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

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.

Musical Symbolism and Dramatic Meaning

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.

In its purest form, closest to nature, like Mahler’s cuckoos in his First Symphony (1888), Kern has chosen to represent the river by the interval of a perfect fourth (the same interval that begins “Taps” and “Reveille”). As shown in Example 2.1a, “Fish got to swim [B-E], and birds got to fly” [E-B]), Kern uses this perfect fourth to connect the force of the natural world with the central human theme of the work embodied in “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man”: a woman in love is destined to love her man forever, even when he abandons her. The theme first appears early in the work as underscoring for the dialogue in which the unrequited lover Pete questions Queenie about how she acquired the brooch he had given Julie. Since audiences have not yet heard the words to this song, its meaning cannot be fully grasped during the exchange between Pete and Queenie that interrupts choruses of “Cotton Blossom.” But with Example 2.1a, the lyrical version of Julie’s song that whites would not know (it was sung by her African-American mother when Julie was a child), Kern and Hammerstein have successfully connected Queenie and Julie from the outset of the show. Julie’s identity as a mulatto otherwise remains undisclosed until two scenes later, when the meaning and impact of her association with Queenie’s race will be clarified.

Significantly, the five three-note Show Boat themes shown in Example 2.2 are sung by and to people–or in one case to an anthromorphized boat—who are part of the river and close to nature.45 The largest group of these “river” motives, nearly all introduced in Show Boat’s opening scene, consist of short musical figures, in which Kern fills in the perfect fourth of “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man” with a single additional note. The four notes of the “Cotton Blossom” (Example 2.2a) when reversed provide the opening musical material for the main chorus of Joe’s “Ol’ Man River” (Example 2.2b) and, when reshuffled, Cap’n Andy’s theme (Example 2.2c).46 Additional transformations of these three notes encompassed within a perfect fourth can be found in the opening of “Queenie’s Ballyhoo” (Example 2.2d) and in a prominent segment of “Mis’ry’s Comin’ Aroun’” (Example 2.2e),