Show Boat Blu-ray Review
Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman, December 8, 2020
If you were to find yourself on
Jeopardy! and, like it or not, were presented
with
the category of
Musical Theater and then the answer, "Partner of Rodgers", even those (and maybe
especially those) without one
whit of interest in musicals might breathe a sigh of relief, and be able to easily respond, "Who is Hammerstein?", even if the correct question turned
out to be "Who is Hart?" or even "Who is Sondheim?" or "Who is Charnin?" What, though, if the answer had actually been, "Partner of
Hammerstein"? Are there many people who would easily know of any collaborators
other than Rodgers for this venerable legend of
American lyric writing? Of course memories can be short, and there was a time, and indeed a good,
long time, when if a partner of
Hammerstein's was thought of, chances are it would have been Jerome Kern, the composer with whom Hammerstein created what is generally
thought of as a major step toward a traditional integrated "book" musical,
Show Boat. If Hammerstein's pieces with Rodgers helped elevate
the concept of a multidisciplinary theater experience which expertly combined story, song and dance into an Art Form, it's arguable and maybe
inarguable that
Show Boat provided a more than firm foundation for that later edifice, despite its watery setting.
What's kind of bracing (even to this day) about
Show Boat is not necessarily just its structural innovations, but indeed the content that
the structure contains. The story here is typical of Edna Ferber's works, spanning two generations (at least), in a tale that wends from the late
19th
century to the early 20th. The
Cotton Blossom plies the Mississippi River, pulling into ports with its aggregation of performers who then
do
a
bit of "marketing" to attract ticket buying customers to their venue. The
Cotton Blossom is owned by Cap'n Andy Hawks (Charles
Winninger) and his slightly harridan-esque wife, Parthy (Helen Westley). The Hawks' daughter Magnolia (Irene Dunne) has dreams of becoming a
star
in her family's business, but rather quickly love in the form of riverboat gambler Gaylord Ravenal (Allan Jones) shows up, detouring those plans.
While marriage soon ensues, suffice it to say that over the course of the decades the story covers, Ravenal's winning ways aren't a sure thing,
leading to a number of marriage based soap operatic elements that may remind some of a later Irene Dunne effort,
Penny Serenade.
Now,
that part of the content is hardly innovative or especially provocative, even if Hammerstein's book manages to deliver unexpectedly
nuanced
characterizations, at least within the context of a musical play trying desperately to break free from the shackles of operetta. But in two
interwoven subplots, Hammerstein reveals a kind of audacity (admittedly culled from Edna Ferber's source novel) that a
so-called "musical comedy" had probably never offered before. The first of these involves two married black workers on the
Cotton
Blossom, Joe (Paul Robeson) and Queenie (Hattie McDaniel), while the second involves the
Cotton Blossom's star attraction, Julie La
Verne (Helen Morgan). Without revealing any outright spoilers (are there still people who don't know some of the "secrets" of
Show
Boat?), Hammerstein rather deftly approaches matters of race and intolerance in much the same way he would do later in
South Pacific.
As surprisingly prescient as
Show Boat is in some matters, it also can't quite escape the inherent racism of its production era and even
some elements from Ferber's original conception, or at least its many dramatizations. This particular aspect, which is delved into rather deeply in a
really fascinating supplement included on this disc, will probably be the one major stumbling block of both the musical in general and this film in
particular for some modern day eyes and ears.
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