Rolling Along with Show Boat
To understand the seismic impact of Show Boat’s Broadway opening—only three days before the end of 1927—you have only to look at the shows that opened in 1926.
Among the 212 shows that opened on Broadway (yep, that’s right—212) were the George White’s Scandals, the Earl Carroll Vanities of 1926, the Garrick Gaieties of 1926, Nic-Nax of 1926, Bare Facts of 1926, Bad Habits of 1926, and Rufus Le Maire’s Affairs, just to name a few. (Alas, Padlocks of 1927—a revue of censored material—didn’t open until the following year.). You get the picture. While the Gershwin brothers and Rodgers and Hart were producing their incipient book musicals that season, these nearly indistinguishable and meretricious annual revues dominated the scene.
It took the combined energy, talent, and courage of Edna Ferber, Jerome Kern, Oscar Hammerstein II, and Florenz Ziegfeld to turn the tide of the American musical and steer the first grown-up American musical into harbor.
The novelist and playwright Edna Ferber first became interested in the performance tradition of the floating showboats in 1925. Her novel Show Boat was published by Doubleday in August of the following year. Composer Jerome Kern read the novel in October, and immediately saw it as the kind of material he was looking for: more textured, serious, and inherently musical than the assembly-line vehicles of the 1920s. When Kern broached the notion of a musical adaptation of her large-scale, epic novel, Ferber’s initially expressed reservations about the appropriateness of such a venture among the numbskull revues inhabiting Broadway at the time, but she was swayed by Kern’s seriousness of purpose and by that of his collaborator, Oscar Hammerstein II.
Kern and Hammerstein worked quickly and by November 29 auditioned a first act for producer Florenz Ziegfeld, who wrote to a colleague: “This is the best musical comedy I have ever been fortunate to get hold of.” Kern and Hammerstein signed contracts with Ziegfeld on December 11, promising a working script by January 1, 1927, for a proposed mid-April premiere.
Hammerstein’s task of bringing Ferber’s nineteen-chapter novel to the musical stage was without precedent in the American theater. Ferber’s novel was a serious work of fiction, elaborate in structure, moving back and forth in chronology over five decades, and featuring lengthy digressions that Hammerstein was obliged to elide. He retained the novel’s major through-lines—including its harsh look at race relations–while softening some of its more tragic elements. Hammerstein also followed Ferber’s lead and was the first writer of the musical stage to present Black characters interacting with white characters in a manner that transcended mockery and simplistic stereotypes.
The novel’s last three chapters, which brought the story into the “present day” 1920s, provided the most trouble for Hammerstein. In one draft, he created a scene where Joe and Queenie’s grandson grows up to become the famous singer Paul Robeson. Robeson had been actively sought by Kern and Hammerstein to play Joe and the intention was to have Robeson himself come on stage at this point to give a brief recital of his familiar repertoire, apparently from the “stage” of Carnegie Hall. When Robeson was unable to appear in the 1927 production, the scene was cut–mercifully, perhaps. (Robeson eventually appeared in the London version and the 1936 film.)
Show Boat made its out-of-town debut in Washington, D.C. on November 15, 1927—half-a-year later than anticipated, much to Ziegfeld’s annoyance–with a running time of over four hours. The collaborators continued to revise the musical and Show Boat finally docked in New York on December 27 at the new Ziegfeld Theater, Ziegfeld cut short the run of the theater’s opening attraction, Rio Rita, to make way for Show Boat. The musical ran for 577 performances and was so successful that Ziegfeld revived it on Broadway as early as 1932.
With its epic narrative, complex themes, provocative problems, and conflicted (and multi-generational) characters, Show Boat was the most advanced and adventurous musical of its day by a nautical mile. As Stephen Sondheim put it, in the documentary Broadway: The American Musical, “What Oscar did was to marry European operetta and American musical comedy tradition. One of the reasons Show Boat turned out as well as it did is that Kern knew what Oscar was trying to do, and he was just as interested in doing it—attempting to tell some kind of story about character.”
Laurence Maslon is an arts professor at NYU and the editor of Library of America’s collection American Musicals (1927-1969) which, of course, includes Show Boat.