The Miracle That Was Show Boat
On December 27, 1927—80 years ago today—American musical theater changed forever with the opening, at New York’s Ziegfeld Theatre, of Show Boat. It was a hit from the very start. From its opening tryout in Washington, D.C., through its other out-of-town runs in Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and Philadelphia, it sold out. In New York it ran for 572 performances, a very long run in the 1920s and longer than any other show in Jerome Kern’s career.
It has been filmed three times (the first version, made in 1929, is lost) and has been revived numerous times in major productions, most recently in New York in 1994, when it filled the cavernous Gershwin Theatre for a year and half. No fewer than six of its songs have become standards, including “Ol’ Man River,” now so much a part of the warp and woof of American culture as to be widely regarded as a folk song.
It began in 1926 when Jerome Kern read a new novel by the Pulitzer Prize–winning author Edna Ferber called Show Boat. Unlike many Broadway composers of his generation (he had been born in 1885), Kern cared deeply about plot and character. His series of Princess Theatre shows, written with Guy Bolton and P. G. Wodehouse between 1917 and 1924, had begun to transform musical comedy from a series of songs and vaudeville routines, held together with the flimsiest of plots, into a dramatic whole, with real American characters and realistic stories.
He immediately thought Show Boat would make the basis of a great and very different type of musical. So he called Oscar Hammerstein II, who had worked with him on the recent big hit Sunny. Hammerstein, ten years younger than Kern, had worked mostly in the operetta format, which had European roots and tended to feature prince-meets-milkmaid plots with exotic settings and characters. He, too, had been trying to develop a more genuinely American form of musical theater.
Hammerstein enthusiastically agreed to work on the show as soon as he read the book, and they each separately drew up treatments for turning it into a musical play. To their delight, the treatments agreed nearly perfectly on how to dramatize Ferber’s sprawling novel, whose story stretches over four decades, from the 1880s to what was then the present.
But before they could proceed much further, they needed to acquire the dramatic rights. Neither Kern nor Hammerstein knew Ferber, but at the opening of Kern’s now forgotten Criss Cross, in October 1926, the composer saw the critic Alexander Woollcott at the intermission and knew that he was a friend of the author. Kern asked him to arrange an introduction sometime soon. Woollcott said that it would be difficult but he would try, and he might be able to do it if he played his cards right. Then he introduced Kern to the lady standing next to him, who was Edna Ferber.
On December 11, Kern and Hammerstein signed a contract with the producer Florenz Ziegfeld, promising a script and a score by January 1, 1927, with rehearsals to start soon afterwards and with an opening in April. Ziegfeld, the already legendary Broadway producer of the Ziegfeld Follies, was known for elaborate shows with beautiful costumes, beautiful sets, and, most of all, beautiful girls. (Irving Berlin had written “A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody” for Ziegfeld in 1919.) Show Boat, with its serious themes, many characters, and extended plot, was not a usual Ziegfeld-type show, to put it mildly.
And indeed Ziegfeld kept delaying the start of rehearsals, working on other shows that were both less expensive to mount and less risky. At one point Kern and Hammerstein drove to Ziegfeld’s house north of New York City intending to demand a yes-or-no answer to whether he actually had the wherewithal to produce the show, given his other commitments. But they found him living in such baronial splendor–footmen behind every chair in the dining room at lunch, for instance—that they never got around to asking.
The delay, however, gave Kern and Hammerstein time to work carefully. In the 1920s it was not unusual for a composer to write two, even three, shows a year. Between 1925 and 1930, for instance, the young team of Rodgers and Hart wrote no fewer than 13 shows that opened on Broadway.
Show Boat was, from the start, very much a collaborative effort. Hammerstein elevated the character of Joe, who appears only in passing in the novel, to be a sort of one-man Greek chorus and wanted a song for him to express the nature of the world in which the play takes place, a world dominated by the great river that runs through the heart of America, and by racism. Kern, who always wrote the music first, was very busy at the moment and said he didn’t have time to write a melody just then. (Even for a genius like Jerome Kern, it can be very hard work to come up with the right music.) Hammerstein suggested using the music of the opening chorus, “Cotton Blossom,” simply inverting the melody and slowing it down.
The result was “Ol’ Man River.” After the song was finished, Kern took it to Edna Ferber’s apartment and played it for her on the piano, singing in his modest voice. “The music mounted and mounted and mounted,” she remembered, “and I give you my word, my hair stood on end, tears came to my eyes. I knew that this wasn’t just a musical comedy number. This was a great song. This was a song that would outlast Kern and Hammerstein’s day and my day and your day.”
Show Boat finally went into rehearsal, under the uncredited direction of Hammerstein, in early September and opened in Washington on November 15 (an unusually long period of rehearsal). The reviews were glowing, but the show ran well over four hours. It had to be drastically cut, although Show Boat remains one of the longest of Broadway musicals, taking about three hours. It is also one of the largest. The original production had a chorus of no fewer than 96 people (the Ziegfeld Theatre, needless to say, had a very large stage).
Because of the early cutting and the fact that Kern and Hammerstein wrote some new songs for later productions and films, there is no definitive text for Show Boat. Each new mounting of the show has been somewhat different, with some songs dropped or used by other characters and some dialogue altered.
One reason for this has been the evolution of race relations in the 80 years since Show Boat opened. On opening night in 1927, the curtain went up on a dockside scene with black stevedores loading cotton bales onto a steamboat. They sang, “Niggers all work on de Mississippi,/ Niggers all work while de white folks play.”
The words were shocking, even in 1927, but they honestly portrayed the racial situation of 1880s Mississippi. Indeed, dealing with race at all in a Broadway production was shocking. It was, in fact, unprecedented to have black actors playing real characters, not racial stereotypes, in a musical, and performing side by side with white actors. But as the civil rights movement gathered force in the ensuing years, directors and producers felt obliged to tone down the original. “Niggers all work,” became “Darkies all work,” then “Colored folks work,” and then “Here we all work.”
In recent years Show Boat has even been accused of being racist itself, instead of the giant leap forward in racial understanding and honesty that it was. These accusations have come mostly from race-baiting black politicians and from race- and gender-obsessed scholars in humanities departments in colleges and universities. The argument, such as it is, is basically that Show Boat should have been a polemic on racism instead of a story of people living their lives in a world often pervaded by it. But that is to argue that Kern and Hammerstein should have written a totally different play—and, it should be noted, one that would have closed on opening night.
Regardless of the largely manufactured controversies, Show Boat is imperishable. Despite its size, complexity, and considerable musical demands, it continues to be produced regularly around the world, the oldest American musical that can hold the boards on its own terms, not just as a charming antique. There will be a full concert version at Carnegie Hall next June. Its incomparable score will live as long as people love the synergistic combination of sophisticated words and music that is the hallmark of the Broadway musical.
Show Boat, like the mighty river on which much of it is set, just keeps rollin’ along