Thirteen years ago, the Arcola theatre marked its 10th anniversary with a staging of Marc Blitzstein’s agit-prop musical The Cradle Will Rock. Now its director, Mehmet Ergen, has pursued his fascination with this elusive, intriguing US composer by presenting, for the first time in Europe, the stage work that Blitzstein went on to compose after Cradle, the “play with music” No for an Answer, as part of this summer’s Grimeborn opera season.
No for an Answer received its premiere, semi-staged, in New York in 1941. Though some admired it – Aaron Copland thought it “one of the most original works in that form composed in this country” – the first run only lasted for three nights, and the work subsequently received only one further performance before Blitzstein’s violent death in 1964. But on the evidence of the Arcola performance, energetic though that is in Ergen’s economical production, this is not a neglected masterpiece. Too many of the 20-odd numbers in the score seem effortful, their word-setting awkward and the dramatic pacing uncertain.
Set among the members of a Greek-American social club during the Great Depression as they look for a way to escape from their economic deprivation, it’s certainly a story that makes no secret of its compassion and its political credentials. But even the central characters and their relationships are sketchily drawn, so that they are little more than ciphers, while the narrative loses its way in the second half. Paradoxically, though, the quality of the music after the interval is distinctly better than what had come before, and at least does provide a few glimpses of Blitzstein at his best, in a style that owes most to Kurt Weill, and sometimes prefigures Stephen Sondheim.
Moments such as Francie’s touching song Be With Me, beautifully delivered by Katrina Michaels, and Bulge’s Penny Candy, turned into a real showstopper by Vas Constani, do suggest what might have been, but otherwise the best efforts of this wonderfully committed 20-strong cast aren’t enough it make it all convincing.
• At the Arcola theatre, London, until 29 July. Grimeborn opera festival continues at the Arcola theatre until 23 September.
