Playwright: Jason Sherman
At: TimeLine Theatre Company
Phone: (312) 409-8463; $22
Runs through: June 6
Marc Blitzstein once remarked that he had three strikes against him: 'Number one I'm a Jew, number two I'm a Communist, number three I'm a homo composer.' The composer of Regina (successfully revived last season at Lyric Opera), Juno, and Native Land (film score) always was open about who he was. Blitzstein's frankness cost him his life in 1964 when he was bashed to death while vacationing in the Dominican Republic, just weeks before his 59th birthday.
Writer and fellow leftist Eva Goldbeck knew Blitzstein was gay when they married in the mid-1930s. Friends for nearly a decade, they forged intellectual, political and emotional bonds that transcended the sexual. Goldbeck (a distant relative of mine through her mother, the opera singer Lina Abarbanell) was dead within three years from anorexia (not then recognized as a pathology) and breast cancer. Her death devastated Blitzstein and became the impetus for his best-known and most successful work, the pro-labor agit-prop musical, The Cradle Will Rock that took Broadway by storm in 1937.
At least that's the premise of playwright Jason Sherman in It's All True, a dramatic comedy in which Eva's ghost confronts Blitzstein at key moments during rehearsals for The Cradle Will Rock, directed by Orson Welles, produced by John Houseman and starring firebrand actor and activist Howard Da Silva (who later spent years on the blacklist). Borrowing his title from an infamous, never-completed Welles film, Sherman shows the clash of egos and temperaments, of politics and theater that turned Cradle into a behind-the-scenes circus before it opened, and earned it a place in theater history afterwards. The irony is, not everything in It's All True is true: Sherman makes up some major pieces, such as an affair between Da Silva and his inept leading lady.
No matter: Sherman has created a titillating, tabloid-style glimpse at an intersection of art, government and outsized personalities that punctures all egos; a crisp and manic—albeit occasionally repetitive—juggernaut that sweeps one along in its portrayal of a colorful and famous dramatis personae. As produced by TimeLine the lead performers bear superficial but striking physical resemblances to the real people they portray, and have been drilled to fast-paced, energetic precision by director Louis Contey. In addition, Matthew Krause (Blitzstein), Nigel Patterson (Houseman), Brian McCaskill (Welles), Paula Stevens (Eva), David Parkes (Da Silva) and Juliet Hart (as Welles' first wife) seem imbued with an understanding of the era they recreate.
They are helped by a very sharp physical production sporting Alex Meadows' well-researched period costumes (including de rigueur suspenders for the men) and a wonderful, witty, compact backstage set by Brian Sidney Bembridge that demonstrates why he's quickly earned a place among the top designers in town.