Show Boat is a musical with music by Jerome Kern and book and lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II. It is based on Edna Ferber's best-selling 1926 novel of the same name. The musical follows the lives of the performers, stagehands and dock workers on the Cotton Blossom, a Mississippi River show boat, over 40 years from 1887 to 1927. Its themes include racial prejudice and tragic, enduring love. The musical contributed such classic songs as "Ol' Man River", "Make Believe", and "Can't Help Lovin' Dat Man".
The musical was first produced in 1927 by Florenz Ziegfeld. The premiere of Show Boat on Broadway was an important event in the history of American musical theatre. It "was a radical departure in musical storytelling, marrying spectacle with seriousness", compared with the trivial and unrealistic operettas, light musical comedies and "Follies"-type musical revues that defined Broadway in the 1890s and early 20th century. According to The Complete Book of Light Opera:Here we come to a completely new genre – the musical play as distinguished from musical comedy. Now … the play was the thing, and everything else was subservient to that play. Now … came complete integration of song, humor and production numbers into a single and inextricable artistic entity.
The quality of Show Boat was recognized immediately by critics, and it is frequently revived. Awards did not exist for Broadway shows in 1927, when the show premiered, nor in 1932 when its first revival was staged. Late 20th-century revivals of Show Boat have won both the Tony Award for Best Revival of a Musical (1995) and the Laurence Olivier Award for Best Musical Revival (1991).
Ferber and her novel Show Boat
In April 1926, Edna Ferber's fifth novel, Show Boat, began publication in a serialized version in the magazine Woman's Home Companion (WHC). The complete book was released in August 1926 by Doubleday, Page and Company before the magazine series finished the following September. The work was unusual content for a women's magazine of the period, with its inclusion of taboo subjects like infidelity, desertion, single motherhood, prostitution, gambling, and miscegenation. It was well received by both the public and the critics from the beginning, and the author received offers for film adaptations after the first two installments of the novel were published in WHC. It became a best-selling novel.
It centers on Magnolia, the daughter of the owners of a showboat, Cotton Blossom, Captain Andy Hawks and his wife, Parthy. Musically gifted as a child, she learns from the ship's performers and from the Cotton Blossom's Black cook Queenie and her husband, the dock worker Jo. Despite her mother's opposition, Magnolia becomes an actress and singer on the boat's stage. She falls in love with her co-star, gambler Gaylord Ravenal; they marry and have a child. Ravenal's gambling addiction and huge debts, philandering with prostitutes, and ill health lead him to abandon his family. Magnolia manages to move on and thrive because of her prodigious singing talent; she is described as a white woman gifted with the singing voice of a Black vocalist. Musicologist Todd Decker stated:
Magnolia's embrace of show business as a means to survive as a single mother is directly linked to Ferber's use of black music to characterize her heroine. Magnolia's black voice thus proves a defining aspect of Ferber's main character and a central pillar of the novel's structure and larger themes. Magnolia's story and the plot of Show Boat alike trace the course of American life across the divide separating the nineteenth century from the twentieth, an epochal shift felt with particular power in the 1920s when the effects of World War I and a series of overlapping transformations in daily life were altering the fabric of the nation.
Ferber's novel was inspired by a conversation she had with the producer Winthrop Ames in 1924. Ames, to whom Ferber dedicated her novel, was producing Ferber's play Minick, which was preparing for its Broadway debut; its tryout performances were not going well. Following a difficult day, Ames joked that they should all join a showboat if the play flopped. Ferber had never heard of a showboat, and her curiosity began her fascination with 19th century showboats on the Mississippi River. She began months of research and became an expert on the types of 19th-century paddle steamer ships active on the Mississippi.
She boarded the James Adams Floating Palace Theatre in April 1925, leaving North Carolina, and spent five days on the ship while it traversed the Pamlico River. Ferber described the voyage as resulting in a "treasure trove of show-boat material, human, touching, true". On board, she attended rehearsals and took on jobs from selling and taking tickets to performing small roles. She also spoke with audience members. The ship's captain, Charles Hunter, hosted the trip. Much of the world of the novel was based on stories he told to Ferber. One, involving a family of showboat performers with mixed-race children, were the basis for the novel's subplot of the characters Julie and Steve. Julie, a mixed-race woman passing as white, and her white husband Steve broke miscegenation laws of the era by marrying.
Magnolia was a typical heroine of a novel by Ferber, who tended to base her female leads on herself. Magnolia is a confident woman who, with pluck and determination, succeeds in business without the help of a man. While the character marries, it is a failed marriage, and she rises above the weaknesses of her romantic partner who leaves her through tragic circumstances. Magnolia's domineering mother Parthy was based on Ferber's own mother, Julia Ferber, and Parthy and Captain Andy's marriage was modeled on her own parents' marriage. Show Boat departed from Ferber's earlier writings in that it was not set in an all-white mid-western town. Her decision to set the novel on a Mississippi River boat traveling south forced her to engage with race for the first time. While the central characters in Ferber's novel are predominantly white, the inclusion of secondary characters like Julie, Jo, Queenie and various unnamed Black characters, provide a view of a multiracial world.
The novel often presents Black figures in relation to music; frequent references to spirituals and other forms of music associated with African Americans provide background for Magnolia's musical journey. This choice reflected the increasing popularity in the 1920s of Black singers performing spirituals on the concert stage in America. Influenced by the writings of ethnomusicologist Natalie Curtis, Ferber uses the theme of African-American music as a means of criticizing the state of contemporary white American theatre. At the end of the novel, Magnolia watches her daughter Kim study to become a singer and actress; only to have the life and soul of her talents driven out of her by the white music and theatre education system. Ferber implies that music from Black culture is more authentic, intuitive, and superior in quality than music from white culture that is restrained by education. Decker wrote: "In Show Boat, Ferber used a racial argument about the sources of musical inspiration and authentic voice to support her thesis about the source of inspired versus uninspired acting in the almost entirely white realm of Broadway theater."
Ferber's Show Boat was an unlikely candidate for a musical adaptation in the 1920s: Its heroine's unhappy marriage, her independence, and her grit in surviving as a single mother after being abandoned by a morally flawed husband ran counter to the typical portrayal of women in Broadway musicals as helpless victims who need rescuing. And Julie's tragic subplot was far darker than Broadway musicals' typical content. Rather than ending with a happy marriage to her male rescuer, Ferber's novel depicts Magnolia's marriage as the source of her problems followed by her triumphant solo journey to independence and success. Nevertheless, the novel's recurring music and entertainment themes made it an irresistible challenge for Kern and Hammerstein to adapt for the musical stage. After the 1925 success of the musical Sunny in collaboration with Hammerstein, Kern sought a new Broadway project for the pair. By late 1926 he was determined to make Ferber's novel the subject of their next musical. Hammerstein agreed, and the pair began writing material even before obtaining permission from Ferber to use her work or having a producer attached to the project.