She Works Hard for the Money

In October 1938, rehearsals for the musical revue Sing for Your Supper had been dragging on for six months, with no end in sight. A production of the Federal Theatre Project, it was to be the program’s first big singing-and-dancing extravaganza to debut in New York City, home of the musical. It featured original skits about regular folks forging their way through troubled times, as well as satire, patriotic songs penned by FTP staffers, and a few rousing numbers lifted from Broadway. But the production was plagued with problems.

First, there was the cast: after enlisting over 100 actors from the WPA ranks, it was discovered that there were “no tap dancers, torch singers, or what-it-takes for a musical comedy among them,” according to a New York Times feature from that October detailing the troubled production. Then there was the rehearsal space: the cast could barely hear directions shouted over the sound of set-building and hammering. So they moved venues—three times. Speaking anonymously, one cast member told the Times that a “baker’s dozen” of the company had broken out in nervous shingles; two had suffered breakdowns. “Not over the plots of the sketches,” the writer noted with barely concealed glee, “but over the fate of the seemingly forgotten opus.”

These stories were devoured with gusto by critics of Hallie Flanagan, the director of the FTP. To theater elites, she was a nobody—an academic with little background in commercial productions, and a woman to boot. Flanagan had a bachelor’s from Grinnell College, a master’s from Radcliffe, and was hired by Vassar in 1925 to start an experimental-theater program. She was a year into her Vassar job when she became the first woman to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship, which she used to study theater in Europe. These accomplishments were enough to earn her the FTP appointment in 1935, but not enough to impress the male theater establishment. Who was this woman who had been entrusted with millions of federal dollars to organize and direct a national theater program? One 1935 headline told it bluntly: “Theatre Men Fear Effect of Mrs. Hallie Flanagan’s Proposal.”

From the minute the FTP began in 1935, New York theater heavyweights had voiced concerns that its shows wouldn’t match the quality of Broadway productions, and would even discourage the public from attending the theater. Their fear was founded, to some degree: the FTP produced an extremely wide range of projects, including puppet shows, foreign-language plays, radio shows, and “living newspapers,” dramatized news stories that conveyed information about everything from unionizing efforts to the threat of syphilis. But it also mounted complicated theatrical dramas and comedies, some with large casts on par with Broadway’s. By 1938, Flanagan felt the FTP was ready to mount a musical in New York.

Sing for Your Supper borrowed its eponymous opening song from the 1938 Richard Rodgers’s musical The Boys from Syracuse, a farcical romance about mistaken identities based on Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors. Perform a service and you’ll earn a reward, the song says, although it may just be a simple meal. Such a sentiment suited the production’s mission of speaking to an audience which had fallen on hard times. (The musical also featured the show-stopping original number “Papa’s Got a Job”—in which an evicted family celebrates when the father finds work—featuring most of the nearly 200 cast members.)

Sing for Your Supper finally opened at the Adelphi Theatre in New York on April 24, 1939, over a year after rehearsals began, to mixed reviews. Brooks Atkinson, the city’s reigning theater critic, gave the show a mixed review in the New York Times, praising “Papa's Got a Job” as “modern theatre at its best” but ultimately deciding that “much of the material is third-rate stuff with songs that are frequently lost in the tumult of a noisy orchestra and to lyrics that can hardly be heard.” The student reviewer sent by Columbia University was kinder, writing in the Columbia Daily Spectator that “Uncle Sam’s children have done right well by themselves in this sprightly [sic] musical. The tunes are good and most of the skits are funny … What they lack in finish, they make up in enthusiasm.”

Despite critical ambivalence, Sing for Your Supper “was playing to large audiences who got up every night and cheered,” as Flanagan wrote in her 1940 book Arena: The History of the Federal Theatre. Patriotic songs and crowds did little to protect Flanagan and the FTP, however: both were coming under increasing scrutiny from the House Un-American Activities Committee, convened by the US government to weed out alleged subversives in both public and private institutions. Flanagan and the FTP were accused of having Communist sympathies—and Sing for Your Supper, “sprightly” though it may have been, was offered up by HUAC members as an example of waste and mismanagement. The critics prevailed; Congress passed legislation that ended the program on June 30, 1939. Just two months after opening, Sing for Your Supper gave its last performance that night.