Broadway
Show Boat
(Gershwin Theater, New York; 1,918 seats; $75 top)
Steve - Doug LaBrecque
Queenie - Gretha Boston
Parthy - Elaine Stritch
Cap'n Andy - John McMartin
Ellie - Dorothy Stanley
Frank - Joel Blum
Julie - Lonette McKee
Gaylord Ravenal - Mark Jacoby
Magnolia - Rebecca Luker
Joe - Michel Bell
That both shows are now running within 15 blocks of each other -- in landmark productions that have little more in common than an ability to startle us with their freshly discovered beauty -- may disturb those in search of new work, but it offers most theatergoers an uplifting, eye-opening, ear-pleasing time.
And "Show Boat" represents the biggest gamble yet for producer Garth Drabinsky: a sprawling yet ultimately intimate production, deploying a company of 68 in the service of a show introduced nearly seven decades ago. Whether all this effort will ultimately pay off at the box office is doubtful, given the odds -- but it won't be for lack of first-class trying.
Faced with a sweeping tale that begins during Reconstruction and ends in the Roaring '20s, Prince tackles head-on the racial issues that have prompted criticism of the show nearly from its inception; this is, after all, a musical whose first sung lines are "Niggers all work on the Mississippi/Niggers all work while the white folks play," and whose original Queenie was played by Tess Gardella, a strapping white vaudeville actress famed for playing mammies in blackface under the stage name Aunt Jemima.
Hammerstein eventually changed the lyric to "colored folk," which Prince retains. But he purposefully keeps the word "nigger" in the dialogue, and he and set designer Eugene Lee offer up a riverfront scene replete with "White Only" and "Colored Only" signs everywhere. Tellingly, those signs are just about the only things that remain unchanged over the show's 40-year span.
Indeed, rather than mute the show's racial and class distinctions, Prince and Lee have set them in high relief without ever undermining one of the most beautiful scores ever written.
Equally inspired is Prince's pairing with choreographer Susan Stroman, with whom he's given the show a cinematic sweep that draws the audience almost effortlessly across the years. Their most dazzling interpolation is a montage near the end of the second act that uses the changing fashions of popular dance to move the action from fin de siecle Chicago to the flapper era, and it's also here that the production pays homage to the striking ways black life and art permeated American culture.
"Show Boat" has a raw, anti-technological look to it: The Cotton Blossom is no romantic Ziegfeldian vision, but a white-clapboard-and-smoking-chimney affair. After a somewhat static and distant first act, the show comes teemingly to life in the Chicago sections, and ends with dancing fireworks back on the levee.
What Prince hasn't done, and which no one is likely ever to do, is address the show's deeper flaws: For all the talk of Kern and Hammerstein's fearlessness in dealing with miscegenation, the half-white, half-black Julie (Lonette McKee, reprising the role that made her a star in the 1983 production) is really never more than a plot device, disappearing early in the first act after providing the impetus for Magnolia (Rebecca Luker) to go onstage, only to reappear ever so briefly in the second, and for the same reason -- to provide Magnolia's next opportunity.
Despite some heavy-handed miking in the early scenes, the show has been beautifully transposed to the Gershwin, an unwieldy and typically off-putting space. William David Brohn's revisions of the original Robert Russell Bennett orchestrations are exquisite, and the show is generally tighter than in Toronto.
A wonderful cast offers up one sung treasure after another, including "Mis'ry's Comin' Aroun'," cut from the original, for Gretha Boston's dignified Queenie, and, of course, "Ol' Man River," sung by Michel Bell, who can't act but makes that fact seem insignificant. Elaine Stritch gets "Why Do I Love You," a song not meant for the hard, tough Parthy, but given his star by Prince, and a sweet gift it is. Luker possesses one of the most beautiful voices anywhere in the theater today; she's lovely as Magnolia and nicely matched with Mark Jacoby's Ravenal, though the sparks don't fly. McKee grows steadily in a thankless role, though I remember her delivery of "Bill" as having been much more mournful than it is here. As the comic secondaries, Dorothy Stanley and Joel Blum are winningly limber and silly. And as Magnolia and Gay's grown daughter Kim, firecracker Tammy Amerson is onstage for only a few minutes, but she nearly steals the show in a giddy Charleston number at the show's end.
That leaves the major cast replacement, John McMartin, who came in as Cap'n Andy while Robert Morse continues in Toronto. Suffice it to say that McMartin misses and Morse is missed as the henpecked master of the Cotton Blossom revels.
Florence Klotz's costumes -- millions of them, it seems -- are perfect, as is the ever-changing atmosphere suggested by Richard Pilbrow's beautiful lighting scheme.
In the end, as I wrote last November, Prince and company have mounted a persuasive argument for the show's humane spirit and soaring score. "One forgets the clock," Variety reported in its original review. It was true then, and it's true today.
Choreographed by Susan Stroman; musical direction by Jeffrey Huard; orchestrations by Robert Russell Bennett and William David Brohn. Sets, Eugene Lee; costumes, Florence Klotz; lighting, Richard Pilbrow; sound, Martin Levan; dance music arrangements, David Krane; assistant to Prince, Ruth Mitchell. Opened Oct. 2, 1994; reviewed Sept. 28. Running time: 2 hours, 55 min.
With: Tammy Amerson, David Bryant, Ralph Williams, Jack Dabdoub, Mike O'Carroll, Lorraine Foreman, Sheila Smith, etc.
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