Showboat, the famed Kern and Hammerstein musical, was innovative in its time for featuring heavy social issues and powerful lyrics. A talented cast opens today at the Show Palace Dinner Theatre.
By BARBARA L. FREDRICKSEN
Published February 27, 2004
The 1927 musical Show Boat was truly an historic event in theater.
Until then, Broadway musicals had been light-hearted and frothy. Characters rarely had depth, and any serious subject was taboo.
But Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II turned those Broadway conventions on their heads.
Show Boat addressed such subjects as racism, unhappy marriages, desertion and the hard lives of African-Americans in the post Civil War era, something altogether new to a stage more accustomed to the glitz and glamor of Ziegfeld Follies, Music Box Revue and The Merry Widow.
The Show Palace Dinner Theatre's production of this classic opens today for a seven-week run.
Show Boat covers the period from 1880 to 1927 and has a conventional love story at its core. The young and beautiful Magnolia Hawks, whose father, Cap'n Andy Hawks, runs the showboat Cotton Blossom, meets and falls in love with the n'er-do-well riverboat gambler, Gaylord Revenal. They marry and leave the showboat to work in Chicago, but Ravenal deserts Magnolia after he loses everything during a bad night of gambling.
After a shaky start, Magnolia becomes a club singer and then goes on to Broadway, where she and her daughter Kim become stars.
But Show Boat is much more than a love story. A tragic secondary plot concerns Magnolia's friend Julie LaVerne, a mixed-race singer whose life is torn apart when she is discovered to be involved with a white man - a dangerous and illegal relationship at the time. The Cotton Blossom itself is placed in jeopardy when a local sheriff comes on board and threatens to jail Julie and her lover, Steve Baker, and close the show. How it is resolved is one of the most dramatic and memorable moments in theater.
There are wonderful comic moments, too, mostly supplied by Cap'n Andy, who at one point performs an entire second act of a play when his actors flee the stage.
And there are poignant moments, as when the stevedore Joe sings the powerful Ol' Man River, a lament about the life of a black man on the river. The role will be played by Phillip Boykin, who has gotten rave reviews for his rendition of the song in Show Boat productions in Canada and the United States.
Indeed, the show has some of Hammerstein's and Kern's best music: Make Believe, Can't Help Lovin' Dat Man, Bill, After the Ball and the soaring You Are Love.
To portray the leads, the Show Palace has brought in newcomers Lynetta Ivey and Alan Wager as Magnolia and Ravenal and brought back veteran actors Bobb James (Herbie in Gypsy; Buffalo Bill in Annie Get Your Gun) to play Cap'n Andy and Liz George (Velma in Chicago; Judy in A Chorus Line) as Julie.
Ms. Ivey has played Maria in The Sound of Music and Anna in The King and I in national tours and regional theaters. Wager has been Curly in Oklahoma!, Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady, Tommy in Brigadoon and Motel in Fiddler on the Roof, among other roles.
Another Show Palace newcomer is Madeline Thompson as Queenie, Joe's wife and the Cotton Blossom's cook, a role she played at the Mark Two Dinner Theater in Orlando. She also played Sister Mary Huber in Nunsense and Bloody Mary in South Pacific there. She sometimes plays Mabel in the Blues Brothers Show at Universal Studios in Orlando.
Also in the cast are Show Palace favorites Matthew McGee (Devil in Damn Yankees, The Maid in La Cage aux Folles and Hysterium in Funny/Forum) as Jeb, and Troy LaFon (Juror in Chicago, dancer in Hello Dolly!, Crazy for You, A Chorus Line) as Pete.
At a glance
WHAT: Show Boat
WHERE: Show Palace Dinner Theatre, 16128 U.S. 19, Hudson
WHEN: Today through April 11. Shows are at 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, 3 p.m. Sundays, and 1:30 p.m. some Wednesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. Doors open two hours before each show for buffet and full cash bar.
TICKETS: Dinner and show, $38.50; show only, $27.45; ages 12 and younger, $20.95 and $15.95, all plus tax and tip. Call toll-free (888) 655-7469.
