The Cradle Will Rock: in concert

That’s thunder, that’s lightning, and it’s going to surround you! No wonder those stormbirds seem to circle around you… well, you can’t climb down, and you can’t sit still; that’s a storm that’s going to last until the final wind blows… and when the wind blows… the cradle will rock!

The Cradle Will Rock is a 1937 anti-establishment musical with a storied history, originally funded by the New Deal-era Federal Theater Project. Blitzstein’s definition of musical theatre through a Brechtian lens, after consultation and study of Brecht’s methods, involved “direction… topicality… political and social education…[and] spine and nerves.” The Cradle Will Rock follows this approach closely. Throughout the show, we jump between the Night Court, where the members of the “Liberty Committee” have been mistakenly arrested, to flashbacks of the ways in which each member of the Committee has sold themselves to Steeltown’s oligarch, Mr. Mister.

With a concert reading of this musical in the midterm season of November 2018, we hope to see what 1937 has to say about our modern politics. Exposing the way that all sorts of people sell themselves out for power and influence - whatever their personal politics, and whatever walks of life - The Cradle Will Rock is a piece you’ll be thinking about for a while.