What is a “transgressive” artist? There are two contrasting
models around at the moment: In the first, Tim Robbins’s new film
The Cradle Will Rock, it is Marc Blitzstein, composer, lyricist and
librettist of The Cradle Will Rock, a bit of 1930s agitprop
commissioned and then cancelled by the Federal Theater Project.
Orson Welles and John Houseman then led a famous march uptown to
the Venice Theatre, at which Blitzstein, seated at the piano,
performed the show himself. It is, of course, one of the all-time
great Stalinist droners, set in Steeltown, USA, a municipality
run by Mr. Mister entirely for the benefit of himself and a few
cronies. Fortunately, down at the steel plant, Larry Foreman is
organizing the workers to fight for union recognition.

As Robbins sees it, the defiant socialist composer was a victim
of capitalism’s assault on culture: the “right-wing” deemed the
show too “dangerous” to stage. That’s an odd way to look at a
production that was scuppered by government bureaucrats and
inflexible labor unions: after the FTP dropped the show and
Houseman booked the Venice Theatre, it was the Musicians’ Union
and Actors’ Equity that declined to allow their members to go
along with the revised arrangements. As Houseman wrote in his
memoirs, “The final fatal blow had been dealt by those very
unions in whose defense the piece had been written.”

Only the most humorless old socialist could fail to spot the
ironies here, but Robbins