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.
