MrSmith1's picture

    Oh Showboat, Why Do I Love You?

     

     

     

    A while ago, TCM ran the 1951 version of the musical “Showboat”, with Howard Keel, Kathryn Grayson and Ava Gardner.  Although, I much prefer the 1936 version (directed by James Whale and starring Irene Dunne and Paul Robeson), I watched it, because to me, any Showboat is better than no Showboat.   And as I watched, I reminded myself that I have been meaning to write this blog for some time.

    1927 was an amazing year by anybody's standards; Babe Ruth hit 60 home runs, Charles Lindbergh became the first person to fly solo across the Atlantic ocean, "The Jazz Singer" starring Al Jolson premiered and was a monster hit, while Buster Keaton's masterpiece, "The General" premiered and flopped ...

    1927 was also the year that Philo Farnsworth transmitted the first electronic television pictures, the Harlem Globetrotters played their very first game and The Cyclone roller coaster opened at Coney Island.  And to top it all off, two days after Christmas, fabled theatrical Impresario, Flo Ziegfeld produced a new show which would change Broadway forever ... a musical based on a sprawling best-selling novel by Edna Ferber that spanned 40 years, 1887 to 1927.  The show had music by Jerome Kern and lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II.    It employed the first integrated cast ever seen on a Broadway stage, and would become known as the first ‘book’ musical; a  play where the songs were integral to the revealing of character and/or the forwarding of the plot.  To this day, Showboat remains one of the great achievements in musical theater.   It dared to go where no musical had gone before; employing a serious plot that dealt with racism, miscegenation, alcoholism and enduring love.   It was much more than the frivolous boy-meets-girl type shows that had been the comfort zone for previous musicals and operettas. 

    At this point, let me say, I have been a devoted fan of Broadway musicals for over 50 years, and Showboat is still one of my favorite shows.   

    Why?   Well obviously, the first thing is that is has so many great songs.  The most famous, of course, is “Ol’ Man River”, with its pentatonic scale melody (That means you can play it on the piano using only the black keys),  “Make Believe”, where Mr. Hammerstein literally invented a genre; the conditional love song.  (A conditional love song allows the play’s lovers to sing about being in love in the first act, rather than having to wait until the plot has them fall in love in Act Two. )  Hammerstein would continue to use this device to great success when he worked with Richard Rodgers some 20 years later.  “People Will Say We’re in Love” from “Oklahoma”, and “If I Loved You” from “Carousel” are just two examples. and then there’s Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man” ( aka ‘Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly …’) , “Life Upon the Wicked Stage”, “You Are Love”, and “Why Do I Love You?”, to name some of Showboat’s memorable list of songs.  Kern had a most remarkable way with melodies.  (side-note: The melody of “Ol’ Man River” Is actually an inversion of the show’s opening number, “Cotton Blossom” and sung at a slower tempo, thus turning an upbeat tune into a sadder, darker number.  A lyricist friend once told me that when someone asked Jerome Kern about it, and questioned whether or not anyone would notice, Kern said,  “It doesn’t matter if the audience realizes it consciously or not, they would feel it.”  And I think they do.)   

    I suppose looking at it from today’s perspective, Showboat’s book is a bit clunky in terms of plot and heck, three of the songs weren’t even written by Kern and Hammerstein.  They were authentic riverboat songs taken from the period in which the show is set.  Kern insisted on using them because he wanted to get an authentic feel for the world the show inhabits.

    Still, something about the show moves me. Deeply.  It tugs at my heart in many ways, from yearnings for my own lost loves, to my sense of injustice about the treatment of blacks in America, to what seems to me to be a very zen-like statement that Time, like Ol’ Man River, just keeps rolling along and we, like the  passengers on the showboat, are merely enjoying the drama and comedy of our lives as we are carried along by it.  

    I imagine it was a bit shocking to audiences used to the standard plots of earlier musicals.  In fact, on opening night, Flo Ziegfeld was convinced the show was a flop, because the audience was virtually silent after the final curtain rang down.  It wasn’t until he read the rave reviews the next day and saw the long lines at the box office that he realized he had a monster hit.   For me, the show stirs emotions that go far deeper than most musicals, even ones written today. 

    I was part of the generation whose parents considered musicals the popular music of the day.  From Irving Berlin and Cole Porter, to Rodgers and Hammerstein and Lerner and Loewe, popular music was Broadway and vice versa.

    A lot of my early musical appreciation grew out of listening to my parents’ old 78’s which included many Original Cast recordings.  It’s also where I discovered the delightfully quirky eccentricities of the Raymond Scott Quintet. (But that’s a story for another time.)   

    As a little kid, I was enraptured watching Mary Martin performing the musical “Peter Pan” on TV. Although, to tell the truth, it did take me a while to understand how a woman could play a little boy.  “How is she able do that?” I kept asking …My parents finally told me it was the costume she wore … And evidently, at age 5, that was all the explanation I needed. 

    Luckily, I got to see a lot of Broadway shows.  I lived most of my childhood on Long Island, and my parents would often take my sister and myself in to see shows.  In addition, my school seemed to find an excuse for a field trip to see a Broadway show at least once a year.  And in those days, Broadway was a much more affordable entertainment option. (I recall buying two Orchestra tickets for the original production of Hair for $10.)

    I went to see my first Broadway show when I was 9 years old.  That was in 1960, and my parents, my sister and I had driven into to the City.  As always, my dad parked the car in the Rockefeller Center garage. (I’m pretty sure that was the only place in the city that my father knew to park, because no matter where we were going in Manhattan, we always seemed to end up parking in the Rockefeller Center garage.) 

    I remember we didn’t have tickets to anything, my parents decided that we would just “See what we could get” … so we spent the morning going to different theaters and ticket brokers trying to get tickets to a matinee.  We tried for the big hits like Bye Bye Birdie and Do-Re-Mi with Phil Silvers, but they were both sold-out or didn’t have 4 tickets together.  One of the box office people told us to try this new show which was in previews.  It was written by Meredith Willson, (who wrote the Music Man, which was one of my favorite records at the time, because I could joyfully march around my room and sing-along to “76 trombones.”)  So we took a chance and went to see “The Unsinkable Molly Brown” with Tammy Grimes and Harve Presnell.  Now, mind you, I had never been to any live theater before, so for me, this was a revelation.  I could barely contain my excitement as the house lights dimmed, the overture struck up, and the curtain rose.  That began my love affair with the theater. 

    But getting back to Showboat, the best of all the versions, I’ve seen was, in my opinion, the Harold Prince production of the mid-1990’s, which won a Tony award for Best Revival in 1995.  Although my mom didn’t pass away until 2012, a week short of reaching her 94th birthday, that production of Showboat was, sadly, the last Broadway show that we saw together.   

    My mom, of course, had her own collection of Broadway memories … for example, she had attended the second night of the initial run of South Pacific, and she had been going to Broadway since she was a child, although she admitted she had not seen the original version of Showboat, but had seen the 1947 revival..  If I had access to a time machine, I think one of the first trips I would take would be to go back to see that 1927 opening night of Showboat.  Today of course, some people say the show is racist because the lyrics in the opening number originally used the ‘n word’, and the Black characters are mostly in subservient roles. Personally, I think that is a case of judging a work by our current sensibilities rather than judging it in the context of its time.  The use of the “n” word, sung by the black members of the chorus, offers a rather biting comment on the times; Even when the n word is substituted with other words, like colored folks, it still makes it’s point; “Colored folks work on the Mississippi, colored folks work while the white folks play …”  I would suggest that the show is about as anti-racist as you could get.  For example, in the scene where a local sheriff has been tipped off by a disgruntled worker that Julie and her husband Steve are in a mixed marriage and therefore violating the miscegenation laws common in the South, everyone is supportive when just before the sheriff arrives. Steve takes out his pocket knife and makes a small cut on Julie’s hand, sucking some of her blood and swallowing it.  Thus, he is able to claim to the sheriff that while it is true that Julie is of mixed race, he also has black blood in him.  While this saves Julie from being arrested, it also means they can no longer be the showboat’s leading actors, which seems ludicrous today, but remember 1927 was only a few years removed from the premiere of Birth of a Nation, in which the KKK were depicted as heroes for crying out loud.    As an audience we feel the injustice and unfairness towards Julie and Steve.  I don’t know any racist shows that work to engender sympathy for people who are victims of racial discrimination. do you?   20 years later, Oscar Hammerstein wrote about racial prejudice again in South Pacific and reminded us that racism ‘has to be carefully taught.’ 

    So while Showboat may seem dated in its portrayal of racial relationships, it is a product of its time, and I would say it was boldly breaking ground by showing the black characters as real, sympathetic people, and not comically exaggerated stereotypes. 

    But in the end, you have to keep coming back to the music.  It’s big and grand and full of sweeping melodies.   The shows ambitions are big and grand too; it seeks to express some profound truths about Love and Life.   Why do I love you, Showboat?  Because fish gotta swim and birds gotta fly … and Ol’ Man River he just keeps rollin’ along.

     

     

     

    Comments

    Smith, you just about have me in tears. What a wonderful piece and I share your emotions.

    And I am jealous of anyone who can partake of N.Y. shows, musicals or otherwise.

    In the late 70's I was on assignment in London, during the blackouts (a miners strike, I think) and one could get into any performance by showing up thirty minutes ahead of time. I gorged myself, unbelievable. There was kind of a cult thing, going to SuperStar every week on Friday night. I saw every bedroom comedy that had ever been staged.

    I guess you know about "76 Trombones"

    I was going to ask you, what's the best source for the old musicals on DVD.


    76 Trombones ... Do you mean that it has the same melody as another song in The Music Man,  Goodnight My Someone?  Meredith Wilson just slowed the tempo and altered the rhythm slightly and turned a march into a love song, then put the two together in one scene were they are sung as counterpoint ...  Theater used to be an integral part to most New Yorker's lives, because it was only slightly more expensive than seeing a movie.  Now, it has become so expensive that seeing a play or musical has to be a special occasion, which forces the producers to produce more spectacle type shows so people feel as if they got their money's worth.   When I was young we used to 'second act' a lot of shows after they had been running a while and we knew they weren't selling out.  We would sneak in with the audience returning from intermission and grab an empty seat and enjoy half a show for free. P.S. I like the online TCM store. They have a great selection of old movie musicals.  


    We had a "move down" maneuver. Get the cheap seats then eyeball any empty orchestra seats and move down after intermission. My room mate once stood up in the balcony after I moved down and yelled, "throw that bum out" pointing in my direction but the curtain was just about to go up and the ushers clamped him, not me.


    Ha!  "Throw the bum out!"
     

     


    Bravo, Mr. Smith! You've written a lovely, heartfelt homage to a wonderful art form. Yet more than that, you expressed your love and appreciation in such a way as to make us all feel it, too.

    I saw Phantom of the Opera on Broadway in December of 2000. We got all dressed up, hired a snazzy car and finished the evening with dinner at an upscale restaurant with an amazing city view. It was a dream weekend in New York. We bought Christmas presents at the gift shop in the World Trade Center ... I haven't thought of that in awhile.

    Thank you for this, it's just grand.


    Thanks, barefooted. I have been lucky enough to see some amazing Broadway productions over the years. I remember seeing Sondheim's Company with my parents during the first or second week of its run. I was so excited and thrilled by it, but my mom and dad actually told me that there weren't any tunes they came out of the theater humming (Which, funnily enough, was to became a frequent knock against Sondheim by the critics, a knock, by the way, I don't think he deserves) Anyway ... Thanks again for the kind words.

    I had the unforgettable experience to hear William Warfield sing Ole Man River with orchestral back-up on a summer evening in an outdoor amphitheater at a Michigan music institution around 1984. He was there to lecture, up from Illinois.

    There were at least 500 in the audience on wooden bleachers or on the gently sloping ground, surrounded by forest. There were some other performers, and there were loads of small children making a hum of noise and movement.

    Warfield appeared towards the end, he was dressed in a stunning white suit and slacks, a huge figure with broad shoulders, 'barrel' chest and a voice that needed no amplification. He sang just one song. As his deep baritone tones rolled out the melody, total silence suddenly prevailed, all eyes turned to the stage, including the children.  Even those who had never heard of Show Boat (including yours truly), realized they were witness to a stunning American song, by a man unsurpassed in its performance. "tote that barge, lift that bale, get a little drunk and you lands in jai---ai----ulll......llllll..." He lived until 2002, he was in his 60's in the 80's. I note Wikipedia says his 'voice was declining' into the 70's and on, there was absolutely no hint of decline that night.


    Amazing.  What a wonderful memory.   I have had a couple of those moments; times when you knew you were witnessing something very special.   My mom used to talk about seeing Judy Garland at the Palace in the 1950's when she made her big comeback, and so when Garland returned to play the Palace again for the last time in the late 60's, I decided as either a Christmas or Mother's Day present, to take my mom.  She was reluctant to go because she didn't want to spoil the golden memory she had of the earlier time, but she eventually decided to go with me.  We sat in the rear of the orchestra and being very young and naive, I didn't quite understand why there seemed to be so many nice looking young men in the seats surrounding us.  Critics had said that Garland's voice was not what it used to be, but that night, she was really as good as ever, and the crowd went crazy for her.  I had never experienced that kind of electricity before. What a performance.  It was an experience I'll never forget. 


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