Show Boat
–from Show Boat, by Edna Ferber
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Ferber’s best-seller found sympathetic readers in three of the hottest talents of her day. Composer Jerome Kern, librettist Oscar Hammerstein II, and producer-director Florenz Ziegfeld were attracted by Show Boat’s commercial appeal and dramatic potential, but I think they were also turned on by Ferber’s populist vision. The kind of theater Ferber was advocating was the American musical–only in 1926 it hadn’t been invented yet. The operettas and revues created by Kern, Hammerstein, Ziegfeld, and their peers were glitzy and rarefied fluff almost exclusively concerned with upper-class images and dominated by a pseudo-European sensibility. And they were emotionally empty, their silly scripts serving as mere excuses for song and dance numbers. What the makers of the musical Show Boat set out to do–once they had won the adaptation rights from the skeptical Ferber–was to create an integrated work of music and drama in which a serious story and credible characters would share the stage with crowd-pleasing spectacle.
If Prince’s inventive exploration of the Ferber/Hammerstein narrative buoys act one, the director nearly goes overboard trying to resuscitate act two. Though it’s an epochal landmark, Show Boat is deeply flawed in its final half. Part of the reason is a dearth of good new tunes. Only one Kern-Hammerstein number–the charming but lightweight “Why Do I Love You?”–approaches the quality of act one’s masterful music; “Bill,” the haunting torch song sung by a now down-at-the-heels Julie, is a leftover from one of Kern’s earlier collaborations with P.G. Wodehouse, and the sentimental waltz “After the Ball” is an authentic Gilded Age song interpolated for period flavor.
Still, one wishes the show were more emotionally moving. It’s effective in its comedy thanks to John McMartin’s antic Andy (a cross between Bert Lahr, Ed Wynn, Joe E. Brown, and Art Carney), Dorothy Loudon’s prunish Parthy, and the delightful burlesque-show clowning of Eddie Korbich and Clare Leach as Frank and Ellie, the Cotton Blossom’s second banana team; its romantic sequences owe much to the beautiful singing of Mark Jacoby’s Ravenal and Gay Willis’s Magnolia; and Jo Ann Hawkins White as a vibrant, refreshingly unmammyish Queenie and Michel Bell as Joe (singing “Ol’ Man River” with a voice as deep as the Mississippi itself) give the show its moral power. What’s missing is pathos, due largely to Marilyn McCoo’s bland, badly acted Julie: statuesque and beautiful but lacking in charisma, the onetime lead singer of the plastic-soul group Fifth Dimension fails to give her songs the nuance and emotional underpinning they need (local actor Paula Scrofano was infinitely more touching in Drury Lane Oakbrook Terrace’s revival of several seasons back).
