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Excerpt from Mark the Music: The Life and Work of Marc Blitzstein

By Eric A. Gordon

Cheryl Crawford, the producer, had been a founder and director of the Group Theatre in the early 1930s, and had already put on such shows as Brigadoon, Porgy and Bess, Kurt Weill's One Touch of Venus and Love Life, and Hellman's The Little Foxes and Watch on the Rhine. She was accustomed to taking risks on material her instinct trusted-for which the theatre owes her an incalculable debt. As she wrote in a letter to a friend, defending her adoption of Blitzstein's Regina and sketching a kind of artistic credo for herself:

If I want to stay in the theatre, I have to firmly believe that a sense of truth, coupled with theatrical talent, has an audience, a big one! If you tingle with a sudden awareness of things you only dimly felt before, of evil, of compassion, so that you know more about life after such an experience, that is all I ask.

I'm going to see to it that the audience sitting before Regina has an emotional experience they won't forget. That is theatre. That's why I'm in it. Gags and sugarstick romance have a place in a public's entertainment, but I'd like to give them something richer, truer, deeper.

As a play, this must have had a considerable catharsis for an audience or it wouldn't have run so long. I think the music adds bigger values-more emotion, more passion, more tenderness. /1

At one of the dozens of backers' auditions she hosted in the early months of 1949 where Blitzstein belted through his arias to raise the necessary $140,000 production costs, Clinton Wilder happened to be present.

Obviously impressed, he contributed $5,600 toward this somewhat unlikely moneymaker, and Crawford made him her associate producer. Other backers included Dwight Deere Wiman and the owner and operator of the Forty-sixth Street Theatre, Robert W. Dowling and Louis Lotito. The largest investor, at $25,500, was Edward E. Otis. Only as late as August of 1949, less than two months before the first tryouts in New Haven, did the producers announce the final decision on the name of their property: The Little Foxes musical would be known as Regina.

Robert (Bobby) Lewis, a prominent director who had been part of the Group Theatre in the thirties, had already agreed to direct. For the sets, Crawford engaged Horace Armistead, who designed a revolving stage whereby the angle of vision, and the psychological emphasis, could be changed. For the sumptuous costuming, she recruited the veteran designer Aline Bernstein. To choreograph the ballroom scene, Chinkypin's quick-stepping jig, and assist with general movement, she brought in the well-known dancer of recognized progressive leanings, Anna Sokolow.

Lillian Hellman gave Blitzstein detailed comments on his script. As someone with little understanding of music, or of its use in the theatre, she entertained her doubts all along about this project. But she had given her permission, and indeed saw Blitzstein's attempt at making a great American opera out of her play as a profoundly touching tribute from one artist to another. "It is a job of true stature and true bigness," she wrote to him. "I am grateful for it beyond the words I have to tell you.... Please be happy and very proud of yourself." /2

Blitzstein spent March and part of April of 1949 at Jo's in Philadelphia, avoiding phone calls so be could finish writing Regina. Curiously, it took him until then to compose the "Rain Quartet," which became the most memorable scene in the show, partly because of its stunning vocal evocation of the weather, but perhaps also because it contains Horace's credo:

Consider the rain,
The falling of friendly rain-
That serves the earth, then
Moves on again.
Consider the rain.
Some people eat all the earth.
Some stand around and watch while they eat.
And watch while they eat the earth.
Now rain-consider the rain.

As he worked, a favorite wordless tune by Leonard Bernstein kept playing havoc with his brain, until one day the lyrics came to him. He wrote them to Shirley, who passed them on to her brother:

There goes what's-his-name.
Unhappy what's-his-name.
I've been wondering who's to blame?
Who's to blame? Huh? /3

Lenny never used Marc's lyrics; but be did keep the tune in his trunk for the next several years, until he finally used it for the words, "There's a place for us, Somewhere a place for us…." Three decades after West Side Story, neither Shirley nor Lenny could shake from their minds Marc's "There goes what's-his-name"-nor did they care to.

Lillian Hellman was probably the best known of the American organizers and hosts of the Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace that opened under the auspices of the National Council of the Arts, Sciences and Professions on March 25 at the Waldorf-Astoria. For months she had struggled with the strange deliberations of the State Department as to which invited guests would be allowed in. The conference split the American intellectual community into opposite sides: those who considered meeting and talking peaceably with representatives from the Soviet Union a valid occupation, and those, organized by Sidney Hook and his ad-hoc committee of anti-Communists, who either picketed the proceedings outside the hotel or called counterdemonstrations protesting the pro-Soviet bias at the conference. Aside from signing on as a sponsor of the conference, Blitzstein's role involved greeting the musicians and writers, shepherding them to conference functions, concerts, and private gatherings.

Among the Soviet guests, Dmitri Shostakovich came, for his first visit to the United States. Addressing the nearly three thousand delegates-artists, writers, and musicians-he asked for their commitment to peace, freedom, and democracy. There was at least one evening when he, Konstantin Simonov, and Ilya Ehrenburg sat around someone's apartment drinking vodka with Marc and Bill Hewitt, who had come up for the occasion. On the last day, Shostakovich played the piano at a Madison Square Garden rally that attracted a capacity house of eighteen thousand. But he had gone through rough times in recent months: Zhdanov's antiformalist campaign amounted to virtual censorship of his music, and that of every other significant Soviet composer. Reporters questioned him mercilessly about the position of artists and the state of intellectual freedom in the Soviet Union; this conference followed shortly on the heels of Stalin's banning all schools of genetics that did not concur with the fraudulent researcher Lysenko's political theories. There was little Shostakovich could say that wouldn't either make him appear foolish in America or get him into serious, perhaps fatal trouble at home. Obliged to tout the official Soviet position-indeed, he had been asked to attend by Stalin personally-be spoke these words to the conference, a statement that differs in no significant way from the position American Communists also held:

Formalism we call that art that does not know of love for the people, that is anti-democratic, that takes into account only form and denies content; it is a philosophy that is engendered by a pathologically disturbed, pessimistic concept of reality, by lack of faith in the strength and ideals of man. This is a reactionary nihilist philosophy that must lead to the corruption and death of music. The had features of cosmopolitanism that are profoundly alien to the fate of the nation and of mankind, the decline and emptiness of that pseudo-culture that has no roots in the people, in the nation, manifest themselves in the rejection of the broad audience and in the loss of national features. /4

Perhaps Shostakovich should not be judged too harshly in hindsight: However little of this speech he may have believed, or however little he trusted in the power of the state to enforce esthetic policy, he pronounced his words in the hangman's shadow.

Bill had returned to Virginia when Marc, back at Jo's, wrote to bring him up to date on the aftermath of the conference:

The Shostakovich saga would make a book. I was prepared to be chairman for an affair here in Philadelphia for him and the other delegates, when the State Dept. came through with its asinine decision to send them all packing. I can't quite make out whether the govt is more afraid of Shostakovich and the others finding out about what the rest of America is like, or of us finding out what they are like-but fear certainly plays the biggest part. And what a windfall of propaganda-opportunity for the "enemies of democracy!" /5

There were propaganda opportunities for the conservative side, too. In the fall of 1948, significantly just days before the November election, the government had launched a grand show-trial in federal court at New York's Foley Square against twelve leaders of the Communist Party, on a charge of advocating the overthrow of the government by force or violence. Trial proceedings began in January 1949 and lasted until October 15, 1949. With a verdict of guilty against them, Party leaders began being jailed and fined by the government. Charges such as contempt of Congress (for challenging HUAC) and refusing to register as foreign agents landed others in prison. As a matter of course, Blitzstein signed a number of open letters protesting the government's procedures. At one of his last Carnegie Hall concerts before being consigned to commercial oblivion, Paul Robeson made a point of inviting Eugene Dennis, General Secretary of the Party, to occupy a box near the stage. It was just before Dennis began serving his first prison term. Announcing the dedication of his next song to his close friend Eugene Dennis, be sang "The Purest Kind of a Guy" from No for an Answer as the spotlight turned on the general secretary.

That May of 1949, the Alger Hiss trial began, that watershed moment in early Cold War history that appeared to reveal high-level treason within the very ranks of the government. The trial contaminated the news for months until its conclusion in 1950. And what a climate for anger about leaks to the Communists: That summer of 1949 the Chinese Communists definitively drove out Chiang Kai-shek's forces from the mainland, assuming complete power by October 1. In September the Soviets exploded their first atomic bomb. Enraged senators and public leaders screamed of disloyal Communist sympathizers in every quarter of American life. The American Legion's Americanism Division released a list of 128 people whose past activities made them unsuitable for Legion sponsorship. Blitzstein was on the list.

The League of Composers paid tribute to Serge Koussevitzky on May 10 that year, honoring him on the silver anniversary of his tenure with the Boston Symphony. As the beneficiary of a Koussevitzky Music Foundation grant, Blitzstein made an appearance at the Waldorf-Astoria dinner and played the piano in a preview performance of several set pieces from Regina. Indeed, Blitzstein dedicated the opera to the foundation and to the memory of Natalie Koussevitzky.

By then Blitzstein, Bobby Lewis, Cheryl Crawford, and Lina Abarbanell were struggling with the casting. For the lead role, Blitzstein would have liked to hire Risë Stevens or Dorothy Kirsten. The part of Regina is exceedingly difficult to perform eight times a week, however: The fact that Stevens refused, saying the piece more properly belonged in the opera house, is easily understood.

The producers ended their search with a choice that, on the face of it, sounded unlikely. Alfred Drake had recommended Jane Pickens, born and brought up in Macon, Georgia, a veteran of the three Pickens Sisters (Patti, Jane, and Helen), a popular radio and stage group in the 1930s. Their father was a cotton broker, and their mother had taught them singing. They performed together for only five years, though by the time they quit in 1936, they had reportedly earned a million dollars from their recordings and studio work.

Both Jane and Patti continued as solo acts. Jane performed with the Ziegfeld Follies in 1936, then spent a year touring with Eddy Duchin's orchestra. By the late 1940s, she had graduated to fancy supper clubs and to a regular radio spot on NBC, where she earned a cool fifteen hundred dollars a week. Yet despite her enviable achievements, she had never given up the aspirations for a career in classical music that she had nurtured ever since studying at the Curtis Institute of Music with Marcella Sembrich. She had also spent a year at Fontainebleau with Camille Decreus, and four years at Juilliard. She might slip an operatic aria or two into her shows, but managers forever pegged her as one of those "three kids who twang their noses imitating Uncle Ned's banjo."

When she got the part of Regina, the syndicated Broadway columnist Earl Wilson conducted an interview in which she described how badly she had wanted the role. "Ah knew, Ah knew Ah would get it," she told him. "Ah used to read in the papers that somebody else had the part, and Ah said, 'Ah don't know much, but Ah know one thing-Ah'm Regina.'" /6

It wasn't long before Tallulah Bankbead, the famous Regina of the 1939 stage play, heard about the musical version. "Who's playing me?" she inquired. When she heard the role had been offered to Jane Pickens, she growled, "Pickens? I didn't even like her when she was with the Andrews Sisters." However, she graciously offered Pickens her help on delivering the line Regina addresses to Horace at the end of Act II: "1 hope you die. I hope you die soon. I'll be waiting for you to die."

"Well, of course," Bobby Lewis reminded her, "she'll be singing the line."

"She's going to sing it? What the hell do you think I did?"

Brenda Lewis, whose given name curiously was Birdie, had sung professionally for more than eight years. She had begun her career at the age of twenty, amazingly enough singing the Marschallin in Der Rosenkavalier with the Philadelphia Opera Company. By now a regular with the New York City Opera, she had an impressive thirty-two roles in her repertory. When she heard about Blitzstein's new musical drama, she took an immediate craving for the lead role. She went to each audition dressed in all the flamboyance she imagined Regina would affect. Unspeakably flattened when the producers chose Pickens but not one to give up hope completely, she returned to the auditions-dressed drably now, like the oppressed, crushed Birdie-and applied for the secondary part. "I love her," Blitzstein noted, hearing her anew. "Bobby still thinks she is too far away from the character; too full of guts and stuff; but I love her, and believe she could be trained to it." She got the part.

William Wilderman had auditioned for the New York City Opera several times, but they never took an interest in him. He had a good ear and a huge natural talent, though he was not a good sight reader. Knowing that he would require painstaking coaching from Blitzstein, but also knowing that his was a rich bass voice not to be passed up, the producers accepted him as Horace.

William Warfield, an Eastman graduate with a good command of languages and a bit of previous Broadway experience, auditioned for Lina. "Fine personality," she commented; "fabulous breath control. Voice not the most beautiful. But let Marc hear him." /7 He got the role of Cal, the black butler.

There was unfortunately no solo part Charles Holland, Blitzstein's Airborne tenor, could have played in Regina. In keeping with his desire to promote black talent, Blitzstein wrote to Koussevitzky early in the summer of 1949, begging him to hear the singer, "to my mind one of the great promising lyric tenors of our day." Purely because of his color, Holland had not won the success he deserved. Koussevitzsky did hear Holland shortly afterward and seemed pleased, but no work came about. /8

For the role of Jazz, requiring a singing trumpet player, Blitzstein recruited the well-known jazz artist Bill Dillard. A Philadelphian, Dillard had played trumpet at Blitzstein's old alma mater, West Philadelphia High School. Though he had a limited amount of stage experience, the composer prepared him thoroughly in the big "Chinkypin" number. Blitzstein wanted a tone far removed from the operatic-more of a holler or a field call, even a chain-gang style of singing. The other Angel Band members included Buster Bailey, clarinet, and Benny Morton, trombone, both of whom had played with Fletcher Henderson; and Bernard Addison, banjo, and Rudy Nichols, drums. They all considered Blitzstein's music a quite authentic Dixieland sound that recalled Scott Joplin, and they played it note for note without improvisation. None of the blacks in the cast sensed any stereotyping; they all felt comfortable with the essential dignity of their roles.

Russell Nype had arrived in New York from Illinois in 1947. One night be was dining in a modest family-style restaurant by himself when out of the blue an unknown lady at the next table asked him, "What do you want to do?"

"I want to act and sing," he replied.

"Well, then," the lady said, "I want Lina Abarbanell to hear you." And she made the introduction.

"I love your quality," Lina told him. "Keep studying, and keep coming back to me."

A year or so later, by then a dance instructor at Arthur Murray Studios, be went back just as Lina and the producers of Regina had become exasperated with finding a tenor to play the dopey Leo. He sang a couple of numbers and they signed him immediately. After his exposure in Regina, Nype went on to do Great to Be Alive with Vivienne Segal (Marc's former stepsister); he followed that with a two-year stint with Ethel Merman in Call Me Madam.

Cheryl Crawford's production of Brigadoon was playing on a cross-country tour, with Priscilla Gillette in the lead role of Fiona. Crawford called her back to New York and asked her to take the role of Zan. During the run of the show, Gillette was in her first months of pregnancy; when the baby came the following summer, she named her Alexandra.

For the role of the boorish Oscar, the producers recruited David Thomas; for Ben, they chose George Lipton, who had appeared on Broadway for three years in Annie Get Your Gun. Donald Clarke played Mr. Marshall.

Early in 1949, Blitzstein wrote to Maurice Abravanel about the chance of his conducting Regina. They had met a decade before through Lina Abarbanell-the similar names denoted a common origin and perhaps a distant relationship in Spain before the expulsion of the Jews in 1492. Abravanel had long been associated with Kurt Weill's works, conducting many premieres dating back to the 1920s in Berlin. As a refugee in America, he had spent a year at the Metropolitan Opera, though few people believed his story that he had told the Met off and left of his own accord because of its low standards. Lina had taken Abravanel to see The Cradle Will Rock during its 1938 run at the Windsor Theatre, and he was bowled over by the music, even more by the great drama. Sharing a drink after that performance, Abravanel told Blitzstein how impressed he had been with the libretto. "Now if you could only write a libretto for Kurt Weill," be suggested, hardly realizing how deeply he was insulting the American composer.

After the war, in 1947, Abravanel left New York for Utah to build up a class orchestra in Salt Lake City. By 1949 the Utah Symphony was on the verge of bankruptcy, however, and might not sponsor another season. Against this background, and since Blitzstein had long forgiven his terrible gaffe, the conductor decided to go to see Blitzstein in New York and hear his proposal. In any case, he had always liked being involved in new works by American composers.

Blitzstein considered Abravanel just the right man for Regina. "Why not Lenny?" the conductor asked.

"Lenny would be great for a first performance," Blitzstein answered, knowing how Bernstein operated, "but not after that. He couldn't stick to the tempi and keep the show fresh; he'd become unhappy doing it eight times a week."

Abravanel signed for a definite four weeks only, in case a season in Utah materialized after all. As an assistant, who would carry on after Abravanel left the show, the producers engaged Emanuel Balaban, a teacher at Columbia University with an appreciably lesser feel for the theatre.

Only that summer in Brigantine on the Jersey shore did Blitzstein compose the ballad for Zan, "What Will it Be?" It was a concession to Bobby Lewis and the producers, who wanted more memorable tunes, and until then she had no set piece of her own. Though musically it is clothed in an undeniable Broadway sentimentality, it must count as one of Blitzstein's prettiest songs. With more than a hint of Freudian imagery about the loss of virginity, be again manages to capture that ineffable feeling of late adolescence on the verge of maturity. On another level, it is Blitzstein's confession of readiness for love again, now that Bill had left. How could Marc predict what perfect stranger might walk through the door of a bar where he was drinking some night? Just the way Bill had that time at the Yorkminster:

What will it be for me?
Will someone say "I love you"?
What will it be, to be
The one to say "I love you"?
Will it be all real and right?
And how will it feel
To really love a perfect stranger?
Look in his eyes, and look
And kiss that perfect stranger?
I cannot imagine it quite.
It's like nothing else before,
The opening of a door
To the light.
I stand at the door, and wait
And wonder who'll come knocking.
Who'll stand outside, and wait
And wonder-will I open?
Open to what dazzling light?
My life is waiting for me.
I wonder what will it be?

(Years later, in remembrance of Blitzstein, Francis Thorne based a passage of his Lyric Variations no. 5 for Orchestra on the theme of "What Will It Be?" It premiered in 1982.)

Blitzstein composed new songs for Regina up to and including the out-of-town tryouts. These new arias were in direct response to his producer and director, as is normal in writing for Broadway. But his overall process of composing the opera resembled nothing like The Cradle Will Rock, torn off in a miraculous five weeks, nor like No for an Answer, tugged at for almost four years and resulting in a mountain of unused material. The fact that he had a "collaborator," in the form of an already existing book, helped him strike a comfortable working stride. It was a lesson be might well have studied better, for be rarely achieved such a stride again.

Against the background of the violent anti-Communist Peekskill Riots forty miles up the Hudson from New York, Bobby Lewis began rehearsals in August. "In Russia maybe we'd have six months to rehearse this show," he told his cast, "but here we have only six weeks." He had them first read their lines, without music: He would have them act this opera, not just sing and go through the standard blocking. Then, when they had seen what the play was all about, he told them something they may never have learned in the conservatory: "Singing is the highest expression of emotion. You have to sing when there's that much in you to come out."

Blitzstein held private coaching sessions with all the principals, showing them exactly what he had in mind. Most of them visited his tiny flat on East Twelfth Street, but be went up to his leading lady's Park Avenue home regularly to work with her on her difficult role. At rehearsals be would demonstrate to the chorus how savagely the party scene should go-but Lewis found it difficult to get thirty-two choristers to get that feeling into their delivery. Once, when Blitzstein tried to tell Russell Nype how to play Leo, Lewis pointedly told the actor, "You're not to take direction from anyone else but me." Blitzstein respected the work of a professional colleague, and from them on be enjoyed a solid rapport with Lewis.

The director had problems with Jane Pickens. She was beautiful enough for the role, to be sure-the kind of performer of whom it was said she sported such an ample décolletage that people couldn't take their eyes off her voice. The looks helped to disguise the fact that she did not have a truly good vocal quality for opera. This work, after all, called for developed, trained voices, not Blitzstein's typical theatre singers. Already Bobby Lewis had determined that for anyone to hear her small voice in the theatre, the stage would have to be miked. Maybe if she had been able to compensate as an actress, she could have overcome the vocal problems.

Pickens was a lovely, friendly lady, a devout Christian Scientist and completely apolitical, who devoted much of her free time to fundraising for cerebral palsy research. She didn't want to be disliked. She identified with the gracious side of Regina, not with her essential malice. At most she saw Regina as a woman trapped in the South and desperate to get out. She did not care for vulgarity: She walked away from it when she saw it. During a rehearsal break while others enjoyed a smoke or a chocolate bar or coffee, she would sit to one side, study her music, and nibble a box of raisins. Maurice Abravanel recalled that hardly a day would go by when Blitzstein wouldn't refer to his "Slim Pickens"-and be wasn't referring to her figure.

"I could never kill anything, much less my husband," she once said in rehearsal. Bobby Lewis asked her to imagine being in bed trying to sleep with a mosquito buzzing in her ear.

"Think of the satisfaction you would derive from getting up and smacking it dead against the wall," Lewis told her. That helped her a bit.

Chappell published six songs in advance of the premiere: Regina's "Summer Day" and "The Best Thing of All," Ben's "Greedy Girl," the Chinkypin minstrel number, the "Blues," and Zan's ballad, "What Will It Be?" Only the last song could be lifted from the show as a separate number with any chance of commercial success-indeed, its chance seemed so great that it is truly a wonder that no one recorded it. In time, the company would publish a full piano-vocal score as well.

Regina opened with four sold-out performances at the Shubert in New Haven on October 6. Backstage, Lina went around to all the performers' dressing rooms with her good wishes and a plate of fresh pineapple-her cure for phlegm and dry throat. The audience adored nine-year-old Philip Hepburn as Chinkypin, but they felt bewildered by this untraditional score, missing the songs they had a right to expect from a musical. Critics had problems, too, because the program did not list the names of individual musical numbers. They felt disoriented-they hardly knew if the show had any musical numbers.

Several writers about the show remarked admiringly on the fact that Blitzstein had orchestrated it himself-most composers left that job to specialists hired to do it. In fact, Henry Brant had thought he could help Blitzstein with the orchestration, but Blitzstein had begun it already, with some specific ideas fairly distant from Brant's. In the end, Brant felt the score lacked sonority, that Blitzstein's truer gift remained in the smaller theatre works. David Diamond also believed Blitzstein's orchestration thin, and criticized it for a deficiency in counterpoint and middle parts. "That's for you," Blitzstein answered, satisfied that what he had done was already highbrow enough for a Broadway score.

Seeing the show on the stage for the first time, Bobby Lewis felt that Cal's "Blues" slowed down the action too much, and he wanted to cut it. Naturally, William Warfield objected-it was his only moment to stand out, his "Old Man River." Abravanel wanted to keep it: The show needed a lyrical pause amidst all of the vicious Hubbard sniping. After all, isn't it "Celeste Aïda," not all the jealousy business, that everyone considers the most beautiful passage in Verdi's opera? Crawford deferred to Lewis, compromising as far as to let Warfield sing it at one matinee in New Haven, but the decision was foregone.

(A few months later, in March 1950, Warfield made his New York concert debut, the beginning of a distinguished singing career. Irving Kolodin ran into Blitzstein there and told him he should have his head examined for having taken the "Blues" out of Warfield's part in Regina. What could Blitzstein reply but to mumble a few feeble words about the producers, the continuity?)

Variety's advance report, based on the New Haven premiere, predicted correctly that Regina would require some reworking out of town, but it also primed New York readers for the fact that Regina represented something genuinely new in the theatre.

After New Haven, Regina moved on to the Colonial Theatre in Boston and opened on October 11. Peggy Doyle's review in The American highlighted the controversy over its unusual form: "Regina Applauders Outweigh, Silence Critics." Elinor Hughes reported in the Boston Herald the next day how Brenda Lewis had been cheered, and how Jane Pickens "covered herself with deserved glory for her fine performance of a difficult and exacting role and had to buck memories of Tallulah Bankbead in addition." /9 Hughes returned to the fray in a Sunday followup:

There hasn't been as hot an argument around town in years as the one now raging over Marc Blitzstein's musical drama Regina, now in its final pre-Broadway week at the Colonial. There are, as I'm sure you know by now, two sharply divided camps, and the battle lines remind me slightly of those drawn at the Battle of Agincourt; now as then, you can't very well be in the middle. /10

Cheryl Crawford hoped the show might have at least one or two songs that could become popular by themselves and help make Regina a hit. "What Will It Be?" was intended as one. Also, it seemed that however much Regina stood at the center of attention, the biggest showpiece fell to Birdie. Responding to the demand for a real star turn for Regina, Blitzstein sat down at the piano installed in his suite at the Copley Plaza and wrote "The Best Thing of All," a reflection of Regina's repellent materialism. It helped to reinforce the satanic element in the character that Pickens found hard to convey. Some of its thematic content clearly comes from passages in Another Part of the Forest. The composer liked to refer to this aria as Regina's "bullfighter number" or "toreador song." In some ways it summons up the spirit of a stripper's routine, emphasizing Regina's quintessential vulgarity.

Arnold Arnstein, regarded as the best music copyist in the business, traveled with the show to help with such last-minute additions, for all the orchestra parts would have to be copied out virtually overnight. He remembered one performance in Boston when Jane Pickens couldn't find her fan. As she hunted for it all over the stage, she got distracted and stopped singing. Abravanel kept the orchestra going with the same eight bars of music until she finally located it, then continued with her music.

While the show was in Boston, a young composer living there and working as the pianist for the Boston Symphony went to the theatre to show Abravanel and Blitzstein a short opera he had just written. Both of them rejected the work out of hand because the title role never actually appeared. It was Lukas Foss with his opera The Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, which after its premiere the following year did indeed go on to become fairly popular.

New York newspapers noted ominously that at least two people at every one of the sixteen performances in Boston walked out demanding a refund, claiming they had been misled into believing Regina to be a musical. But in general the out-of-town press had been enthusiastic. New York anticipated a wild success. Interviewed by Cue magazine, Hellman admitted that she had seen nothing of Regina since Marc had gone over the final script with her some months before. She kept herself completely out of Regina's way, as her own play Montserrat which she was directing, was due to open on Saturday, October 29, only two nights before Blitzstein's work. "Marc has done a really wonderful job," she said. "And it really is an opera, you know, not just a play with a few songs added." /11 That same night, Regina played as a benefit preview for the National Council of the Arts, Sciences and Professions, the pro-Wallace organization. Hellman, Blitzstein, and Brenda Lewis, all members, were honored. Interestingly, Kurt Weill's Lost in the Stars, a musical drama on a race theme that also featured a small black boy dancer, opened on Sunday, October 30.

That Sunday, Leonard Bernstein did Marc a favor by publishing a "Prelude to a Musical Adaptation" in the Times. Citing the unlikely prospect of turning Hellman's tale of vipers into music, he championed the results Blitzstein had achieved. In an apt metaphor, be defined Blitzstein's technique:

Coating the wormwood with sugar, and scenting with magnolia blossoms the cursed house in which these evils transpire ...

With Regina we have a kind of apex, a summation of what Blitzstein has been trying to do. The words sing themselves, so to speak. The result is true song-a long, flexible, pragmatic, dramatic song. /12

The producers, with the composer, perhaps made a mistake by inviting the drama as well as the music critics to the Forty-sixth Street Theatre for Regina's opening night. Inevitably, the critics would compare this work to the original play, still very fresh in their memories. Brooks Atkinson tried to be supportive: "As theatre, this production of Regina could hardly be improved upon and must certainly rank with the most enlightened stage performances of operatic works.... Even Street Scene was not so thoroughly translated into the language of music." But in the end, he concluded-somewhat missing the point, as did other critics-it does not contribute "to the vitality of one of the theatre's keenest dramas. /13 The drama critics could not face the musical as a separate work with its own set of goals, and they couldn't understand Blitzstein's confounding of all the traditional typologies of stagecraft.

George Jean Nathan revealed his tired theatrical canons in his reflections on Regina, titled "An Old-Fashioned with Puccini for Me." First, be pointed correctly to one of Blitzstein's problems: his staunch and sometimes self-destructive resistance to going the tried-and-true commercial route. But then he took Blitzstein to task for even attempting something new:

There is about Blitzstein an obstreperous arbitrariness that discourages sympathy with his ambitions. He remarks, for instance, that "I wanted to find out how daring it would be to write a musical without one love theme or passage." It is less daring than gratuitous. It is an experiment only for experiment's sake and not with the merit of the experiment uppermost in mind. It is that way with Blitzstein's work in general. /14

The nerve! To deprive George Jean Nathan and all the theatregoers who followed his opinions of their precious love stories!

Still, in that long-gone world of New York media where dozens of reviewers had outlets for their opinions, a good number of sunny, quotable comments saw print: Robert Garland in the Journal-American called Regina "the only good American grand opera"; William Hawkins, in the World-Telegram, thought it "the most exciting musical theatre since Rosenkavalier." Time referred to "first-rate showmanship. . . , exhilarating and enjoyable." Marc's friend the columnist Leonard Lyons tried to put the best face on it, dubbing it a "smash hit." He even quoted Blitzstein as reading the more favorable reviews and saying, "At last-maybe I can make a buck." /15

The music reviewers who saw it turned in a mixed, if not in some cases spiteful judgment as well. Virgil Thomson, long famous for his motto, "Friendship ends at the stage door," wrote a poisonous notice in the Herald Tribune. There is "real operatic writing" in Regina, Thomson said, and be praised Jane Pickens for a "clarity of singing speech that is in every way admirable." But alas, the work was theatrical, "not very musical ... raucous in sound, coarse in texture, explosive, obstreperous and strident." The cast was "without musical distinction" and the orchestra "has a splintery sound. It doesn't blend, and it doesn't support. It either drowns the singers or disappears." /16 Blitzstein had looked to Thomson as to no other critic for an incisive review supportive of the new directions in opera that Regina pointed out. His friends tried to comfort him, saying that Thomson was only jealous lest anyone other than himself write the first truly great American opera. But Thomson had done his damage: Theatre parties canceled their tickets to the show on reading his blast.

Like Blitzstein, Thomson was friendly with Mina Curtiss, and he went to her somewhat contritely after writing his review. Curtiss felt personally hurt that Thomson should have allowed his own vanity to color his review. "You don't think," Thomson asked Curtiss about Regina, "that this may be so new and different that one's prejudices interfere with one's judging of it?"

Curtiss replied, "I'd think about that if I were you."

"He never mentioned it again," she wrote to John Houseman, "but it seems quite clear to me from the piece that I am enclosing where he curls up cozily with Rigoletto that his power has made him either conservative or reactionary. I don't know which." /17

In Musical America, Cecil Smith complained that Blitzstein left too many dramatic moments unscored. He seemed to resent whatever box office success Regina earned. People go because they understand it's "a good show, and not hard to take. From the point of view of commerce, this is no doubt very pleasant for both Mr. Blitzstein and his producers; but it is not profitable to his reputation as a serious composer." In short, be declared with some petulance, Regina is not "much of a contribution to the growth of American opera." /18

It took the Communist newspaper the Daily Worker more than a week to publish its review. Though signed by Barnard Rubin, it betrayed all the earmarks of having gone through a collective editorial process before reaching print. "Let us remember that this is the Time of the Toad period for American culture," Rubin said, enabling his readers to understand why they should not expect to find Regina the same hard-hitting "immediate, working class weapon" as The Cradle Will Rock. But since the fight against white chauvinism was the Communist Party's order of the day, he felt obliged to smear Blitzstein with a broad polemical brush. He cited several places in Hellman's play where the good characters' problack sentiments had not been set to music. According to Rubin, the composer had settled for a much watered-down indictment of Jim Crow.

Hellman had no Angel Band, of course. But Rubin considered Blitzstein's ragtime ensemble extraneous to the action, never organically tied in, and he felt Blitzstein made "patronizing use of their talents." It was as if an opera about the Deep South had to have a Negro band, "as if the audience was being told, 'Look how colorful, gay, childlike and cute these poor ragged fellows are.' This business is if nothing else certainly contradictory to everything Regina has to say."

And if this knuckle-rapping did not suffice to steer Communist theatregoers away from the Forty-sixth Street Theatre and thereby damage the show's chances for a long run, the reviewer summed up with a coda of left-banded (and ungrammatical) praise for the Party's most prominent musician: "To Marc Blitzstein goes the honor and distinction of now being this country's foremost operatic composer. May he use his great talents to go forward from Cradle and not backward from Regina. /19 The FBI clipped Rubin's review for its dossier on Blitzstein.

Though the opera had its social reverberations in 1949, they are built into the work for all time. Blitzstein eschewed the spirit of twenties and thirties Zeitoper, the Kleinkunst revue, the agitprop vehicle. Instead, he made a strong bid for permanence in the American operatic repertory. Rubin, and the Party behind him, had utterly failed to appreciate his aim.

Blitzstein had been unhappy with the Party of late. If in the past he gained from it moral support, ideological orientation, a sense of working for the future in concert with other progressive forces, by now he had come to regard it as only a drain on his resources, a hole into which he poured his energies. Party ignoramuses, who appreciated nothing of the advances in his technique and style, not to mention the considerable risks he was taking in his subject matter and point of view, took public pleasure in deprecating his work. Like Zhdanov in the Soviet Union who attacked Prokofiev, Shostakovich, and the other commanding heights of Russian music, the philistines had similarly gained control in the American party. To Blitzstein it seemed more and more that the only music they liked was the folk-based drivel that corresponded to Stalin's troglodyte taste. Why should he continue to subject himself to their depressing misguidance-and suffer the ever mounting political liabilities attendant to membership?

It is known that Blitzstein quit the Communist Party sometime in late 1949, though whether before or after Barnard Rubin trashed Regina is not clear. It would be convenient if we had his resignation letter dated the day Rubin's review appeared. More likely, his leaving the Party consisted of nothing more than discontinuing dues payments. In the midst of the Party's disarray, attacked from without and withered by recriminations from within-many of these coming from secret government agents-they may hardly have noticed Blitzstein's absence. Even most of his closest friends did not specifically know of his Party affiliation-in those days the wiser policy was not to know such things-and thus would not have known of his leaving. But the essential truth of the matter stands: He would no longer allow the Communist Party to strap him down to its lowest level of dated agitprop standards.

Blitzstein was hardly alone in leaving the Party at this time. From its height of sixty to eighty thousand members in the immediate postwar years while the memory of the Soviet-American alliance glowed brightly, the Party steadily declined to about forty-five thousand in 1949, and then ever more sharply down to ten thousand in 1957. Like many former comrades, however, Blitzstein did not give up his basic commitment to a just social order. Nor, when offered the opportunity, did he ever recant the views he so proudly hailed in earlier days. As he once signed off on a letter to Virgil Thomson, "Red but not dictated." At the same time, the Party press provided its readers with an occasional bit of news about Blitzstein's latest work.

CBS television's "Tonight on Broadway," sponsored by Esso Standard Oil, featured scenes from Regina filmed in live performance on its November 13 broadcast. Sir Cedric Hardwicke hosted the program, telling his viewers, "This fine play is replete with exciting scenes, colorful dances and an outstanding musical score.... You'll find it to be a memorable experience in playgoing."

So the composer Frank Loesser must have found it. Blitzstein attended the show many nights, and when he saw Loesser there for the fourth time, he couldn't resist asking him why. Loesser replied, "I'm studying."

Aaron Copland also attended. According to Leonard Lyons's column, he came out of the theatre so excited that when asked for his opinion, he declared, "With Regina, Mr. Blitzstone has created a milestein in the theatre." /20

Kurt Weill felt as anxious as anyone to write the first truly successful American opera. Perhaps, if one accepts that a single work can be so characterized, he had already written it in Street Scene. "What's wrong with Regina, it goes, goes, goes," he said to Abravanel before the conductor returned to Utah. From time to time it should stop, come to a plateau, and reflect, then build again-which, in reality, the opera does, even with the "Blues" gone. Weill was just acting typically superior.

While Regina continued to play at the Forty-sixth Street Theatre-and while Blitzstein nursed a broken toe caused by a dropped log-the New York City Ballet revived The Guests for four performances during its fall season. Robbins reworked the choreography to some extent and played the role of the host himself. Walter Terry returned to see it and declared it "thematically elegant and choreographically stunning, a work of real stature ... a fine composition and its central Pas de Deux is a miracle of beauty." John Martin in the Times recalled the work as not all that impressive when it was done originally, but with Robbins's changes, "what emerges now is a taut and brilliant theatre work with a style all its own.... The whole thing is crisp and clean and telling. Mr. Blitzstein's music has both bite and beauty, and manages to convey with a curious poignance the awareness of a sick society. There is nothing polemic about either music or action." /21

Jane Pickens received New York University's annual award at an All-University Ball at the Waldorf-Astoria in late November for her achievements in the entertainment field, notably in Regina. And she appeared as Regina in a Lux soap advertisement in The New Yorker. But after the first month of the run, the theatre parties began to drop off. Failure at the box office threatened not only the future of Blitzstein's opera but of almost any bold new stride on Broadway. Attempting to stave off an early closing, twelve leading theatre men took out an ad in the December 13 Times. "We Saw Regina," they headed it, lauding the show. The signers hoped that a hesitant public might be drawn in by the strength of their names: Leonard Bernstein, Moss Hart, Jerome Chodorov, George Jessel, Clifford Odets, Michael Kidd, Cole Porter, Jerome Robbins, Harold Rome, Michael Todd, Tennessee Williams, and Dwight Deere Wiman. But the box office didn't respond.

Toward the end, pickets from unknown quarters appeared under the marquee with signs reading, "REGINA MUST NOT CLOSE," "SAVE THE SHOW," and "REGINA HAS BEEN STABBED-SAVE HER." To no avail. Reluctantly, after fifty-six performances, Cheryl Crawford had to close on December 17. Though she felt disappointed, fifty-six performances are not, in retrospect, all that shameful a record for an opera on Broadway.

As a further disappointment, especially to Blitzstein, who had been a pioneer in the field, no one wanted to issue a cast recording. After Regina closed, despairing that no aural document of the opera would be preserved for the future, Crawford gathered one hundred dollars each from her backers to produce a recording. But the musicians' union insisted on exorbitant fees, and further objected that Crawford could not guarantee that no one would try to issue the recording as a commercial release. So the composer asked several of his soloists to go to a Carnegie Hall studio. They stood around a piano and, with Blitzstein accompanying, recorded five excerpts: Birdie's "Lionnet," Zan's "What Will It Be?," Regina's "The Best Thing of All," the Rain Quartet, and the finale between Zan and Regina, with the other singers filling in for the "Certainly, Lord" chorus.

"Though I am not much on fan letters," the New York Times critic John Martin wrote to the producer after attending the final matinee, "I cannot help writing you this one about Regina":

I have seen a great many theatres in a great many languages over the past forty years or so, but I have rarely been so completely shattered by a performance. What Blitzstein has done is to give us a theatre of our own with heroic dimensions for perhaps the first time. I have never heard music made so integral an element in the total art of the theatre, so boldly used to heighten and create theatrical values. His figures emerge in larger-than-life proportions in a situation that, for all its specific localization, takes on universal compulsions. It is difficult not to make some comparisons with those suspect creatures, the old Greeks. /22

The closing seemed proof to Lillian Hellman that no one could add anything to her play without detracting from its power. Ever the master of the imagined slight, she took rimy umbrage at Blitzstein's fleshing out her story with all the black musical subplotting. Much to Blitzstein's bewilderment, for a long time thereafter she would not speak to him.

Arthur Pollock was only one of the critics who lamented Regina's passing. It was "a failure, so to speak, but one of the most important failures the theater has been blessed with in who knows how long. The theater will be helped to live hereafter because of it." Oscar Hammerstein and Richard Rodgers agreed: "The superb and expressive music of Mr. Blitzstein is a landmark in our development. /23

Within a month, Gian Carlo Menotti's opera The Consul went into rehearsal for its Broadway run at the Ethel Barrymore. Blitzstein could not help feeling that his morally uplifting and ultimately optimistic Regina had helped pave the way for Menotti's depressing Cold War vehicle-the Soviets would have called it "formalist"-that went on to win the New York Drama Critics Award and a Pulitzer Prize. Suddenly the critics began talking about Menotti as the present-day Puccini, though Blitzstein, for one, never subscribed to that judgment. As he said to the critic Paul Moor, "At the outside, a present-day Wolf-Ferrari."

It's not so much that Blitzstein begrudged a fellow composer his success. But Menotti was still in his thirties, and in March Blitzstein would turn forty-five-the age by which Siloti had predicted he would be a mature composer. He had just invested more than three years' work on a show that ran seven weeks. Would he soon be over the hill and never have been on top? It looked as though Blitzstein would soon retreat to his artist's garret, far from the gleam of Broadway lights, within reach of fame but not in touch.

Shortly after Regina's closing, Moor wrote that "a kind of 'Regina Underground' has come into being: indignation over its early demise is bitter, and there are many prophecies that a revival in the not too distant future will prove to the general public bow wrong they were the first time." In view of just such a prospect, Cheryl Crawford stored the sets and costumes in Clinton Wilder's barn. Impatient with the Broadway audience, she told the press, "I am stubborn enough to keep on giving them more of the same until everybody learns to like it, or I croak!" /24

For years after Regina closed, frequent inquiries about possible productions came from theatres and opera houses in Europe. Blitzstein or his agents dutifully sent copies of the score and the libretto to producers and theatrical intendants, the accompanying letters full of thoughts about translations into German or Italian, but of all these nibbles nothing came to pass. Fortunately for his mental well-being, Blitzstein had already conceived his next two projects.

Eric A. Gordon's book, Mark the Music, The Life and Work of Marc Blitzstein is the definitive biography of Blitzstein and would be indispensable for anyone with an interest in its subject. First-printing copies of the book may be obtained directly from Eric by contacting him at ericarthur@aol.com.

Footnotes

1. Cheryl Crawford, One Naked Individual: My Fifty Years in the Theatre (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1977), p. 173.
   
2. Lillian Hellman to MB, September 8, 1948.
   
3. MB to Shirley Bernstein, March 7, 1949; courtesy of Leonard Bernstein.
   
4. D. Rabinovoch, Dmitry Shostakovich, Composer (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1959), p. 115.
   
5. MB to William Hewitt, March 31, 1949; courtesy of William Hewitt.
   
6. Earl Wilson, Wheeling (West Virginia) News Register, November 23, 1949.
   
7. Papers of Lina Abarbanell, Theatre Division, The New York Public Library.
   
8. MB to Serge Koussevitzky, June 10 and 23, 1949, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
   
9. Peggy Doyle, The American; Elinor Hughes, Boston Herald, both October 12, 1949.
   
10. Elinor Hughes, Sunday Herald, October 16, 1949.
    
11. Lillian Hellman, quoted in "Hellman Week on Broadway," Cue, October 1, 1949, pp. 14-15.
    
12. Leonard Bernstein, The New York Times, October 30, 1949.
    
13. Brooks Atkinson, The New York Times, November 1, 1949.
    
14. George Jean Nathan, New York Journal-American, November 14, 1949.
    
15. Robert Garland, New York Journal-American; William Hawkins, World-Telegram, both November 1, 1949; Time, November 14, 1949; Leonard Lyons, New York Post, November 2, 1949.
    
16. Virgil Thomson, Herald Tribune, November 1, 1949.
    
17. This letter to Houseman probably dates from mid-November 1949. It may indeed never have been sent, as the original was included in a packet of Blitzstein's letters to Curtiss that Curtiss returned to Blitzstein's family years after his death.
    
18. Cecil Smith, "Regina-Yet Another Opera on Broadway," Musical America, December 1, 1949, p. 9.
    
19. Barnard Rubin, Daily Worker, November 8, 1949.
    
20. Quoted in Leonard Lyons, New York Post, December 12, 1949.
    
21. Walter Terry, Herald Tribune; John Martin, The New York Times, both November 26, 1949.
    
22. Quoted in Cheryl Crawford, One Naked Individual, p. 174.
    
23. Arthur Pollock, The Daily Compass, January 5, 1950; Oscar Hammerstein and Richard Rodgers, The New York Times, January 1, 1950.
    
24. Paul Moor, "Tradition of Turbulence," Theatre Arts (March 1950): 36-38; Crawford, quoted in Lewis Funke, The New York Times, December 25, 1949.