By Stephen Thornton<\/p>\n
On stage at Bridgeport\u2019s Park Theater in the fall of 1944 stood \u201cRepublico, The Little Mechanical Man.\u201d \u00a0He was an empty-headed dummy that the stage barker described as \u201chandy, dandy, and works like a whiz.\u201d \u00a0With his slick hair and neat mustache, the figure looked a lot like Thomas E. Dewey, Franklin Roosevelt\u2019s competitor in the presidential race. \u00a0\u201cHe will not break, chip, or take action on any controversial subject,\u201d the barker promised, and the audience erupted with laughter.\u00a0 The satire hit home with these FDR supporters.October 7th was the premiere performance of the \u201cRoosevelt Bandwagon.\u201d This 17- act stage revue was backed by unions and organized by actor Will Geer (best known as Grandpa Walton), who had a summer home in nearby Nichols, Connecticut. \u201cRepublico\u201d and the musical production traveled to 24 cities from Omaha to Boston.\u00a0 They met with enthusiastic crowds and some controversy; one sketch was banned in Providence RI.<\/p>\n
Featured in the production was Mary Lou Williams, the \u201cfirst lady of jazz keyboard.\u201d \u00a0Williams, an African American, was a child prodigy raised in Pittsburgh. She wrote tunes exclusively for the show, including \u201cBallot Box Boogie in the Key of Franklin D.\u201d \u00a0Woody Guthrie and Cisco Houston also performed for the revue.<\/p>\n
Bridgeport has been called \u201can industrial fortress,\u201d but the city has a lesser-known distinction as well.\u00a0 Theater, literature and film have flourished here, born from the workplace struggles of everyday men and women.\u00a0 Call it Theater for the 99%, the dramatization of working class life.<\/p>\n
Worker-oriented theater dates back at least to 1910, when Bridgeport residents Ben Legere and Matilda Rabinowitz staged a production of Ibsen\u2019s The Master Builder<\/em>.\u00a0 The play featured the trials of a wealthy architect, but Ibsen was very popular among those who rejected high society entertainment.\u00a0 Legere and Rabinowitz would soon become union organizers for the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), the radical labor organization that used song and theater to great advantage in the early 20th century.<\/p>\n In 1936, the groundbreaking Group Theater was spending the summer in suburban Nichols.\u00a0 Their production of Waiting for Lefty <\/em>by Clifford Odets was banned by officials in Bridgeport, despite a very successful debut in New York. \u00a0Lefty<\/em> is a series of vignettes told by unionized taxi drivers who are anticipating the arrival of their leader. Each man has faced a moral dilemma, sparked by economic or political factors that have brought them together in the taxi cab union hall. To show the absurdity of the ban, the Bridgeport Sunday Herald<\/em> reprinted the entire play in its pages.<\/p>\n The Federal Theater Project, created by Roosevelt\u2019s New Deal, provided jobs and popular entertainment during the Great Depression. Many of the plays focused on the social problems of the day.\u00a0 Writer Upton Sinclair\u2019s dramatization of his novel It Can’t Happen Her<\/em>e played simultaneously in Hartford and Bridgeport.\u00a0 The plot focuses on the possibility of fascism taking hold in this country in a distinctly American form.\u00a0 The cast included local Bridgeport actors and stagehands who depended on the government project to earn a living.<\/p>\n Macbeth<\/em> (\u201cthe Scottish play\u201d) is one of Shakespeare’s best-known works.\u00a0 In the hands of 21-year old Orson Welles, the daring production was, as a New York Times<\/em> critic wrote, a drama that \u201coverwhelms you with its fury and its phantom splendor.\u201d \u00a0Welles employed an all-African American cast, and moved the action from Scotland to Haiti. Macbeth<\/em> played in only a handful of cities, including Bridgeport in July, 1936.<\/p>\n Not every stage show was dramatic.\u00a0 The musical Pin and Needles<\/em> opened in New York in 1937.\u00a0 This highly successful comedy reflected the real-life experiences of garment workers.\u00a0 It evolved from a union hall cabaret to a full-fledged theater production that toured nationally.\u00a0 In January, 1938, the Park Theater provided Bridgeport\u2019s working families with this uplifting, pro-union (and romantic) hit show.<\/p>\n During World War II, the new union federation known as the CIO (Congress of Industrial Organizations) mounted a Broadway-style musical Marching With Johnny<\/em>. It ran at Bridgeport\u2019s Klein Memorial Hall in December, 1943.\u00a0 Although the production only lasted two months, it was unique for promoting the idea of cooperation between men and women war workers, in contrast to the common divisive rivalry that prevailed at the time.\u00a0 The musical also featured a song entitled \u201cCrispus Attucks,\u201d which told the story of the African American Revolutionary War martyr.<\/p>\n After the war, military production began to disappear in Bridgeport.\u00a0 So did plays that reflected working class life. Critics and opinion makers sneered at \u201cproletarian theater.\u201d \u00a0We were all middle class consumers now, and our biggest struggles were supposed to be which home appliances to buy.<\/p>\n Sources<\/u><\/p>\n Billboard Magazine, December 4, 1943 By Stephen Thornton On stage at Bridgeport\u2019s Park Theater in the fall of 1944 stood \u201cRepublico, The Little Mechanical Man.\u201d \u00a0He was an empty-headed dummy that the stage barker described as \u201chandy, dandy, and works like a whiz.\u201d \u00a0With his slick hair and neat mustache, the figure looked a lot like Thomas E. Dewey, Franklin […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":11833,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[4,18,23,37,58],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11323","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-african-american-heritage","category-entertainment","category-featured","category-labor","category-theaters"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bportlibrary.org\/hc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11323","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bportlibrary.org\/hc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bportlibrary.org\/hc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bportlibrary.org\/hc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/18"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bportlibrary.org\/hc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11323"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/bportlibrary.org\/hc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11323\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12020,"href":"https:\/\/bportlibrary.org\/hc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11323\/revisions\/12020"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bportlibrary.org\/hc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11833"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bportlibrary.org\/hc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11323"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bportlibrary.org\/hc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11323"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bportlibrary.org\/hc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11323"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nLibrary of Congress, American Memory
\nThe Pittsburgh Press, October 4, 1944
\nWoody Guthrie, America’s Folksinger, Karen M Coombs, Twenty First Century Press
\nLife Magazine, October 23, 1944
\nCensorship: A World Encyclopedia, Derek Jones, ed., Routledge Press<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"