Enchanted Evenings:The Broadway Musical from 'Show Boat' to Sondheim and Lloyd Webber (9 page)

By 1927, Kern had long since earned the mantle allegedly bestowed on him by Victor Herbert (1859–1924), the composer of
Naughty Marietta
(1910) and dozens of other Broadway shows, as the most distinguished American-born theater composer. For more than a decade Kern had been the model
and envy of Porter, Gershwin, and Rodgers, who were embarking on their careers during the Princess Theatre years. But it was not until
Show Boat
that Kern had the opportunity to create a more ambitious species of Broadway musical. The care which he lavished on the score is conspicuously evident from the numerous extant pre-tryout drafts on deposit at the Library of Congress (see “Manuscript Sources for Ravenal’s Entrance and Meeting with Magnolia” no. 1 in the online website) and by an unprecedentedly long gestation period from November 1926 to November 1927 that included numerous and lengthy discussions with librettist and lyricist Hammerstein. Many other changes were made during the out-of-town tryouts.

In order to provide a framework for discussing
Show Boat
it will be useful to distinguish among its various stage and film versions. Although the vocal score of the 1927 production, published by T. B. Harms in April 1928, has been out of print for decades, much of this original Broadway version was retained in the still-available London vocal score published by Chappell & Co. (also 1928). It is also fortunate that much of the Convent Scene and two brief passages absent from the Chappell score—the parade music in act I, scene 1, and the “Happy New Year” music (“Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight”) in act II, scene 6—can be found in a third vocal score, published by the Welk Music Group, that also corresponds reasonably well to the 1946 touring production.
²³

McGlinn’s 1988 recording is an indispensable starting point for anyone interested in exploring a compendium of the versions produced between 1927 and 1946 (as well as the 1936 film).
²⁴
All of these versions incorporate new ideas and usually new songs by the original creators. Even if one does not agree with all of McGlinn’s artistic and editorial decisions, especially his decision to include in the main body of the recording (rather than in the appendix) material that Kern and Hammerstein had agreed to cut from the production during tryouts, the performances are impressive and the notes by Kreuger and McGlinn carefully researched.

In the introduction to his monograph Kreuger notes that “one fascinating aspect of
Show Boat
is that, unlike most major musicals, it has never had an official script or score.”
²⁵
The lack of the former did not pose a problem to Kreuger, who had obtained the 1927 libretto directly from Hammerstein himself a few days before his death in August 1960.
²⁶
Its absence has proven, however, to be an enormous headache for historians and, conversely, a source of opportunity for some directors (for example, Hal Prince), who have
been given a free hand to decipher and interpret the complicated evolution and varied documentary legacy of this musical according to their personal visions.

One extended number published by Harms, “Mis’ry’s Comin’ Aroun,’” had been dropped from the production in Washington, D.C., as early as November 15 after the very first evening of the tryouts. Because Kern “insisted that the number be published in the complete vocal score,” McGlinn argued, not without justification, that Kern “hoped the sequence would have an afterlife in a more enlightened theatrical world.”
²⁷
For this reason McGlinn includes “Mis’ry” into the body of his recording rather than in an appendix.

McGlinn’s other “restorations and re-evaluations” are less convincing on historical grounds. Dropped from both the Harms score and the 1927 production were two numbers, “I Would Like to Play a Lover’s Part” (originally placed at the beginning of act I, scene 5) and “It’s Getting Hotter in the North” (act II, scene 9). The latter song was replaced by a reprise of “Why Do I Love You?” called “Kim’s Imitations,” performed by the original Magnolia, Norma Terris, who was made up to look like her daughter Kim and performed impressions of famous vaudeville stars. Since Kern did not wish to include this discarded material in the vocal score (and it was in response to Kern’s wishes that McGlinn reinserted “Mis’ry”), its presence in the body of McGlinn’s recording is questionable. One other number deleted before the December premiere, “Trocadero Opening Chorus” (at one time in act II, scene 6), was placed in the main portion of McGlinn’s recording for “technical reasons.”
²⁸

For the first London production in 1928—which premiered after the New York version had been playing for a little more than four months—Kern and Hammerstein wrote “Dance Away the Night” (replacing Kim’s reprise of “Why Do I Love You?,” itself a replacement of “Kim’s Imitations”). Also in this production Kern’s 1905 London hit, “How’d You Like to Spoon with Me?” replaced the non-Kern interpolation, “Good-bye, Ma Lady Love.” Two scenes were entirely omitted, the Convent Scene (act II, scene 4) and the scene in the Sherman Hotel Lobby (act II, scene 5), along with the song, “Hey, Feller!” (act II, scene 7). Another song, “Me and My Boss,” composed especially for Paul Robeson, who sang the role of Joe, was not used and is presumed lost.
²⁹

After returning to Broadway in 1932 for 181 performances (with several members of the 1927 cast and Robeson), the next major Broadway revival, with extensive changes by Kern and Hammerstein, arrived on January 5, 1946.
³⁰
Even the overture was new, a more traditional medley-type version to replace the “Mis’ry”-dominated overture of the 1927 production. The first word heard in the original 1927 New York production, “niggers,” had already been replaced by “coloured folks” in the 1928 London production. For the 1946 revival Hammerstein removed other references to this offensive word and rewrote a quatrain in the opening chorus in which “Coal Black Rose or High Brown Sal” was replaced by the less racially tinted phrase in dialect, “Y’work all day, y’git no fun.”

“
Show Boat
, the marriage of Magnolia and Ravenal at the end of act I (1946).” Photograph: Graphic House. Museum of the City of New York. Theater Collection. For a film still of this scene see p. 159.

Other changes in 1946 included a new emphasis on dance numbers, the composition of yet another song for Kim in the final scene, “Nobody Else but Me” (Kern’s final song before he died on November 11, 1945, during auditions), three major deletions (“Till Good Luck Comes My Way,” “I Might Fall Back on You,” and “Hey, Feller!” [dropped in London 1928]), an abbreviation (“C’Mon Folks”), a repositioning (“Life upon the Wicked Stage”), the deletion of two scenes (act I, scene 3, and act II, scene 5), and the rewriting of a third (act II, scene 7).
³¹
Kreuger, who briefly discusses these changes, does not mention the elimination of local color (including banjos and tubas) and comedic elements such as Cap’n Andy Hawks’s introduction of Rubber-Face Smith in the opening scene. Although Kreuger regretted the absence of style in the stage performances, he unhesitatingly supported these revisions as improvements.
³²

Theater historian and critic Ethan Mordden in a
New Yorker
essay on
Show Boat
published one year after the McGlinn reconstruction assesses the 1946 version far less favorably. Although, like Kreuger, Mordden recognizes the incalculable influence of
Oklahoma!
and
Carousel
, he regrets the alterations that “homogenized a timeless, diverse piece into a document of a specific place and time: Broadway mid-nineteen-forties.”
³³
Mordden continues:

In 1927, “Ol’ Man River” and the miscegenation scene and “Bill” derived their power partly from a comparison with the musical-comedy elements dancing around them. Take the fun away, the apparently aimless vitality, and “Show Boat” loses its transcendence. The 1946 “Show Boat” is dated now, too consistent, too much of its day. The 1927 “Show Boat” is eclectic, of many days. Nevertheless, the revisions were locked in. American “Show Boat” revivals honored the 1946 version without question, and it became standard.
³⁴

In contrast to most of the musicals discussed in subsequent chapters,
Show Boat
directors and their public can choose among two authentic stageworthy versions and one film version (considerably fewer, for instance, than the possibilities extant for Handel’s
Messiah
). More commonly, they have chosen to assemble a version of their own. Just as conductors have for two hundred years created their own
Messiah
hybrids, the 1971 London and 1994 Broadway revivals presented provocative conflations of several staged versions of
Show Boat
as well as the 1936 film.
³⁵
For example, two songs from the 1971 London revival that were part of the 1928 London version did not appear in the original 1927 New York production.
³⁶
Kern’s swan song and last attempt at a final song for the show, “Nobody Else but Me,” introduced in the 1946 New York revival (but not in the touring production), also appears, albeit sung out of context in 1971 by superstar Cleo Laine, who refused the role of Julie unless she was assigned a third song. From the 1936 Universal film the 1971 London revival recycled two of its three new songs, “Ah Still Suits Me” (for Paul Robeson’s Joe) and “I Have the Room above Her” (for Allan Jones’s Ravenal), sung by their rightful characters but in newly conceived dramatic contexts.
³⁷
Although critical assessments may vary, the 1971 London production provides an unmistakable example of the triumph of accessibility over authenticity.

In director Hal Prince’s revival of
Show Boat
in 1994 (the first Broadway production to take full advantage of McGlinn’s research), “brothers” and later “coloreds” “all work on the Mississippi” and racial prejudice is acknowledged onstage throughout the evening.
³⁸
Blacks move scenery and pick up messes left by whites, whites steal the Charleston dance steps from black originators, and an endlessly reprised “Ol’ Man River” sung by Michel
Bell looms larger than ever. In scenes depicting 1927 as well as the late 1880s, audiences could see conspicuous signs over drinking fountains and elsewhere marked “White Only” and “Colored Only.”
³⁹

Prince and production designer Eugene Lee employed modern stagecraft “to create montages which integrate a leap of years, restore serious incidents and clarify plot and character motivations.”
⁴⁰
From the 1928 London version Prince borrowed “Dance Away the Night” when he needed some music for the radio. From the 1936 film he used Ravenal’s suggestive song, “I Have the Room above Her” and, more pervasively, “motion picture techniques such as cross-fades, dissolves and even close-ups.”
⁴¹
As in the 1946 Broadway production, Frank and Ellie’s “I Might Fall Back on You” was dropped (although used as underscoring) and dance assumed a still more important role, especially in the montages staged by choreographer Susan Stroman.
⁴²
The powerful “Mis’ry’s Comin’ Aroun,’” restored for the Houston Opera production on Broadway in 1983, was again featured.

In earlier productions act II opened with a crowd scene at the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago. Prince drops this scene along with its two songs (“At the Fair” and “In Dahomey”) and takes the duet between Magnolia and Ravenal, “Why Do I Love You?,” which was sandwiched between these songs, and gives it to the otherwise songless Parthy (Elaine Stritch) to sing to her granddaughter. Perhaps inspired by the 1936 film, which, unlike the stage version, shows the birth of Kim and Parthy rocking her, the effect of this change is enormous. With this one gesture, the shrewish, bigoted, and largely unsympathetic Parthy gains a humanity denied in all previous staged versions.

In an article that appeared in
Modern Music
during
Show Boat
’s initial New York run, Robert Simon, a staff writer for the
New Yorker
and an opera librettist, wrote about what he perceived as Kern’s operatic predilections:

In
Show Boat
, Kern has an opportunity to make much of his dramatic gift. The action is accompanied by a great deal of incidental music—although “incidental” is a misleading trade term, for Kern’s music heightens immeasurably the emotional value of the situation.… Themes are quoted and even developed in almost Wagnerian fashion.
⁴³

Without further elaboration Simon suggests that Kern, like Wagner and several of the Broadway theater composers considered in this study, embraces his principal dramatic themes within a family of leitmotivs.
⁴⁴
All of these
motives in Kern and Hammerstein’s “leit-opera” (a term perhaps coined by Simon) can be seen against the backdrop of the Mississippi, arguably the principal protagonist of the drama, much as the “folk” form the heart and center of Musorgsky’s
Boris Godunov
and Gershwin’s
Porgy and Bess
.