Show Boat

Show Boat is a musical with music by Jerome Kern and book and lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II (with the notable exception of "Bill," the lyrics of which were written by P. G. Wodehouse). It is based on a 1926 book of the same name by Edna Ferber, and is generally considered to be one of the first popular American "musical", as a dramatic form with popular music, separate both from operetta and from the "Follies"-type musical comedies that preceded it. In many ways, it took the plot and character-centered "Princess Musicals" that Kern had developed with Bolton and Wodehouse the previous decade and broadened the scope. However, George Kaufman and the Gershwins' Strike Up the Band, which previewed earlier that year clearly made similar leaps.

The show opened at the Ziegfeld Theatre in New York on December 27, 1927, where it ran for a year and a half. It is frequently revived and was adapted as a movie on at least four occasions, in 1929, 1936, 1946 (as a mini-show inside the movie Till the Clouds Roll By), and 1951. (See Show Boat (film))

Plot Synopsis

The story spans about 40 years, beginning aboard the showboat Cotton Blossom in the 1880s, on the Mississippi River near Natchez, Mississippi. A riverboat gambler, Gaylord Ravenal, comes aboard and is taken with Magnolia, an aspiring performer and daughter of the ship's captain and owner, "Cap'n Andy". Magnolia (aka Nolie) is smitten with Ravenal as well, and seeks advice from Joe, one of the workers aboard the boat.

A local sheriff comes aboard and insists that the show not go on, because the star of the show, Julie, is a mulatto woman married to a white man, and local laws prohibit miscegenation. With the star gone, Magnolia and Gaylord fill in. He later confesses his love for her and proposes.

Years later, Gaylord and Magnolia are married and living in Chicago. Gaylord's gambling debts get out of control, they move to a very poor apartment. Nolie's old friends Frank and Ellie (two other performers from the Cotton Blossom) come to see her apartment to rent it out, and to their surprise find her there. Nolie, excited, knocks on Ravenal's door to show them who has popped in, only to find a note, saying he's leaving her. Ravenal does not know that Magnolia is pregnant. Frank and Ellie seek a singing job for Nolie at the same club where Frank and Ellie are working for New Year's. Unbeknownst to Magnolia, Julie, now a drunk showgirl left by her husband, hears Magnolia's song, the same song she taught her years ago Can't Help Lovin' Dat Man, and abandons her position so that Magnolia can fill it.

On New Year's Eve, Andy comes to the club, unaware of Magnolia's troubles, only to discover her nearly being booed off stage. He rallies the crowd to her defense in a grand sing-along of an old song After the Ball is Over. He brings her back to the Cotton Blossom.

A couple of months later, Ravenal and Julie, who have never met, are on the same boat on the way to New Orleans. Julie, angered at the fact that Ravenal left the innocent Magnolia with a child, starts to chide and hit him for his horrible acts. Up until this point, however, Ravenal had never known about his daughter, Kim. Before Julie disembarks, she hands Ravenal a newspaper article, complete with picture, showing Captain Andy, Magnolia, and Kim, and the Cotton' Blossom's next stop.

Ravenal goes to where the Cotton Blossom is docked, and sees his daughter, Kim, playing with a doll. He asks her who the male doll is supposed to be, and she responds that she is make believing it is her father, who she has never met. Touched, Ravenal asks if he can "make believe" that he is her father, while singing the song "Make Believe," that he had sung with her mother so many years ago. Magnolia comes out of the ship, surprised, filled with emotion, and chooses to take back Ravenal; this entire time, Julie watches on as the Cotton Blossom leaves the shore.

Songs

A definitive list of songs, per se, is somewhat pointless since the original production ran nearly four hours and thus is almost never performed in its original form. Confounding the situation further are new songs written for revivals. Typically, productions pick and choose from the original material to fashion a distinct version of Show Boat. Nevertheless, the key songs from the show include the following:

• "Cotton Blossom" — The notes in the phrase "Cotton Blossom, Cotton Blossom" are the same notes as those in the phrase "Old Man River, Old Man River," but sung in reverse order. According to Hammerstein and Kern, this was intentional symbolism.
• "Where's The Mate For Me?"
• "Make Believe"
• "Can't Help Lovin' Dat Man" — Queenie's surprise at the apparently white Julie's knowledge of a "black folks'" song foreshadows the discovery of Julie's mixed origins.
• "Till Good Luck Comes My Way"
• "I Might Fall Back On You"
• "Why Do I Love You?"
• "Ol' Man River"
• "You Are Love" (considered by Jerome Kern to be his worst-ever song.)
• "I Still Suits Me"
• "Queenie's Ballyhoo"
• "Life Upon the Wicked Stage"
• "Bill"
• "After The Ball" a song by Charles K. Harris from 1892

The instrumentation for the show according to the original orchestrations by Robert Russell Bennett is one flute (doubling as piccolo), one oboe (doubling as English horn) , 2 clarinets, one bassoon, 2 horns, 2 trumpets, one trombone, percussion, one banjo, and strings.

Racism and Controversy

Showboat boldly portrayed racial difficulties, and for a 1927 show it was quite progressive in doing so. It was the first racially integrated musical, in that both black and white performers appeared on-stage together. (Ziegfeld’s Follies allowed single African American performers like Bert Williams, but would never have had an African American woman in the chorus.) However, Showboat had two choruses--a black chorus and a white chorus. (It was not until 1947's Finian's Rainbow that a Broadway musical was truly racially integrated.)

The show has come under much attack, primarily because of the use of 'Nigger" in the lyrics in the first scene, in addition to the historical portrayal of blacks serving as passive laborers and servants. The show opened with the black chorus trudging:

    Niggers all work on the Mississippi.
    Niggers all work while the white folks play-
    Loadin' up boats wid de bales of cotton,
    Gittin' no rest till de Judgement Day. [1]

In subsequent productions, "nigger" has been changed to "colored folk," to "darkies" and in one bizarre choice, "Here we all," as in "Here we all work on the Mississippi. Here we all work while the white folk play." The 1988 CD for EMI restored the original lyric, while the 1994 production chose "Colored Folk."

1994 Revival

Harold Prince's 1994 revival (opening in Toronto in 1993, and on Broadway in 1994) revitalized interest in the show by tightening the book, dropping and adding songs and highlighting the racial elements of the show. Throughout the production African-Americans constantly cleaned up the mess, moved the sets (even when hydraulics actually moved them), with their presence constantly commenting on the racial disparities. After a New Year's Eve ball, all the streamers fell on the floor and we saw African Americans busy sweeping them away. A brilliant montage in the second act showed time passing with the revolving door of the Palmer House in Chicago, and headlines going by in quick motion and then little snippets of slow motion to highlight a specific moment. African American dancers portrayed street dancers doing a dance and then time would pass and the fashionable white dancers had taken the dance.

During the production's stay in Toronto, many black community leaders and their supporters launched a massive opposition to the show, labelling it as "cultural genocide" and a spreader of "lies and hate", and often mobilizing volunteers to heckle audiences in front of the theater ^[2]. Many commentators, black or non-black, viewed the show as an outdated and stereotypical commentary on race relations that portrays blacks in a negative or inferior position ^[3], and others thought it was ironic that a supposedly anti-black show was receiving attention and support while the actual black community in Toronto was facing economic and social problems ^[4].

However, other observers decried the show's opponents for their own prejudices and racist attitudes, for many had supposedly stated that they viewed the show as a Jewish attempt to bring down blacks (both Kern and Hammerstein were Jewish New Yorkers), and to many it seemed apparent that by labelling ethnic groups as racist, the protestors were guilty of the very thing that they were complaining about ^[5]. Indeed, those who attempt to understand works like Show Boat and Porgy and Bess through the eyes of their creators usually comprehend that the shows were intended as statements against racism, and that the productions are not stereotyping blacks themselves but rather satirizing the common national attitudes that both held those stereotypes and enforced them through discrimination. In other words, just as quoting an out-of-context line from a play and claiming that it is the view of the playwright is absurd and deceptive, the fact that a dramatic or literary work portrays racist attitudes and institutions does not mean it condones them; while theater history tells us that leading Jewish writers had long used the musical as a vehicle to call for tolerance and social harmony, in examples such as Finian's Rainbow, and by Hammerstein himself in South Pacific.

Notes

1. ^ Original Libretto (Book and Lyrics)
2. ^ William, Henry A. III (Nov. 01, 1993). Rough Sailing for a New Show Boat. TIME.
3. ^ Philip, M. Nourbese (1993). Showing Grit: Showboating North of the 44th Parallel (2nd ed.). Out of print. pg. 59. Retrieved December 13, 2005.
4. ^ Anderson, Scott (Nov. 11, 1993). SHOW COVERAGE IS MISSING THE BOAT. Eye.
5. ^ Briggs, Joe Bob (May 7, 1993). Joe Bob Goes to the Drive-In. The Joe Bob Report.