What makes it all bearable, and can sometimes make it beautiful, is the score, in which pastiche passages that mock the bad guys alternate with jagged, yearning arias that ennoble the others. (If it sounds like Leonard Bernstein, that’s because Bernstein was a Blitzstein protégé.) In both modes, the music is more expressive than the lyrics, which seem to have been written for a pamphlet.
The show’s history feeds into these contradictions. Whether because of budget cuts or censorship, “The Cradle Will Rock” was canceled by its sponsor, the Federal Theater Project, on the day of its planned premiere.
With the intended theater (and sets and costumes) locked down, the director, Orson Welles, then 22, decided to rent a space 19 blocks north. The audience paraded to the new site but, in an irony more pungent than any of Blitzstein’s, the actors’ and musicians’ unions forbade their members to perform under the terms of their existing contracts.
So Welles invited the actors to buy tickets and sing their roles, in street clothes, from their seats. On the otherwise empty stage, Blitzstein accompanied them at an upright piano, forgoing his 23-player orchestration.
That jury-rigged solution became the bare-bones template for most future productions. Classic Stage uses the piano reduction, played tag-team-style by four cast members. It cuts the company to 10 actors from 30, which can get confusing as most play multiple roles. Though there is a set, designed by Mr. Doyle, it is hardly more elaborate than the one at the premiere. Nor are Ann Hould-Ward’s costumes any showier: She dresses everyone, even the elites, in dirty work clothes, as if to underline the labor of the actors themselves.
The simplicity that has felt clarifying in Mr. Doyle’s best work feels stingy here. The piano accompaniment strips “The Cradle Will Rock” of much of its sostenuto beauty; what’s left is further eroded by singing that sometimes grates the ears. The staging, in one 90-minute act, is largely static and, where musical theater razzmatazz is called for, totally underwhelming. Too much of the acting seems deliberately wooden.
