Enchanted Evenings:The Broadway Musical from 'Show Boat' to Sondheim and Lloyd Webber Block, Geoffrey (large ebook reader .txt) 📖

Boat is “perhaps the most successful and influential Broadway musical play ever written.”1 For the authors of New Grove, the impact of Show Boat has been “inestimable, particularly in that it impelled composers of Broadway musicals to concern themselves with the whole production as opposed to writing Tin Pan Alley songs for interpolation.”2 For the many who judge a show by how many songs they can hum or whistle when they leave (or enter) the theater, Show Boat offered “at least” an unprecedented six song hits for the ages; moreover, nearly all of these songs, according to Grove, “are integral to the characterization and story.” And the many who place opera on a more elevated plane than Broadway musicals could be impressed by the knowledge that Show Boat, when it entered the repertory of the New York City Opera in 1954, was the first Broadway show to attain operatic stature.3 By virtually any criteria, Show Boat marks a major milestone in the history of the American musical and has long since become the first Broadway show to be enshrined in the musical theater museum.

Show Boat gained recognition in the scholarly world too when in 1977 it became the first Broadway musical to receive book-length attention in Miles Kreuger’s thorough and authoritative “Show Boat”: The Story of a Classic American Musical.4 Five years later, manuscript material for the musical numbers discarded during the tryout months prior to the December 1927 premiere was discovered in the Warner Brothers Warehouse in Secaucus, New Jersey.5 By April 1983 the Houston Opera Company—which had in the late 1970s presented and recorded a Porgy and Bess that restored material cut from its pre-Broadway tryouts—arrived in New York with a version of Show Boat that used Robert Russell Bennett’s original orchestrations (rediscovered in 1978) and most of the previously discarded tryout material.

In 1988 John McGlinn (1953–2009), who had served as a music editor for the Houston Opera, conducted a recording of Show Boat on EMI/Angel that incorporated Bennett’s 1927 orchestrations and restored tryout material. McGlinn’s recording offered a significant amount of dialogue with musical underscoring. It even included an appendix containing longer versions of several scenes (shortened for the New York opening) and songs that Kern composed for the 1928 London engagement, the 1936 Universal film (with a screenplay by Hammerstein and new songs by Kern), and the New York revival in 1946.6

Critics who attended the opening night on December 27, 1927, at the Ziegfeld sensed that Show Boat was not only a hit but a show of originality and significance. Robert Coleman, for example, described Show Boat in the Daily Mirror as “a work of genius” and a show which demonstrated the sad fact that “managers have not until now realized the tremendous possibilities of the musical comedy as an art form.”7 Coleman’s review is also representative in its praise of the original run’s exceptional production values, including “fourteen glorious settings” and a superb cast. Although Show Boat, in contrast to other Ziegfeld productions, did not open with a lineup of scantily clad chorus girls, Coleman thought he saw “a chorus of 150 of the most beautiful girls ever glorified by Mr. Ziegfeld.”8

Within a few days after its opening Percy Hammond wrote that Show Boat was “the most distinguished light opera of its generation,” and Brooks Atkinson described it as “one of those epochal works about which garrulous old men gabble for twenty-five years after the scenery has rattled off to the storehouse.”9 Nearly every critic described Kern’s score either as his best or at least his recent best. Surveys of the American musical as far back as Cecil Smith’s Musical Comedy in America (1950) support these original assessments and single out Show Boat as the only musical of its time “to achieve a dramatic verisimilitude that seemed comparable to that of the speaking stage.”10 Beginning in the late 1960s historians would almost invariably emphasize Show Boat’s unprecedented integration of music and drama, its three-dimensional characters, and its bold and serious subject matter, including miscegenation and unhappy marriages.

Although critics for the most part found silver linings nearly everywhere, they also freely voiced their discontent with one aspect of the work: the libretto. Show Boat might give the highly respected (albeit somewhat curmudgeonly) critic George Jean Nathan “a welcome holiday from the usual grumbling,” but most critics felt that the libretto, while vastly superior to other books of the time, did not demonstrate the same perfection as Jerome Kern’s music and Florenz Ziegfeld’s production.11 In particular, critics voiced their displeasure with the final scene. Robert Garland, who described Show Boat as “an American masterpiece,” noted some “faltering, like many another offering, only when it approaches the end,” and Alexander Woollcott wrote that “until the last scene, when it all goes gaudy and empty and routine, it is a fine and distinguished achievement.”12

More recent historians continued to view Show Boat as a refreshing but flawed departure from other shows of its day. Richard Traubner, for example, who praised Show Boat as “the greatest of all American operettas,” attributed this greatness to its triumph over “libretto problems.”13 Even Show Boat aficionado Kreuger corroborates the verdict of earlier complaints: “As a concession to theatrical conventions of the time, Hammerstein kept everyone alive to the end and even arranged a happy reunion for the long-parted lovers, decisions, he revealed to this writer, that he came to regret.”14

Despite these reservations, only Lehman Engel, the distinguished Broadway conductor and the first writer to establish canonical criteria for the American musical (see the “Coda” to chapter 1), would banish Show Boat from this elite group. Although Engel acknowledges that Show Boat’s “score and lyrics are among the best ever written in our theater,” he tempers this praise by his assessment of “serious weaknesses.”15 For Engel, Show Boat’s “characters are two-dimensional, its proportions are outrageous, its plot development predictable and corny, and its ending unbearably sweet.”16 Engel is particularly perturbed by six “not only silly but sloppy” coincidences that take place in Chicago within a