Posted: 3/13/26 at 1:28pm
Next year is the centennial of this groundbreaking musical with book and lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein and music by Jerome Kern. Show Boat was the first musical to deal with downbeat topics: miscegenation, alcoholism, gambling addiction. It was the first musical to have the songs and dances integrated into the plot. And it was first to have the principal characters and the chorus racially integrated. The song “Ol’ Man River,” written for Paul Robeson whose performance is saved in the 1930s film, for decades was anointed as Broadway’s best song. Nancy Sinatra recalls the night when father Frank brought tears to the eyes of Martin Luther King when he sang it at a Carnegie Hall fundraiser.
The last Broadway production was the renowned 1994 Harold Prince show that brought us the late Rebecca Luker in the Tony-nominated role of Magnolia. Thirty years is a long time between productions, although a revival is not for the faint-hearted. Casting the many principal actors is difficult, and so many new songs were written for subsequent stage and film productions that hard choices must be made on which songs to exclude. Most of the second act is open for new creative interpretation as long as Gaylord deserts his wife due to his gambling debts and Julie some years later in an accidental meeting directs him back to Magnolia for a reunion of undetermined length.
Although bypassing a full production of a show so seminal to the creation of the modern musical seems criminal, I’m not optimistic.
