the"), and it's a disgrace...

...Robbins makes it appear as though the pressure brought to bear on Flanagan by HUAC was responsible for the padlocking of The Cradle Will Rock, but that too is a lie—it was the very progressive WPA itself, watching out for its cash flow in classic Washington fashion, that sent "the Cossacks" in to ensure the show would not be performed during a budget controversy...

...The insertion of Lenin into his mural was an alteration of the original plan...

...What Rivera decided to do was add a glorified portrait of Lenin to the mural...

...Which is to say, sets or no sets, costumes or no costumes, the actors and musicians were not allowed to perform the piece at all, because of restrictive union rules...

...But there's really no reason to be kind to The Cradle Will Rock, because it is agitprop of a very specific and repulsive kind—the Stalinist kind...

...Flanagan explains that Marlowe "was the greatest dramatist in the period immediately preceding Shakespeare...

...Celebrate form...

...As Houseman notes in his memoir, Run-Through, "the final fatal blow had been dealt [Blitzstein] by those very unions in whose defense the piece had been written...

...Appoint people to your museum boards that detest the Riveras of the world...

...In addition, there was a practical consideration that was more important than the narrow language of contracts: The Rockefellers were anxious to rent offices in a new seventy-story building in the middle of the Depression...

...Glassy-eyed with fear, the actress who was to play the part, Olive Stanton, began singing it from the audience...

...By the time they reached the Venice Theater, they were 2,500 strong...

...She has been studying Marx...

...As Hallie Flanagan, who ran the Federal Theater Project, put it in her memoir, "This was not just a play set to music, nor music illustrated by actors, but something new and better than either...

...Hamill concludes that in Rivera's case, "the propagandist overwhelmed the artist, as he seemed more interested in currying favor with various Communist critics than in making an enduring work of art...

...In 1939, by a House vote of 373 to 21, the funding for the project was cut to the last cent...

...It was unlikely that capitalist tenants would be happy to arrive each morning if forced to gaze at the face of Lenin...

...Her bravery in the face of possible sanctions from her union emboldened the rest of the cast, also in the audience, to rise and play their parts from their seats...

...At the end of the movie, Rockefeller receives counsel from William Randolph Hearst: "We control the future of art because we will pay for the future of art...

...The audience was seated...

...Blitzstein called it a "labor opera that falls somewhere between realism, romance, satire, vaudeville, comic strip, Gilbert and Sullivan, Brecht and Weill and agitprop...

...Houseman ruefully recalled later: "We were so busy asserting our integrity that we hadn't given much thought to the problems of performance...

...Though the movie takes place between fall 1936 and spring 1937, Robbins mixes in two other events of the 1930s and makes them seem contemporaneous— the commissioning and destruction of a mural by the artist Diego Rivera in the lobby of the new Rockefeller Center in 1934 and Flanagan's 1938 appearance before the House Un-American Activities Committee...

...Mother Goose is no longer a rhymed escapist...

...The man running the handheld spotlight found her in the balcony...

...Indeed, in the years of his sad final decline, Orson Welles wrote a delightful autobiographical screenplay about the whole business and cast the British actor Rupert Everett (later Julia Roberts's gay buddy in My Best Friend's Wedding) as himself before the funding fell through and Welles died in 1985...

...Within forty-eight hours, as Houseman told it four decades afterwards, "a dozen uniformed WPA security guards invaded our theater...

...If you wanted to be kind, you could call Blitzstein's play a period piece, which is the thing you say when an artwork from the past seems absolutely horrific in the present—tuneless, witless, ham-handed, unfunny, and didactic...

...But Revolt of the Beavers did exactly that, and the usually mild-mannered Brooks Atkinson of the New York Times complained at the time that "many children unschooled in the technique of revolution now have an opportunity, at government expense, to improve their tender minds...

...More to the point, as Hamill says flatly, "the unfinished mural was almost as bad as its title," which was "Man at the Crossroads Looking with Hope and High Vision to the Choosing of a New and Better Future...

...Indeed, he was a cultural commissar of sorts, writing in the pages of the Daily Worker about the acceptable or unacceptable content of the work of others...

...Within a few seconds, Marc Blitzstein became aware that he was not singing alone...

...taxpayers were paying the salaries of a significant number of people who advocated the violent overthrow of the United States government and the installation of a Stalinist tyranny...

...Blitzstein was indeed a party member, as were many homosexuals, including Whittaker Chambers...

...But by June 1937, the free-spending WPA was being reined in by Congress, and Welles and his fellow WPA arts honchos received a memo from Washington informing them that they could not open "any new play, musical performance or art exhibit" for a few weeks...

...In the movie, Blitzstein (played by the usually amusing Hank Azaria, who's totally charmless here) says he's not "officially" a member of the Communist party because his homosexuality made that impossible...

...Robbins calls his Cradle Will Rock "a (mostly) true story," but it isn't...

...Did The Cradle Will Rock play a part in that funding cut...

...The same is true of Robbins's film, which mercifully spares us more than a few snippets...

...You're reinventing musical theater...

...That is Stalinism, pure and simple—for it was the Stalinists who believed that the only real art is Socialist Realism and that abstraction of any kind was counterrevolutionary...

...This Marlowe," Starnes asks, "is he a Communist...

...John Podhoretz is a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD and a columnist for the NEW YORK POST...

...Houseman sent out a member of his staff with $5 and instructions to find a spinet, get it on a truck, and drive the thing around until they located a house, which they did, around 8:00 on a hot evening...

...Flanagan's speech supposedly takes place nine years after the premiere of Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein's Show Boat, a major American musical that dealt with racial prejudice, and two years after the premiere of George Gershwin's Porgy and Bess...

...Such views were not illegal, but neither did they require a direct subsidy from Washington...

...So, in the world according to Tim Robbins, modernism and abstract expressionism were foisted on an unsuspecting world by moneybags like Rockefeller to prevent realistic, revolutionary art from bringing about the Revolution...

...There were no sets, no actors, nothing but Marc Blitzstein, the author of the book, music, and lyrics for a musical called The Cradle Will Rock, which he was going to have to perform entirely by himself...

...But again, the true story is more complicated, interesting, and flavored than that...

...Create the next wave of art...