‘Show Boat’ at 95

Exactly 95 years ago today, on December 27, 1927, the worlds of music and theater collided, and both were changed permanently. “Show Boat” did almost everything very differently from any work previously presented on the stage anywhere, and its breakthroughs are traditionally discussed in terms of three achievements. First, it told what was then described as a “serious” story — like most musicals of the period, there was frivolity and fun and plenty of humor, but undergirding the production was a genuine, truly epic drama, wholly different from the sort attempted even in opera or operetta.Second, it used singing, dancing, and instrumental music as a means of telling that story, of delineating characters, of establishing a particular time and a very specific place. Third, more than even most non-musical dramas of the period, “Show Boat” raised a flag for civil rights, for racial integration, for social justice, and even for what we would refer to today as issues of marriage equality.When “Show Boat” had its premiere on that Tuesday evening in the Ziegfeld Theater on West 54th Street, it was clear something entirely new had been created. Modern musical theater was born, and so was a classic show. “Show Boat” was an especially unusual baby in that it had four major essential parents, one lady and three gentlemen, all of whom left an indelible imprint on the new arrival.First among those creators was Edna Ferber, who wrote the sprawling original novel of three generations of an American family — with the focus on three remarkable American women — working in show business, both on the Mississippi River and on dry land.Then there was composer Jerome Kern, who read that book shortly after it was published, when it was heading for the best-seller list, and realized it would make a great basis for a musical theater work of some kind — no one really knew what kind of stage piece it would be, since the form it eventually took had not yet been invented.Then too, “Show Boat” could not have been created without producer Florenz Ziegfeld, who was the only showman of his day with the vision to allow the work to have the kind of creative scope that the story demanded.It was Oscar Hammerstein II who did virtually everything else: he adapted the libretto from Ferber’s book, in the process heightening the drama and condensing the multi-generational sprawl to make it more or less containable in a single evening’s entertainment. He also wrote the lyrics to nearly three-dozen songs heard in different permutations of the work’s evolution, of which “Ol’ Man River” is merely the most famous today. Lastly, Hammerstein, credited under a pseudonym, actually directed the work: He pretty much had to, as no other creator could have even fathomed what a production like this actually meant and how it would work. Between the four of them, as historian Ethan Mordden has written, they proved that a musical “might well be something that hadn’t been tried before. Even: a musical should be.”“Show Boat” was the longest-running musical comedy of the 1920s, and surely no other work has been revived, recorded, and filmed as often. The first movie version, a part-silent film, came out in 1929, and Ziegfeld produced the first revival only a few months before his death. That revival also inspired one of the earliest album-length recordings of a Broadway show. James Whale directed the definitive film version in 1936, which, among other things, preserved the classic performances of Paul Robeson as Joe (singing the ultimate Broadway protest song, “Ol’ Man River”) and Helen Morgan as “Julie” (singing the ultimate Broadway torch song, “Bill”). Since then there have been other full-scale revivals, notably helmed by Hammerstein himself in 1946 and Hal Prince in 1994. There also was a splendiferous 1951 technicolor remake produced by Arthur Freed, which suffers greatly in comparison to the 1936 film (except in the performances by William Warfield, Marge and Gower Champion, and especially by the leading man, baritone Howard Keel) but nonetheless is the version that most of us first saw and is the reason why we love “Show Boat.”Miles Kreuger, in his excellent chronicle, “Show Boat: The Story of a Classic American Musical” (published at the time of the 50th anniversary), observes, “The history of the American musical theater, quite simply, is divided into two eras — everything before ‘Show Boat’ and after ‘Show Boat.’” It’s true, even though it took about 15 years for Broadway to catch up with it. It’s hard to imagine that there could have ever been a “Porgy and Bess,” an “Oklahoma,” a “My Fair Lady,” a “Sweeney Todd” or even a “Hamilton” without it. Ninety-five years after the opening, It’s the racial element of “Show Boat” that attracts the most discussion today. The text is generally cleaned up to a degree for modern audiences; indeed, the show opens with the n-word, which Hammerstein drops like a literal n-bomb, trying to shock its mostly white audiences and awaken them to the plight of suppressed African American laborers in the deep south, enslaved in everything but title, at the end of the 19th century.Somehow the creators cast a blackface entertainer, singer Tess “Aunt Jemima” Gardella, in the most prominent Afro American female role, something that would never be acceptable by contemporary audiences. Yet if “Show Boat” has anything to say to us today, it’s that segregation is bad for people and even worse for entire countries; that racial prejudice hurts everyone well beyond its intended victims; and that love is love. Hammerstein, Kern, Ferber, and Ziegfeld knew this in 1927, and the rest of the world is still catching up with it today.Mr. Friedwald on December 27 appears in a webinar titled “’Show Boat: Analyzing the Broadway Musical That Changed Everything.” For more information, please go here.

‘Show Boat’ at 95

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