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

three-week period in 1904 (significantly all in the second act), coincidences that are comically improbable, even in a city with half its present population.17

Of the two principal collaborators, Hammerstein (1895–1960) had far more experience with operetta-type musicals as well as recent successes. Wild-flower (1923), created with co-librettist Otto Harbach and composers Herbert Stothart and Vincent Youmans, launched a phenomenally successful decade for Hammerstein as librettist, lyricist, and director for many of Broadway’s most popular operettas and musical comedies: Rose-Marie (1924) and The Wild Rose (1926) with Rudolf Friml and Stothart; Song of the Flame (1925) with George Gershwin and Stothart; and the still-revived The Desert Song (1926) with Sigmund Romberg. Two years before Show Boat Hammerstein had also collaborated with Harbach and Kern on the latter’s most recent success, Sunny.

Kern (1885–1945), whose mother was a musician, “had some European training in a small town outside of Heidelberg” when he was seventeen and studied piano, counterpoint, harmony, and composition the following year at the New York College of Music.18 Ten years before Show Boat, Kern stated in interviews that “songs must be suited to the action and the mood of the play.”19 At the same time he also considered devoting his full attention to composing symphonies.

Although there is no reason to doubt Kern’s aspiration “to apply modern art to light music as Debussy and those men have done to more serious work,”20 it was not until Show Boat that Kern was able to fully realize these goals. Kern had, of course, previously created complete scores for an impressive series of precocious integrated musicals during the Princess Theatre years (1915–1918), at least two of which, Very Good Eddie and Leave It to Jane, have been successfully revived in recent decades. For the earlier years of his career, however, Kern had been confined mainly to composing interpolated songs to augment the music of others. Two of these, “How’d You Like to Spoon with Me?” interpolated into The Earl and the Girl (1905), and “They Didn’t Believe Me” from The Girl from Utah (1914), remain among his best known. Similarly, Sally (1920) and Sunny (1925), two vehicles for the superstar Marilyn Miller and his most popular shows composed during the years between the intimate Princess Theatre productions and the grandiose Show Boat, are remembered primarily for their respective songs “Look for the Silver Lining” and “Who?” and have not fared well in staged revivals.

Before 1924, Edna Ferber had never even heard of the once-popular traveling river productions that made their home on show boats. By the following summer she had begun the novel Show Boat, which was published serially in Woman’s Home Companion between April and September 1926 and in its entirety in August by Doubleday. Early in October, Kern, who had read half of Ferber’s new book, phoned Woollcott to ask for a letter of introduction to its author and met her at a performance of Kern’s latest musical, Criss Cross, that same evening. Even before Ferber had signed a contract on November 17 giving Kern and Hammerstein “dramatico-musical” rights to her hot property, the co-conspirators had already completed enough material to impress Follies impresario Ziegfeld nine days later.21 On December 11 Kern and Hammerstein signed their contracts, according to which a script was to be delivered by January 1 and the play was to appear “on or before the first day of April 1927.”22

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.

Reconstructing Show Boat (1927–1994)

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