Few musicals have as much to say, and as much that could be said about them, as “Show Boat.”
First performed in 1927, Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II’s work is a pioneering tale of romance, race and American culture at a turning point. Somewhere between operetta and popular entertainment, it helped to made musical theater a serious art form, weaving drama and song in a way that Hammerstein would carry on and master with Richard Rodgers in shows like “Oklahoma!” and “Carousel.” And it did so while breaking barriers not only of form, but also of social convention.
Still, “Show Boat” traded in blackface performance and other types of casual racism that have long been discomfiting, and a source of controversy. This can be difficult to reconcile with the progress for Black artists that the musical provided, and with the idea it offered audiences: Its story, spanning several decades from the Reconstruction-era South to the rapidly modernizing North, was told through music, quietly arguing along the way that the history of American music was the history of America itself.
These complications are just a few reasons that “Show Boat” has endured. It was quickly revived after its first run, adapted into multiple films, and has appeared on New York and global stages every decade since. The latest revival, by Target Margin Theater, called “Show/Boat: A River,” opens on Thursday at NYU Skirball, in partnership with the Under the Radar festival.
As the title suggests, this will not be an old-fashioned “Show Boat.” While retaining the skeleton of the original musical at a smaller scale, “Show/Boat: A River” aims to reimagine it for the here and now.
In a way, there could be no more traditional way to approach “Show Boat,” which has been “reimagined” in pretty much every iteration since it opened on Broadway. If “Show Boat” is, as Rodgers described it, “the first truly American theater music,” it is also the most unstable musical. Some changes over the years have been dramaturgical, and some political, but all have been motivated by the belief that “Show Boat” is worth reviving not just for some good tunes, but because it has always, and may always, have something important to say.
KERN WAS STILL READING Edna Ferber’s 1926 novel, “Show Boat,” when he knew he wanted to adapt it for the stage. Its setting and plot, about generations of performers from a family that runs a Mississippi River show boat, lent itself to musical theater, he thought. And, as he told Hammerstein, it had “a million-dollar title.”
Ferber was a populist author with a feminist bent, but she didn’t consider “Show Boat” a serious work. Kern and Hammerstein, though, elevated the material. Where the novel viewed race with passive indifference, the musical faced it head-on, building out peripheral Black characters and opening with a Black chorus, followed in the same scene by a white one, integrating what was typically kept on separate stages.
“Show Boat” also elevated the musical as an art form. To tell the novel’s story of multiple generations and locales, of romance and tragedy, it had to work as a proper drama, more like an opera than the more lighthearted, lightly plotted musicals that reigned on Broadway. Neither Kern nor Hammerstein had ever written something so ambitious.
The musical brought out some of the finest work from both: wit, bite and heartbreak in the libretto, and infectious melodies, cinematic underscoring and operatic sophistication in the score. Each decade of the story is indicated through musical signposts like spirituals and parlor songs in the 19th century, and an interpolation of George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” in the 1920s.
Because music is so central to the plot, Kern and Hammerstein also wrote crucial diegetic songs. In the first act Julie, the show boat’s prima donna, sings “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man,” which Queenie, the Black cook, interrupts by saying, “How come y’all know that song?” She has only heard “colored people” sing it before, she says, a revelation that presages Julie being unmasked as mixed race.
In Act II, years later, Magnolia, who is white and like a little sister to Julie, auditions with “Can’t Help” at a theater in Chicago. It turns out Julie is the star there, and she abruptly quits to make room for Magnolia. Magnolia then becomes a star, as if to embody the idea of Black culture being taken up (or taken over) by white entertainers, which is what happened with popular music in the early 20th century and continues to this day.
Kern signified the seriousness of this subject matter with a grand, dramatic A-minor chord in the Overture. Even more of a jolt, in the original Broadway run, was Hammerstein’s lyric for the opening chorus, in which audiences heard Black singers identify themselves with the most severe racial epithet. (In revivals, that word was changed to “darkies,” “colored folk” and, benignly, “we all.”)
Although there are offensive tropes in “Show Boat,” Hammerstein’s attitude was more nuanced, and progressive. The musical also contains advocacy on behalf of Queenie, for example, who is given a scene in which she is made to suffer, with seasoned cool, the indignity of a white man questioning where she got a brooch that Julie gave to her. And the musical’s biggest hit, “Ol’ Man River,” is reserved for Joe, the other principal Black character.
“Ol’ Man River,” more than the hit of this musical, is one of the greatest show tunes, period. Kern wrote it specifically for the beloved bass-baritone Paul Robeson, inspired by what he called the “organ-like” tone of Robeson’s voice. Hammerstein described his lyric, which reflects on the forgotten lives of lowly people, as “a song of resignation with protest implied.” Robeson, who was unavailable for the Broadway premiere but played Joe onstage and onscreen for nearly a decade afterward, had a relationship with the song that was ambivalent at best. He later made changes that transformed it into folk music of defiance.
“Show Boat” was, ultimately, a product of its time. Its first Queenie was Tess Gardella, an Italian American performer known for her blackface stage persona, Aunt Jemima. (The scholar Todd Decker wrote in “Show Boat: Performing Race in an American Musical” that this was “no cause for embarrassment in the late 1920s.”) Racial slurs and offensive dialect were used liberally. And the World’s Fair scene in Act II included the human zoo number “In Dahomey,” which adds nothing to the plot and was written in a pseudo-African style.
ALMOST IMMEDIATELY, Kern and Hammerstein began to revise “Show Boat.” The next run was in London, where it opened in 1928. A Broadway revival followed in 1932, then an acclaimed film adaptation in 1936. In that version, Queenie was played by Hattie McDaniel, who would go on to be the first Black woman to win an Academy Award, for “Gone With the Wind.”
The “Show Boat” film is arguably the best version of the musical. Kern and Hammerstein rewrote the second act to streamline the story and shave the running time. But the movie still retained some of the performance practices of the original stage work: There is a blackface number, and McDaniel wore a kerchief on her head and had the comedic gestures of a mammy caricature. She and Robeson were also given a new song, “Ah Still Suits Me,” that daringly reflected an affectionate Black couple, while still perpetuating racist stereotypes.
From the start, Black thinkers were critical of the musical, and Robeson, who often performed “Ol’ Man River” in concert, with some reluctance, eventually altered the words “I’m tired of living and scared of dying” to “I must keep fighting until I’m dying.” (Hammerstein didn’t approve.) Robeson wasn’t alone in making major revisions to “Show Boat,” though. It became the first musical to be reimagined in the way that has since become routine for classics on Broadway.
In the 1940s, “Show Boat” moved from Broadway theaters to opera houses, which, some thought, was where it always belonged. Operatic scale and style were also applied to the musical’s most complete recording, from 1988, which has a running time of nearly four hours and features stars including Frederica von Stade, Teresa Stratas and Bruce Hubbard, as Joe.
The project was both a reclamation and a reopening of old wounds. The conductor, John McGlinn, recorded nearly every bit of the musical that had been written, whether cut or added, since its pre-Broadway tryout in 1927. He wanted to restore the racial epithet to the opening number, and the Black chorus singers, who had been brought in from a production of “Porgy and Bess” at the Glyndebourne Festival, resigned in protest. Hubbard defended McGlinn, saying at the time, “Blacks today may want to forget the past and build on to the future, but we should never lose our sense of our history.”
“Show Boat” has, despite the changes that accompany each revival, remained provocative. What makes it difficult is also what makes it, as Decker has argued, “the most important musical ever made.”
That is also the belief of David Herskovits, the artistic director of Target Margin Theater, who is directing “Show/Boat: A River.” The original, he said in an interview, has become a period piece, but was not conceived as such. “I want to see if I can restore this to that feeling of ending in the present,” he added. “I’m interested in hearing this story today.”
His production is recognizably “Show Boat,” with principal characters and beloved songs intact. And yet it also isn’t. For one, the roles of “Show/Boat” aren’t cast according to race. Instead the actors, regardless of their race, wear sashes to denote whiteness, putting them on and removing them as they play multiple characters. They are also transparently modern performers; this production both tells the story of “Show Boat” and represents itself as a telling of it in our time.
“Show/Boat” restores “In Dahomey,” in a version conceived by Dionne McClain-Freeney, the production’s vocal arranger and co-musical director. She said the scene was something she wanted to “flip” to “create a moment of Black joy.”
The performers, rather than sing in a fake language as they do in the original, precede McClain-Freeney’s new take on “In Dahomey” with a text of praise in Zulu. It’s a way to acknowledge the untenability of Kern and Hammerstein’s writing, while honoring their idea for the scene, which ended with the punchline that the Dahomey specimens were actually Black Americans relieved that the white spectators have left them alone.
“It’s so clear that Hammerstein and Kern intended to puncture that racial performance,” Herskovits said. “That’s the reason to do the show. They’re not trying to just recapitulate a racist entertainment; they’re trying to put it into question. If this is a period piece, then it’s a period piece marred by all kinds of racist trouble. But I’m interested in restoring to it a kind of immediacy and a generous human intention that reaches beyond that, which has always been in the piece.”
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