(This is the first part of a two-part column. The second part will appear next month.)
Warning to my fellow voyagers: This boat ride may take our rickety vessel through some deep and turbulent waters. If the situation makes you queasy, please bear in mind that I am only your guide: I neither built the boat nor dug the channel in which the restless waters flow. Like you, I am only here to observe. If that’s clear, let us get up steam and proceed.
The main focus of this essay is the 1936 Universal film of Show Boat, directed by James Whale. Often riveting in itself, the film is also a significant watershed in the history of this important work. The huge success of Florenz Ziegfeld’s original 1927 stage production—which had run nearly two years, toured nationally, and been revived on Broadway in 1932 with most of its original cast—still lingered in the public mind. While streamlining or altering much of the original, Whale’s film bears the stamp of authenticity. The original’s librettist, Oscar Hammerstein II, provided the screenplay; he and composer Jerome Kern created three new songs for the film. Whale’s cast is filled with artists who had performed in various stage versions of the work. Virtually all of the leads except for Helen Westley as Parthy, the stern-visaged matron whose husband captains the show boat, had previously performed their roles onstage. While not that unusual in films of the period, this fact in a work with Show Boat’s status as a classic gives the film an extraordinary cachet.
But to perceive its full significance, we have to take on Show Boat as a whole, including multiple stage productions from the 1927 Broadway original onward, as well as the two other films based on the material. The task is a weighty one, and I apologize in advance for the possibility that I may get bogged down in detail when discussing one or another of Show Boat’s many complex aspects. One main reason for the high value of Whale’s film, apart from the many pleasures it imparts, is that it conveys in condensed form the weight of this rich and sometimes bewildering work.
As a musical, Show Boat is both a masterwork and a problem, a history-changing opus that nonetheless remains obstinately embedded in the most troubling part of our nation’s past. No one will ever succeed in producing a wholly viable version of it; it will always remain this huge, flawed, half-distressing thing. And yet, because of its masterful qualities, it will never stop being presented, and being loved. Like American history as a whole, it must be taken for what it is—a vital, impossible, and gorgeous piece of our bittersweet heritage.
Show Boat was born out of a mishap, which may partly explain some of the tangles in its winding history. In 1924, the out-of-town tryout of a new play by Edna Ferber and her frequent collaborator, George S. Kaufman, was disrupted, in one small-town stop on its pre-Broadway tour, by an infestation of bats, which had taken up residence in the dome and chandelier of a too-long disused theater. Watching the audience flee in dismay, producer Winthrop Ames said to Ferber, “Next play we do, we’ll try it out on a show boat, playing towns up and down the river.” Ferber, good insular Manhattanite that she was, said, “What’s a show boat?” and when Ames explained, told him that it was a great setting for a story. Ferber spent a year doing research, briefly living on one of the last few surviving show boats (though not on the Mississippi), and then a year writing. Her novel, Show Boat, was published in 1926.
It immediately became a bestseller. More to the point, it attracted the interest of Jerome Kern, until then not a composer who could be thought of as harboring great ambitions in the music-drama line, but who saw the work’s theatrical possibilities. Kern enlisted Oscar Hammerstein II, the co-librettist of his recent musical, Sunny (1925), and the two of them went to the only Broadway producer whom they agreed had the visionary scope and the taste for lavish theatrical events to encompass the musicalization of a multigenerational chronicle: Florenz Ziegfeld.
Ziegfeld, never one to shy away from a challenge, accepted this one with misgivings that soon turned into passionate enthusiasm. Show Boat, the musical, opened on Broadway two days after Christmas 1927, and was greeted by the press and the public with the rapture that only the Christmas presents one truly wants can evoke. It ran through the next year and then went on an extended national tour. A six-month return engagement on Broadway in 1932 brought back most of the original principals, with one notable exception: the popular Harlem baritone Jules Bledsoe was replaced by the man for whom Hammerstein and Kern had originally conceived the role of Joe: Paul Robeson. Robeson, who had already committed to a national tour of his triumphant performance in O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones when Show Boat was first casting, had played Joe in the 1928 London production, so the authors knew well what they were getting. The role and its key song, “Ol’ Man River,” became permanently identified with Robeson. He sang the song, often with lyrics amended by himself (with Hammerstein’s sanction), for the rest of his life.
We are now only one step away from Show Boat’s significant place in cinema history, but we need to pause before we get there, to sort out the divergent stories it tells as play and as novel. Let me be frank about the latter: I find Edna Ferber’s prose fiction unreadably clotted. This makes no sense: She was a sharp-witted personality who could hold her own with the Algonquin set; the dialogue of the many plays she wrote with Kaufman and others is always crisp, lively, and highly playable. But Show Boat’s elaborated sentences form a wall of thorns that I have never been able to fight my way through. So I must rely to some degree on secondary sources. My apologies for that.
Unlike Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, Dawn Powell—the women writers who explored female lives in the context of a larger and more complex social picture—Ferber, like some other bestselling novelists of her period, catered to what might be called a housewives’ fantasy of feminism: The idea was to set the heroine going through as many and varied experiences as possible, while steadily removing all outside means of support, especially male, so that she was compelled to discover, and make a contented life through, her own inner resources. Magnolia, in the novel, begins as a naive and sheltered young girl who rises to become a retired great lady of the theater, with a grown daughter following successfully in her footsteps. In the course of her evolution, she must endure the loss of her father, a decades-long estrangement from her mother, the desertion of her charming but wayward husband, and the loss of a valued friend whom she later discovers in humiliating circumstances and who declines to acknowledge her. At the end, she inherits the show boat, most of these other characters having died, and returns to the scene of her adolescent romance and early artistic triumphs.
Hammerstein, in shaping the stage musical, altered a great deal of this story, to suit, variously, the conventions of 1920s musical theater, Ziegfeld’s taste for lavish spectacle, Kern’s longing for expanded musical opportunities, and what Hammerstein himself saw as the essential needs of a popular audience. In this last regard, he made key decisions involving most of the major characters: Cap’n Andy and Parthy would both survive to welcome the retired Magnolia and her grown-up daughter, Kim, back to the show boat; Ravenal would also somehow survive and—improbably—be reunited with Magnolia. Magnolia’s road to success as a performer would be aided, first, by a sacrifice on the part of the tragic Julie Laverne, and later, when Magnolia briefly loses her nerve at a pivotal moment, by the encouraging discovery of her father, Cap’n Andy, in the audience.
The story of Magnolia’s maturation composes the central plot thread of Show Boat, the stage musical, but two other elements play roles nearly as significant. One, only touched on superficially, is the drama of race relations in America. This has nothing to do with Magnolia’s ultimately disappointing romance except in depriving her of Julie’s companionship; Julie’s own travails as a biracial artist are seen only when racist malice forces her to leave the show boat troupe. Her later sacrifice for Magnolia’s sake (invented wholly by Hammerstein) goes uncomprehended and hence unacknowledged by Magnolia. The contrasting depiction of Joe and Queenie—a “contented” couple (despite their differences), contrasting also to the perpetually squabbling Cap’n Andy and Parthy—is too cursory even to be called a story line. Yet it contains, when Joe sings “Ol’ Man River,” an emotional statement that seems to encompass the overall philosophic outlook of Black America. (In this context, Robeson’s later impulse to inject an element of activism into the lyric marks a historical change from Hammerstein’s perception.) Much more needs to be said about the show’s shifting view of African Americans, a topic we will come to in due course.
The second key element that weighs on Show Boat without altering the story of Magnolia has no dramatic significance at all, though it occupies a substantial part of the original stage production and has made its presence felt in every version since. This was, quite simply, the nature of the 1920s musical theater, from which Kern, Hammerstein, and Ziegfeld, all three steeped in its conventions through long experience, could not wholly escape. All three were well aware that they were attempting something quite exceptional. Hammerstein and Ziegfeld had both committed to the project only after a period of initial caution, swayed by Kern’s enthusiasm; Kern himself, despite his unflagging faith in the project, never attempted anything of its scope again. (The one relative exception to that last statement was his mistimed attempt, in collaboration with Hammerstein and Otto Harbach, to create a sort of prequel to Show Boat, Gentlemen Unafraid, a large-scale musical about West Point cadets from the South, forced to choose between opposing sides in the Civil War. It tried out at the St. Louis Municipal Opera, where Show Boat was a recurring favorite, in 1938, when the country was plainly girding for war and the work’s essentially pacifist message fell on largely hostile ears.)
The 1920s musical-comedy convention from which Show Boat’s creators were half-consciously struggling to escape was that of a loosely structured and often arbitrarily plotted entertainment with a wide variety of elements. It is a mistake, however, to regard its form as incoherent or to assert that Kern and Hammerstein (or Rodgers and Hammerstein later) invented the “integrated” musical. The best practitioners of musical theater in the 1910s and ’20s took pains to make their works tell reasonably coherent stories and to spot their songs so that they would have at least a partial degree of relevance to the characters singing and the situation in which they sang. In this regard the comic operas of Gilbert & Sullivan (greatly admired by, among others, Cole Porter, the Gershwin brothers, and Lorenz Hart) provided one set of models. The Viennese “Silver Age” romantic operettas of the Lehár-Kálmán school supplied another. Granted, the musical still maintained its links to vaudeville and to the barely strung-together Broadway entertainments, connected only by an overall stylistic sense, known as revues (a Ziegfeld specialty). The 1920s musical’s reputation for incoherence came from the extent to which its authors and directors (often under pressure from producers anxious for box office success) sanctioned interpolated songs, specialties, and arbitrary changes of scene, tone, or event, particularly at a show’s climax. These were like cracks in the structural house the musical’s best artists were attempting to build.
Hammerstein found room in Show Boat for both the decorative solo-with-chorus numbers that were a frequent feature of operetta (like “Till Good Luck Comes My Way”) and for the various kinds of showy numbers that offered 1920s audiences diversion. These were, as often, tailored to the specific performers: The popular dance team of Eva Puck and Sammy White got a newly composed song in the first act (“I Might Fall Back on You”) as well as a specialty using a familiar old song (“Goodbye, My Lady Love”) in the second; the charming Puck was given a number of her own, with the girls’ chorus, in Act 1 (the familiar “Life Upon the Wicked Stage”). Queenie, the show boat’s cook-housekeeper, played onstage by the blackface vaudeville star Tess Gardella (who performed under the stage name Aunt Jemima), also got two specialties, both tenuously linked to the story. The first-act “Ballyhoo” (“C’mon Folks”) shows her attracting Black audiences to the boat’s melodrama performance. Her second-act number, “Hey, Fellah,” uses 1920s rhythm, slang, and costuming to indicate the passage of time. Gardella’s vivacious and forceful performance of both numbers was filmed, along with other numbers involving the original Broadway cast, as part of a sound prologue to the part-talkie 1929 Universal film version of Ferber’s novel. (All four numbers can be seen, along with silent segments of the 1929 film itself, as extras on the Criterion edition of Whale’s 1936 film.) The numbers were shot on a makeshift studio set while the original stage production was still running. Presumably in the show Gardella sang her second number “in one” (in front of a downstage drop curtain while the full-stage set was being changed behind her), but this is hard to imagine from what we see, as the stage is full of dancing chorus girls who encircle her as she belts out the song. (The stagehand manning the curtain, obviously not from Ziegfeld’s running crew, pulls it shut—twice!—before Gardella has finished singing.)
Ziegfeld himself, like his star performers, expected any musical spectacle he was involved with to grant him lavish opportunities, in his case for visual display and variety. For his sake, Hammerstein seized on Ferber’s use of Gilded Age Chicago as a backdrop for Magnolia and Ravenal’s initial happiness, followed by Ravenal’s desertion and the birth of Magnolia’s independent career as an artist. He set the period of their early happiness (marked by the enchanting “Why Do I Love You?”) in the flamboyant context of the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, which he knew was historically important to Ziegfeld as the place where his entrepreneurial career had begun, as manager for the strong man Eugene Sandow. The Fair sequence gave Ziegfeld the opportunity for an elegantly costumed chorus of dandies (“When the Sports of Gay Chicago”) and for his particular specialty, a showgirl parade (“The Congress of Beauty”), as well as for a glimpse of the Fair’s best-remembered attraction, the belly dancer Little Egypt (called Fatima in the script).
It was also perhaps as a tip of the hat to Ziegfeld that Hammerstein found additional employment for the Black chorus that he envisioned as an important part of Act 1’s levee scene, playing and mocking the pseudo-African “savages” of the Fair’s “Dahomeyan Village” with the number “In Dahomey,” in which he depicts the “savages” as actually gentle New Yorkers longing for a pork chop dinner on the Lower East Side. Possibly he remembered that the great Black performer Bert Williams had originally met George Walker, the partner with whom he had created the first Black musicals to break free of minstrelsy, when both were impersonating “savages” in a touring version of the “Dahomeyan Village” exhibit. Ziegfeld’s hiring of Bert Williams to star in the Follies, after Walker’s tragically early death, had broken the color bar to Broadway stardom for Black artists. (One of the Williams and Walker team’s all-Black musicals had been entitled, like Hammerstein’s song, In Dahomey.
These multiple answers to the multiple demands Show Boat posed make clear why creating the show presented its librettist and composer with such problems. Under Ziegfeld’s aegis, Hammerstein and Kern were in effect trying to create a national epic, a romantic operetta, and an insouciant 1920s musical all at once—and all while attempting at least a partial degree of fidelity to Ferber’s novel. That they created a work with so many inspired passages is not surprising, given their passion for the material; the astonishment is that their work had any coherence at all. Many have struggled, since Show Boat, to create dramatically integrated musicals, but no one else has ever attempted such a massive task. One would not expect to see Boris Godunov, Countess Maritza, and a vaudeville show merged into one theatrical evening, but this is to a great extent what Show Boat amounts to.
Assembling this giant jigsaw puzzle was no easy task. Even after the original show’s triumphant opening, Hammerstein and Kern reworked their achievement through at least four stage productions (1927 Broadway, 1928 London, 1932 Broadway, 1946 Broadway), plus the 1936 film version that solidified many of Hammerstein’s best ideas, while adding or reshaping others. (In addition, he and Kern probably made minor tweaks for Show Boat’s repeated productions at the St. Louis Muny.)
Not all of Kern and Hammerstein’s repeated attempts to solve the work’s storytelling problems led to ultimate cohesion, and later productions have added their own tinkering, not by any means all of them helpful. The authors never, for instance, came up with a song for Kim that would satisfactorily embody the difference between her 1920s style and her mother’s (though many aficionados have a sentimental attachment to “Nobody Else But Me,” the 1946 attempt to fill that slot, which was the last song Kern composed before his death). Another problematic slot is Magnolia’s attack of stage fright at her Trocadero debut, for which Hammerstein and Kern wrote several interesting mock-1890s ballads before deciding to use an authentic song of the era and settling on Charles K. Harris’ “After the Ball.” (In one of their attempts, “A Pack of Cards,” Hammerstein seems to be envisioning a plausible death for Ravenal, which would certainly make Magnolia freeze. But he didn’t follow through with it, and the number went unused.)
The score of Show Boat in any form is exceptionally long, as if Kern had been seized by one gorgeous melodic inspiration after another, and simply couldn’t stop himself. Most productions, including Whale’s film, omit so many numbers—among them most of those I’ve cited in the paragraphs above—that you could build a whole other musical out of them. Ravenal’s jaunty “Till Good Luck Comes My Way” is one frequent deletion, as are the first-act specialty numbers for Ellie and Frank. Magnolia’s wedding-day chorus, “Happy the Day,” and the earlier ensemble in which the girls celebrate her and Ravenal’s growing fame as a romantic team, have almost never been heard in recent revivals. The fetching “Why Do I Love You?,” even though a standard, has become a near-standard deletion, possibly as a response to Hal Prince’s terrible idea, in the 1994 Broadway revival, of having Elaine Stritch, as Parthy, bark it ferociously into the infant Kim’s cradle—enough to traumatize a child for life. (Parthy is the only major character for whom Kern and Hammerstein never attempted to write a song.)
Like most of the other numbers mentioned above, “Why Do I Love You” is heard in the 1936 film only as underscoring. The same is true of the World’s Fair music, which in later revivals has almost entirely been omitted. (In Whale’s film we hear “When the Sports of Gay Chicago” as the audience leaves the show boat in Natchez.)
Another of Prince’s ideas, dramatically unwise but with strong musical justifications, was to restore the long episode, consisting mainly of dialogue over choral singing, “Mis’ry’s comin’ round,” which leads to the scene of Julie’s expulsion from the show boat. Its somber, weighty theme underscores that scene as well (in both the stage score and Whale’s film), and is heard at a number of other points, most notably in the show’s original overture. Kern and his orchestrator, Robert Russell Bennett (whose work is carried over, uncredited, into the film), apparently viewed this mournful melody as an equivalent of the Fate theme in Bizet’s Carmen. Though sumptuously composed, the nearly 10-minute episode constitutes dead weight dramatically, which is most likely why Hammerstein cut it from the original production immediately after the opening night. It accomplishes nothing that cannot be conveyed more effectively in the brief, taut dialogue of the interrupted-rehearsal scene that follows, climaxing with Julie and Steve’s departure from the show boat.
Also, the power and grandeur of the episode’s music are welded to the troublesome, racially condescending notion that African-Americans, being an “earthier” people, have a sixth sense, denied to whites, that tells them when a “mis’ry” is approaching for someone. (Julie, being biracial, presumably shares the feeling but denies it.) The use of the stereotype in the emotionally charged context of this musical sequence reveals two significant things about Show Boat. First, that Hammerstein, as what we would call a well-meaning white liberal, is uncertain in his treatment of his Black characters—he wants to perceive them as equals maltreated by racial injustice, but has not freed himself from the clichés of racist thinking sufficiently to do so. And second, that he has never wholly sorted out whether Show Boat’s main dramatic focus should be on its Black or its white characters.
Unquestionably, Hammerstein’s battle to harness all this material must have been a fearsome one. He had to show a semblance of loyalty to Ferber’s multigenerational saga while simultaneously answering his own and Kern’s instincts as writers of operetta, as well as Ziegfeld’s theatricalist taste for spectacle, plus Hammerstein’s own impulse toward political progressivism, which had to be balanced against a commercial audience’s expectations of stereotype “Negro” humor of what was then a widespread convention.
The challenge was enormous. One can easily sympathize with Hammerstein’s plight. Nobody in America had ever tried before to encompass so much in one light entertainment. Show Boat is great, not because Hammerstein succeeded in reconciling his wildly disparate elements—he didn’t—but because the scope of what he and Kern were attempting was so gigantic and so new. Issues of racism and miscegenation had been dramatized on the American stage at least since Dion Boucicault’s The Octoroon (1859), but virtually never in a musical. Lovers in romantic operetta had faced separation or tragic loss before, but never against such a background. And the idea of combining the two elements with the flamboyance that was the hallmark of Ziegfeld’s showmanship was entirely unheard of. Show Boat’s ambitions are staggering; one has to go back to the visions of Berlioz or Wagner to find its operatic equivalent, and forward to off-the-wall concept musicals such as Kurt Weill–Alan Jay Lerner’s Love Life (1948) or Jerome Moross–John Latouche’s The Golden Apple (1956) for its musical-theater progeny. If Kern and Hammerstein’s results were all over the map, one has to keep reminding oneself what a vast map they were exploring.
Read more Feingold on Old Movies for Theater Lovers:
Preston Sturges’ ‘The Palm Beach Story’
Charles Laughton’s ‘The Night of the Hunter’
Clarence Brown’s ‘Intruder in the Dust’
Rouben Mamoulian’s ‘Love Me Tonight’
Ernst Lubitsch’s ‘To Be or Not to Be’
Marcel Carné’s ‘Children of Paradise’
William Wyler’s ‘Counsellor-at-Law’
Val Lewton’s ‘Cat People’ & ‘The Curse of the Cat People’
