by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
PBS’s “Fall Arts Special” last night was Jerome Kern’s and Oscar
Hammerstein II’s Show Boat in a
semi-staged performance by the New York Philharmonic with soloists and chorus —
which means that the leading actors wore costumes (though the choristers
didn’t) and enacted their roles, but the only set was a painted backdrop of a
show boat (depicted accurately for a change — a “show boat” wasn’t a
self-propelled steamer but a barge, moved down the Mississippi River by a
motorized watercraft called a “tow boat” which, despite its name, was actually behind the show boat, pushing it along) projected on a
screen behind the orchestra. The New York Philharmonic was seated on the stage
between the singers and the screen, which as Charles pointed out throughout the
show made the singers hard to hear — though the presenters made a big deal out
of using Robert Russell Bennett’s original orchestrations of the songs, they
forgot that Bennett had intended them to be played by an orchestra in a pit under the stage, where they would give the singers less
competition. Show Boat remains a
remarkable musical, even more remarkable when you consider when it was
originally produced (1927) and by whom: Florenz Ziegfeld, whose name was
associated with plotless “revue” shows like the annual Ziegfeld
Follies. When Ziegfeld did produce a show with an actual story, it was usually
a simple-minded one whose only function was to set up and cue the songs and
dances — until Oscar Hammerstein II somehow talked him into producing a musical
he and Jerome Kern were working on based on Show Boat, a best-selling novel by Edna Ferber which addressed
some of the grimmer parts of human existence. The first act centers around the Cotton
Blossom, the show boat owned by Captain
Andy Hawks (Fred Willard, whose past as a mock TV talk-show host kept getting
in the way of my suspension of disbelief) and his Northern-born wife Parthenia (Jane Alexander),
universally known around the boat as Parthy Ann. The stars of the show boat troupe,
who present The Parson’s Bride
(obviously written by Hammerstein, who did both book and lyrics, as a
deliberately awful parody of the popular melodramas of the 1890’s) and then,
mercifully for their audiences, do a concert of songs and dances afterwards,
are Julie La Verne (Vanessa Williams) and her husband Steve Baker (Edward
Watts).
Only Pete, a “river rat” with a slimy reputation, has the hots for
Julie and, when she rejects him, steals her photo from the show boat’s
sandwich-board ad and takes it to the sheriff to report that Julie’s real name
is Julie Dozier and she was the product of a white father and a Black mother.
In one of the most dramatic scenes of the show, Steve responds to the sheriff’s
imminent arrival by cutting his wife’s finger and sucking a bit of her blood so
that, when the sheriff does arrive, he asks him, “If I got one drop of nigger blood in me, does that make
me a nigger?” (It was interesting that the New York Philharmonic used all the
substitutes for the N-word Hammerstein authorized in later versions when the good guys were speaking or singing, but kept “nigger”
when it was coming from a bad guy, or a good guy trying to make himself look bad.) Told yes, he says, “Everyone here can swear I
got more than one drop of nigger blood in me right now!” So he’s able to keep himself and his wife out of
jail, but they have to quit their jobs and leave the show boat immediately just
before the boat is scheduled for a potentially lucrative four-night run at Fort
Adams. What is Captain Andy to do? His daughter Magnolia (Lauren Worsham)
pleads with him to be allowed to play the female lead herself, since Julie had
been coaching her all this time, and though her mom is ferociously opposed to
her going on the stage, she does so. As for a leading man, Magnolia has already
met and been attracted to Gaylord Ravenal (Julian Ovenden), a professional
gambler who has to leave Natchez in a hurry to escape the people to whom he’s
just lost more money than he had. He pleads with Captain Andy for passage on
the boat, and Andy says he doesn’t take passengers, but if he wants a job as an
actor … The show goes on and it’s a hit, mainly because the audiences see that
the stars are genuinely in love with each other, and at the end there’s a big
wedding in Natchez in which Andy invites not only the crew of the show boat but
all his patrons to watch his daughter and her hot leading man get married. The
second act starts in 1904, eight years later, and Ravenal spends his money as
fast as he makes (or wins) it, so when he hits a losing streak he has nothing
left. He and Magnolia had a daughter, Kim, whom Ravenal placed in a boarding
school run by nuns (when the actress playing the mother superior emerged in a
full sleeveless evening dress — obviously she was not one of the performers required to dress in a
dramatically suitable costume — Charles joked, “What kind of order is this?”), and with his luck having definitively run
out Ravenal decides to leave town and give his last $200 to his wife so their
daughter can finish her term at the convent school.
Broke and with no way to
make a living, Magnolia reluctantly accepts an offer from the comic duo from
the show boat, Frank and Ellie Schultz (Christopher Fitzgerald and Alli
Mauzey), to set up an audition for her at the Trocadero, the nightclub they now
work for. By coincidence (or authorial fiat), Captain Andy shows up at the
Trocadero on opening night, where Julie (under yet another last name) is the
star but is washing out her career with booze. She threatens to walk out on the
show to go on a bender, and the nightclub’s manager says if she does it’ll be
her last time — and Julie overhears Magnolia’s audition and drops out of the
show, urging the manager to hire Magnolia as her replacement. Magnolia is given
Charles K. Harris’s “After the Ball” to sing in the show, and she’s so nervous
she flubs it — until her dad calls out to her from the audience, her nerves
calm down and she gives a great performance that makes her an instant star and
sends her to a career on Broadway. The story flashes forward to 1927, where
we’re back on the show boat (the fact that it’s still a going concern is a bit
surprising) and Magnolia returns with her now-adult daughter Kim (who, in a
gimmick that was also part of the original production, is also played by Lauren
Worsham, though Erika Hennigsen played Kim as a child in an earlier scene) in
tow. Kim is about to make her Broadway musical debut and showcases the song
she’s going to make her debut with, and Magnolia accepts the continued love of
her parents and the Black servant couple Joe (Norm Lewis) and Queenie (NaTasha
Yvette Williams) who’ve worked for her parents all her life. She also gets back
together with Gaylord Ravenal for a late-in-life reunion when he turns up at
their daughter’s big opening. Show Boat is a story full of political, moral and emotional points far removed
from the typical musical fare of its time, and though some historians of the
Broadway musical have said that its history is divided into two periods,
“Before Show Boat” and “After Show
Boat,” it wasn’t until 16 years later, when
Hammerstein teamed up with Richard Rodgers for Oklahoma!, that another musical dared show this much of the
darker side of human existence. Edna Ferber’s novel, which I’ve read, is (not
surprisingly) even darker than the musical — in her version, instead of
becoming a nightclub star and blowing it on alcohol, Julie goes to Chicago and
opens a whorehouse, and in her version Magnolia and Ravenal never get back together — but what remained even after
Hammerstein’s book softened things is still impressively honest and intense.
The stinging attack
on racial prejudice is one of the most astonishing things about Show
Boat — Edna Ferber was anti-racist way before anti-racism was cool (and she sneaked another
attack on racial prejudice into her novel Giant, though that time she was going after anti-Latino
instead of anti-Black bigots) — and so is the whole depiction of a marriage
breaking up because of the man’s gambling addiction and a woman coming to grief
because of alcoholism. One wonders what the 1927 audiences made of it — were
they really touched and moved by the story, or did they just sit through it to
hear Jerome Kern’s glorious songs? And Kern’s songs are glorious — though the fact that the show’s biggest
hit, “Ol’ Man River,” is sung by a Black character is itself trail-blazing.
Song after song from this score has become a standard, including “Make Believe”
(the first of what Oscar Hammerstein II called his “conditional love songs,” in
which he solved the problem of how can two people who’ve just met sing a love
duet by having them imagine themselves
as the lovers the plot will make them later — he would do it again with “People
Will Say We’re in Love” from Oklahoma! and “If I Loved You” from Carousel), “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man” (heard in several
guises and several tempi depending largely on whether Black or white characters
are singing it), “You Are Love,” “Why Do I Love You?” and “Bill” — though the
last wasn’t originally from Show Boat but was a song Kern had written 10 years earlier with P. G.
Wodehouse as his lyricist (“before the Nazis kidnapped and tortured him and
broadcast it on the air,” Charles joked). Since Show Boat was a Broadway musical, its contents were shaped by
far more extra-musical pressures than were usually placed on opera composers —
especially after the mid-19th century, when masters like Wagner and
Verdi got the clout to insist that their works be presented as written instead
of subjugated to the whims of primae donnae having diva-style hissy-fits. As early as the original 1927 rehearsals Show
Boat lost one of its greatest songs, “It’s
Getting Hotter in the North,” which was supposed to be the big final number
showing Kim Ravenal’s successful Broadway debut — only Norma Terriss, who was
starring as Magnolia and doubling as the adult Kim, didn’t like the song and
refused to sing it. For the remaining 19 years of his life Jerome Kern looked
for an artistically and commercially successful way to bring his masterpiece to
a satisfying ending — when a Broadway revival was planned in 1946 he came up
with a new song for Kim, “Nobody Else but Me,” which turned out to be the last
song he ever wrote.
When Show Boat
was first filmed in 1929 by Universal, songwriter, showman and entrepreneur
Billy Rose convinced Universal’s executives that the original Kern-Hammerstein
songs were so overexposed audiences wouldn’t want to hear them, so they should
hire Rose and his collaborators to come up with a new score. Only when the film
was previewed audiences complained that it didn’t contain the original songs,
so Universal had quickly to concoct and shoot a 20-minute prologue that would contain them. The musical was revived in 1932 — with
many people who’d either been in the original cast (like Helen Morgan as Julie)
or had replaced them during the first run (like Paul Robeson as Joe — the role
had actually been created for him but originally Jules Bledsoe, who had a
similar reputation as a Black concert singer specializing in spirituals, took the
part; he’s mentioned in Billie Holiday’s first record, “Your Mother’s
Son-in-Law”: “You don’t have to sing like Bledsoe/You can tell the world I said
so”) — and in 1936 Universal remade Show Boat in what became the definitive version, with James
Whale (the genius behind the first two Frankenstein films) directing, Oscar Hammerstein II writing the
script himself (thus ensuring that, within the limits imposed by film length and
the Production Code, the content would be faithful to the original) and a
stellar cast; Irene Dunne as Magnolia, Allan Jones as Ravenal, Helen Morgan as
Julie, Paul Robeson as Joe, Hattie McDaniel as Queenie, Charles Winninger as
Captain Andy and Helen Westley as Parthy Ann. For this film Kern and
Hammerstein wrote three new songs to be inserted, one of which — “Ah Still
Suits Me,” a duet for Robeson and McDaniel (who was a good enough singer to
hold her own with him — before she got into movies she’d been a friend and
colleague of Bessie Smith’s on the TOBA Black vaudeville circuit, whose
initials officially stood for Theatre Owners’ Booking Association but whose
performers joked really meant
“Tough on Black Asses”) — was included in the New York Philharmonic’s
presentation, as was (praise be!) “It’s Getting Hotter in the North.” I first
heard “Hotter” where everyone else did — as part of John McGlinn’s epic
three-CD boxed set of Show Boat
from 1988, which set out to include every song Kern wrote for the show — and I was blown away by it. Alas, the
liner notes of McGlinn’s album said that the Rodgers and Hammerstein
organization, which controls the Show Boat copyrights, wouldn’t let modern-day producers include “Hotter” in Show
Boat productions. So it was a real treat to
hear it here, even though the New York Philharmonic’s conductor, Ted Sperling,
took it slower than McGlinn did and the song lost some of its sprightly verve.
A third film of Show Boat was
made by MGM in 1951 with a script by John Lee Mahin, who decided that the
original had kept Magnolia and Ravenal apart too long — so instead of leaving
her when their daughter is a child and returning when she’s an adult, Mahin had
Ravenal walk out on his wife while she’s pregnant with Kim (though he doesn’t
know that because when he leaves she hadn’t had the chance to tell him) and returns
when Kim is a child. MGM’s producer, Arthur Freed, had wanted to cast Lena
Horne as Julie, but the distribution people told him flat-out he was nuts: with
an actual African-American in one of the leads Southern theatres would never show the film (most of Horne’s MGM movies were
all-star musicals in which, instead of playing a part, she was trotted out
for a number or two, totally disconnected from the story, so MGM’s Southern
branches could merely snip out her songs from the films before they released
them). So Julie ended up being played by Ava Gardner, miscast (and with her
voice erased from the soundtrack at the last minute and replaced with jazz
singer Annette Warren) but still with more star charisma than anyone else in
the cast (Kathryn Grayson as Magnolia, Howard Keel as Ravenal and Joe E. Brown
and Agnes Moorehead surprisingly good as Captain Andy and Parthy Ann) with the
possible exception of William Warfield, who faced with the unenviable task of
following Paul Robeson as Joe did an excellent job even though Warfield, a
classically trained Black bass-baritone who’d never sung a pop song before,
made it a little too “classical,”
too studied. A fourth audio-visual record of Show Boat exists, a previous PBS telecast from 1989, a fully
staged production from the Paper Mill Playhouse in Connecticut (from their name
you don’t need two guesses to figure out what their building formerly was!)
that lasted two hours and pretty much followed what’s become the standard text
of Show Boat, without either originally
deleted songs or later additions. The long history of this show is the biggest
problem with the New York Philharmonic production; anyone with more than a
passing interest in this sort of entertainment has probably seen it before,
either on stage or in the 1936 or 1951 films, and has certainly heard plenty of other people’s recordings of the
songs (including Billie Holiday’s 1937 “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man,” in which
she took out all the “torchy” leaps, groans and sobs Kern had wrote into the
melody and thereby made a fine song even finer), and it’s hard to appreciate
the current performers without flashing back to people who did the songs
earlier and better. The biggest problem was the Joe, Norm Lewis, who sang well
enough but is a baritone instead of bass and who just doesn’t have the
authority Robeson (and, to a lesser extent, Warfield) brought to the song —
indeed, in one of the ensemble numbers I spotted a Black man with dreadlocks
who got a few notes to himself in one of the choruses, and I heard his deep
bass voice and thought, “Why didn’t they cast him as Joe?”
One radical innovation of this Show
Boat was that it finally realized Arthur
Freed’s dream and cast a genuine Black person, Vanessa Williams, as Julie —
though it turned out that may not have been such a good idea after all; with
someone visibly Black in the role Julie being “outed” as mixed-race simply
doesn’t carry the shock value it did with white performers like Morgan and
Gardner in the role. Instead you think, “So you just figured out she’s Black? We’ve known it all along!” At least, once Williams starts
belting out “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man,” she sings with an electric power that
eludes most of the other performers. Julian Ovenden tries for Allan Jones’
mixture of sincerity and insouciance in the role of Ravenal but just doesn’t
have quite enough voice to pull it off. Lauren Worsham starts out way too childlike to be credible as Magnolia, though as
the story progresses and gets darker both her acting and her singing improve
and she becomes more credible as a complex character. Jane Alexander as Parthy
Ann is quite good — maybe not at Moorehead’s level, but better than anyone else
(including Helen Westley in the 1936 film) — but Fred Willard as her husband
has the weight of his TV characterization hanging over him and his performance
is deprived of Andy’s big moment in the original show: when one of the show
boat’s performances is disrupted by two gun-wielding rowdies and he has to
continue the show by playing all the parts himself. Next to Vanessa Williams,
the best performance is contributed by NaTasha Yvette Williams as Queenie; her
singing in the ensembles on “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man” and partnering with
Norm Lewis on “Ah Still Suits Me” is powerful and authoritative. Ted Sperling not
only conducted but did the stage direction, and though some of the affectations
of the “semi-staged” performance got silly (particularly when the Black
choristers sang about the back-breaking work they’re doing unloading cotton and
what they’re actually toting and lifting are … bamboo chairs), for the most
part it was an entertaining presentation that did justice to one of the
greatest musicals of all time, even though the ghosts of singers (and actors) who did more
justice to this material in bygone ages hung heavily over the evening — the New
York Philharmonic’s Web site discloses that the concert production took place
over four days, October 5-8, but doesn’t offer any information as to when during that four-day run the performance they
actually recorded and showed nationally took place.
