Skirball Salon: Show/Boat: A Conversation

Join Professor Laurence Maslon (NYU Tisch) and Professor Michael Dinwiddie (NYU Gallatin) for a conversation on the history, significance, and legacy of Show Boat – including the reimagined staging at NYU Skirball in January 2025 – in the NYU Skirball Lower Lobby.

Show Boat – a 1927 musical with a score by Jerome Kern, book and lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II, based on Edna Ferber’s 1926 novel – is universally recognized by scholars of American theater and musical theater as a seminal text and a groundbreaking (and popular) addition to the Broadway canon. The musical was groundbreaking in its use of narrative, race, American culture, gender politics, and epic storytelling back in 1927. Show/Boat: A River will be the first production of Show Boat since it has entered the public domain and therefore the first production that can be reinterpreted without any restrictions from the original rights holders.

Professors Dinwiddie and Maslon will hold a free-form discussion about how Show Boat continues to engage, enrage, entangle, and entertain audiences after nearly a century in the spotlight of American culture.

Free and open to the public. 

Michael Dinwiddie is a dramatist and composer whose works have been produced in New York, regional, and educational theater. He has been playwright-in-residence at Michigan State University, St. Louis University, Florida A&M University, and taught screenwriting courses at SUNY Stony Brook, California State University at San Bernardino, and Universidad de Palermo in Buenos Aires, Argentina, among others.  An Inaugural Fellow at Touchstone Pictures in the Walt Disney Writers Program, Michael worked as a staff writer on ABC-Lorimar TV’s hit series Hangin’ with Mr. Cooper. His honors include the Torchbearer’s Award (AUDELCO), the Frederica L. Teer Spirit Award as “a visionary and catalyst for institution building” from the National Black Theatre, honorary lifetime membership in the Black Theatre Network, and a National Endowment from the Arts Fellowship in Playwriting.  He has served on the boards of the New Federal Theatre, the Classical Theatre of Harlem, and the Duke Ellington Center for the Arts.  Michael is the President of the August Wilson Society, and sits on the NewFest LGBTQ+ Film and Media Board of Directors. In 2005, Michael received the NYU Distinguished Teaching Medal.  His course offerings include: Migration and American Culture; Dramatizing History I and II; Poets in Protest: Footsteps to Hip-Hop; James Reese Europe and American Music; Sissle, Blake and the Minstrel Tradition; Guerrilla Screenwriting; Motown Matrix: Race, Gender and Class Identity in “The Sound of Young America”;” and study-abroad courses In and Of the City (NYU Buenos Aires), African Playwrights (NYU Ghana), and Cultural Memory and Resistance (NYU Abu Dhabi). In 2018 he was inducted into the College of Fellows of the American Theatre at the Kennedy Center, and in 2022 the Black Liberated Arts Center, Inc. established the Michael D. Dinwiddie Playwright Award. He is editor of the Theatre Communications Group (TCG) publication, Holy Ground: The National Black Theatre Festival Anthology.

Laurence Maslon is an arts professor at NYU’s Grad Acting Program. In 2014, he edited the two-volume anthology American Musicals (1927-1969)—which includes the first full text of Show Boat—for the Library of America. His most recent book is I’ll Drink to That!: Broadway Cocktails, published by Insight Editions in 2023 (winner, Gold Medal, Independent Book Publishers, 2024). He is also the host and producer of the radio series, Broadway to Main Street on the NPR radio station WLIW-FM. The program is winner of the 2019 ASCAP Foundation/Deems Taylor Award for Radio Broadcast. Among the documentaries he has either cowritten or coproduced for PBS are: the Emmy-Award-winning Broadway: The American Musical; Sammy Davis, Jr.: I’ve Gotta Be Me; and Richard Rodgers: The Sweetest Sounds. His history of recorded music from Broadway, Broadway to Main Street: How Show Music Enchanted America, was published in 2018 by Oxford University Press. He has served on the nominating committee for the Tony Awards from 2007 to 2010 and he has written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, the New Yorker, Opera News, Stagebill, and American Theatre. His revised version of the Gershwin musical Strike Up the Band was presented at Carnegie Hall in 2024.