Undaunted, Welles and his partners huddled in the ladies' room of the Maxine Elliott, determined that the play would go on, even if Blitzstein performed it solo. Welles dispatched an assistant to begin a hectic search for a piano, while he and Houseman tried to find another theater. The assistant found a piano and a truck to haul it–but no one knew where to bring it. The new venue was still in doubt when the audience began arriving at the theater around 7:00 p.m. At about 7:20, some of the actors began performing scenes on the sidewalk while the truck bearing the piano circled the block, and Howard da Silva made one last attempt to get inside the theater. 'I made a big fuss, threatened to storm the barrier single-handedly, principally because my new toupee was in my dressing room and I loved it,' he said. Finally, a theatrical agent offered the vacant Venice Theater, which was 21 blocks uptown and rentable for a mere $100. The truck was dispatched northward, and the crew went outside to announce that the show–or some version of it–would go on after all, just in a different location.

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Then commenced one of the most celebrated episodes in Broadway history as the audience, cast, and crew rambled uptown by public transportation, taxi, and on foot, offering free seats in the larger new venue to bystanders who joined the throng. By the time everyone arrived at Seventh Avenue and 59th Street, the mood in the packed theater was euphoric. Blitzstein set to work removing the front of the piano so it would better project in the large theater, and lighting director Abe Feder hurriedly set up a spotlight. Just after 9:00, 'like partners in a vaudeville act,' Houseman and Welles took the stage to introduce the play.

'I could hear an enormous buzz of talk in the theater and when the curtains opened and I looked, I saw the place was jammed to the rafters,' Blitzstein recalled. 'The side aisles were lined with cameramen and recorders. And there was I, alone on a bare stage, perched before the naked piano in my shirt sleeves, it being a hot night; myself, produced by John Houseman, directed by Orson Welles, lit by Abe Feder, and conducted by Lehman Engel, who had rushed home, got his winter overcoat, and returned to smuggle my orchestra score out of one theater and into another.' It appeared that Blitzstein alone would be the entire show, as he had been at that dinner party.

Yet when the composer began to sing the first song, the Moll's weary and touching 'I'm Checkin' Home Now,' a startling thing happened. The voice of Olive Stanton, cast as the Moll, soared out from the audience. 'It was almost impossible, at this distance in time, to convey the throat-catching, sickeningly exciting quality of that moment,' Houseman wrote years later. The cast had reasoned that Actors Equity had barred them from performing on stage. Nothing prevented them from performing from the seats! As one participant put it later, 'There was no audience. There was instead a roomful of men and women as eager in the play as any actor. As singers rose in one part and another of the auditorium, the faces of these men and women made new and changing circles around them.'

The night was a triumph.

Released by the FTP and now a full-fledged commercial production free of any WPA interference, The Cradle Will Rock played for two sold-out weeks at the Venice. It then went on tour and returned to Broadway for another successful run in 1938, when it became the first original-cast musical in Broadway history to be recorded virtually in its entirety.

By the time Cradle was put on record, the FTP had achieved many successes, with its performers appearing in churches, tents, mission schools, old soldiers' homes, hospitals, public parks, university halls–even on showboats. It staged the plays of Shaw, O'Neill, and Shakespeare, as well as operettas and productions for children such as Jack and the Beanstalk and Pinocchio. The 'Living Newspaper' probed such contemporary issues as the electrical industry (Power), slum life (One-Third of a Nation), Oregon flax growers (Flax), and the search for a syphilis cure (Spirochete). Out-of-work vaudevillians had staged variety shows, circuses had appeared in armories, and marionette plays had delighted children and adults. The FTP's most successful project by far was the Swing Mikado, a jazzed-up version of the Gilbert and Sullivan warhorse that premiered in Chicago in September 1938. In fact, the FTP was too good. It so successfully competed with the commercial theater that many politicians questioned why the government was subsidizing something that could clearly stand on its own.

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