However, because of union regulations, the actors cannot appear on stage and the musicians cannot perform. So Marc Blitzstein, from his piano on stage, starts playing, reading off the stage directions and singing all the parts. Then, from the audience, the actors, one after another, get up to perform their parts. The intentions here are good, but the results, unfortunately, are heavy-handed. At times the action seems to take place only to make a political point.
Many characters are flat creations, and too often buffoons.
Vanessa Redgrave, in a remarkably silly role, plays the steel industrialist Mathers' dilettante wife. She toys with theater and the left, and ends up helping stage the production of Cradle and cheering it from the audience rather than going to a costume ball. The costume ball itself, toward the end of the film, underlines the obviousness of the writing and direction. The industrialists are dressed as bewigged aristocrats of pre-revolutionary France, with Hearst as Cardinal Richelieu. They are celebrating the destruction of the Rivera mural, the offensive against the steel workers, and the trouncing of the Federal Theater Project.