The backstage story of The Cradle Will Rock, most recently the subject of a 1999 Tim Robbins film, is told again in Canadian playwright Jason Sherman’s It’s All True, which debuted the same year. (The most famous recounting is in producer John Houseman’s 1972 memoir Run-Through.) Though it is typical to dismiss American composer and Threepenny Opera adapter Marc Blitzstein’s workers’ musical as poor man’s Brecht/Weill, the story of its triumph over government suppression is the stuff of theater legend. Shut down before it opened by the sponsoring Federal Theatre Project, the production was transferred to an unused theater, with director Orson Welles, then 22, marching an opening-night audience 1700 strong 20 blocks to the new venue. The musical was performed on a bare stage, with Blitzstein at the piano and the performers, forbidden by Actors’ Equity from taking part, rising from their seats in the audience to speak and sing.

It’s All True begins at full steam, with Blitzstein, Welles, and Houseman squabbling in the immediate wake of the shutdown, as " fascist " government guards confiscate scenery, costumes, even star Howard Da Silva’s wig. Indeed, part of Sherman’s mission seems to be to highlight, in flashback, the various forms of divisiveness that preceded the dramatic show of solidarity — by participants and audience — that allowed The Cradle Will Rock to go on as scheduled, albeit sans scenery, costumes, orchestra, and WPA sanction. Welles and Blitzstein disagree about production values and casting. Welles and Houseman quarrel over control. Da Silva locks horns with egotistical careerist Welles, who is bent on turning Blitzstein’s socialist opera into a spectacular with scenery on wagons and a stage that literally rocks. Da Silva also berates Houseman for refusing to protest WPA cuts. And Blitzstein, haunted by his dead Marxist wife, fights his homosexual demons.

But It’s All True, though it tells a fascinating story, is not a very good play. It’s not intended as docudrama. Sherman tells the story, even mines it for an argument about whether the " magic " of Welles’s bells and whistles has anything to do with the true essence of theater. But the playwright blows up personal storms for most of the characters. He even attributes Brecht’s advice to Blitzstein about the play — that " to literal prostitution you must add figurative prostitution " — to the composer’s deceased wife, making her the " Gipper " for which the thing ultimately must be done. And, for a play chronicling the birth of one that eschewed sentiment, It’s All True leans toward melodramatics — and not just in Blitzstein’s tête-à-têtes with dead or dying wife Eva. There is also the unfaithful Welles’s fraying marriage to rich, drunk, neglected wife Virginia and Welles and Blitzstein’s conspiracy to end Da Silva’s affair with fellow actor Olive Stanton, so that heartbreak will finally teach her to sing the streetwalker’s song with the appropriate tough dissonance.

A lot of the play is written in staccato dialogue reminiscent of the tart films of the ’30s. Still, the overblown angst of the play’s ghost-ridden Blitzstein and Welles can be embarrassing. Following an anonymous man into an alleyway, Blitzstein announces his desire to " submit to the working man, " choosing " muscle, stink, danger " over sentiment. And mama’s boy Welles announces, " I’m just another fucked-up artist who doesn’t know how to love women. "

Not surprisingly, director Spiro Veloudos, no fan of subtlety, plays into, rather than against, the play’s excesses. Under his tutelage, Geoffrey P. Burns’s aptly dark and stocky, if insufficiently young, Welles proves a major glowerer. Christopher Chew is comparatively low-key as Blitzstein (and he can sing). Robert Saoud, as the Hungarian-born, English-educated Houseman, seems straitjacketed by his accent. Neil A. Casey is a barking, slightly sleazy Da Silva. Julie Jirousek and Jennifer Valentine double and triple as the women characters, among whom only Olive — no diva or politico but a Brooklyn girl trying to feed her kids — hovers above stereotype, and Jirousek (who can also sing, though Olive can’t) makes her appealing.

In 1999, the American Century Theater, near Washington, DC, revived The Cradle Will Rock, giving Sherman’s play several performances in conjunction with the production. The cartoonish rabble-rousing of Blitzstein’s union musical has, by most reports, not held up well. But the snippets of its score, rendered to piped-in piano in It’s All True, made me wish the Lyric, too, had opted to rock The Cradle rather than just talk about it.