The end of the romantic operettas in America came, it's generally agreed, with Showboat. It took the step up from simple romantic plots in fanciful settings, to gritty realistic settings for, yes, romantic plots but involving more complex characters, often carrying strong social messages. It's often called the first Broadway 'musical'. The director of a 2016 revival in London called the show "the mother of all musicals".
Intriguingly, the comments don't always agree on what made it revolutionary - and are seldom at all critical. But like everything to do with opera, the assessment of Showboat is all about the merging of story, music, lyrics, acting and dance, setting and imagery.
With its piercing topics, gorgeous songs, and dramatic content that drove the show to nearly five hours in length in its initial concept, Showboat changed the destiny of the American musical... Showboat absorbed and reflected the flavor of its era (the Roaring Twenties) while setting forth timeless, deep, startling issues. It displayed new standards for characterizations. .. Kern and Hammerstein wanted to push aside the fluff, glitz, and glamor of the typical Broadway revues of their day. Yet their show required the same intensity of talent, costumes, staging, and financial resources employed by the exceptional entrepreneur Florenz Ziegfeld, who had made such American reviews known world-wide. Read on!
Here we come to a completely new genre – the musical play as distinguished from musical comedy. Now … the play was the thing, and everything else was subservient to that play. Now … came complete integration of song, humor and production numbers into a single and inextricable artistic entity.
Or as this popular online course on American music put it, Showboat was "the Broadway Musical That Changed Everything. Widely considered one the most pivotal shows in the history of the American theater, Show Boat (1927) was a theatrical trailblazer. Not only did it mark the first time a major production used the musical comedy format to tell a serious story, but it also was the first time everything in a musical production — the music, lyrics, book, dances, and cast — were all utilized for the goal of delineating character and moving a narrative forward." A bit more here - and the image above.
A Book, then Broadway, then film
Edna Ferber's popular novel was published in 1926, and Jerome Kern and young lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II opened their show on Broadway in 1927. They must have grabbed the chance to move musical theatre above the romantic operettas of the time. From the novel they drew a strongly contexted, socially significant drama. Sure, the plot remained messy and some characters undeveloped, but they kept the focus on the river and its people. Ferber had apparently only seen the Mississippi once, as a child, but wrote about it with feeling. More here.
Kern and Hammerstein made of the river both a glorious setting and a metaphor for the unrecognised powerlessness of the Black workers in the cotton fields. Their most recorded song recurs throughout the work.
Ol' man river, that ol' man river
He don't say nothin', but he must know somethin'
He just keeps rollin', he keeps on rollin' along.
"It is sung by Joe, a weary stevedore who admonishes the oblivious, implacable river, yet envies its freedom, a freedom he’s unlikely to know, trapped as he is beneath the upstairs glitter of the floating Cotton Palace. He rails against his world of relentless drudgery, where black workers toil “while the white folks play”. The song itself reflects this duality; it has a beautiful, rousing tune, flowing in the opposite direction to the words, which sink deeper and darker, as though fed by tributaries of tribulation." More here.
Compared to the usual operetta recipe, this was a shocker. Kern and Hammerstein (who had first met only in 1925) firmly set out to produce a sort of verismo operetta, cutting from the original story none of the misery of the Jim Crow era, involving alcoholism, gambling, so-called miscegenation and racism. They also took from the novel an interesting focus: like those earlier operettas, it had strong women. Ferber's novels mostly had strong female protagonists, and also strong characters who faced discrimination.
Go to Wiki for the synopsis of the original musical, and - at the end of the article - the way it was changed for the film.
The 1951 film
This MGM film is their third Showboat (earlier films were 1929 and in 1936). A thoughtful comparison is here.
Now in Technicolor the 1951 film stars Kathryn Grayson (who was an opera-trained coloratura), and Ava Gardner (who wasn't - Annette Warren dubbed her singing voice, which Gardner lip-sings perfectly in a brilliant performance. )
But oops - here is Ava singing "Can't help lovin that man of mine" - in her own voice.). Read on below the YouTube her account from "Ava: My Story"
"Now, I can sing. I do not expect to be taken for Maria Callas, Ella Fitzgerald, or Lena Home, but I can carry a tune well enough for the likes of Artie Shaw to feel safe offering to put me in front of his orchestra. But since Julie's two songs, "Bill" and "Can't Help Loving That Man," are so beloved by everyone, I decided to work as hard as I could to fit the bill. I even found this marvelous teacher, who'd worked with both Lena and Dorothy Dandridge, and we slaved away for several weeks and produced a test record of those two songs. Then, rather nervously, I took my life into my hands and gave the record to Arthur Freed himself, God Almighty of musical productions. I don't think the son of a bitch ever even listened to it. He just put it on a shelf and delivered the usual studio ultimatum: "Now, listen, Ava, you can't sing and you're among professional singers." So that settled that one."
Howard Keel is the nicely named Gaylord, with Joe E. Brown as Cap'n Andy Hawks. How much has changed - and not changed - since 1927? Here's a chatty account of the film's stars.
And "Ol' Man River?" Paul Robeson sang it for the 1936 film, a much loved performance. Here is that film performance on YouTube. In this 1951 film, it's sung (with less aggressive lyrics) by William Warfield with the MGM chorus - listen here.
Lyn, 11/9/24
Comments