Show Boat revival? — Page 3

My casting picks for a remake of Show Boat would be:

Lily James as Magnolia Hawks and her daughter Kim (as an adult)

Lady Gaga as Julie LaVerne

Zac Efron as Gaylord Ravenal

Viola Davis as Queenie

Sterling K. Brown as Joe

Tom Hanks as Cap'n Andy

joevitus said: "She's played the role on tour, as Hattie McDaniel had played hers in L.A. Almost all the leads had played their parts on stage.

It's a magnificent film in mostrespects, offensive in a few areas. The miscegenation scene is well-handled and Robeson is treated with dignity, and the imagery in "Ole Man River" is powerful. But there are also embarrassing shots of black people rolling their eyes (in close-up, no less) and other such stereotypical/racist things. These two qualities jar against and contradict each other. I wonder if the negative imagerywas second unit stuff James Whale had no control of.

It is unquestionably the best of the three versions, the truest to the stage show, and happily finally available on Blu-ray."

Joe, those "stereotpyical/racist things" include the shimmy and the shuffle, two dances that totally revolutionized Broadway movement. I used to explain very carefully before I showed those numbers to students, but the film captures elements of Broadway history that aren't always readily available elsewhere.

Of course a current production would tone down that stuff, but from a historian's perspective, it should be noted that "shuffling" was revolutionary before it was stereotypical.

I have this McGlinn version on one CD. According to the notes: " It is the first single-discShow Boatalbum to run over seventy minutes. It is the music precisely as heard opening night at the Ziegfeld Theatre, with the original overture, the finales of both acts, the opening of Act Two, and, of course, all the beloved songs of the score."

I have it synced to my MP-3 player and listen to it frequently when I'm out exercising. Wonderful stuff.

Thanks for posting the video.

Glad you liked it, but I think it's a violation of Board rules to thank someone for posting a video. It's just not done.

I see that on Amazon they have both the three CD set and the one CD Highlights. Both in stock and reasonably priced. I also found this on Amazon's premium music service, although it took a lot of voice commands to Alexa before she found what I was looking for. The description of the three CD set includes a complete list of the tracks on each disk.

https://www.amazon.com/Jerome-Kern/dp/B000002SJL/ref=sr_1_12?dchild=1&keywords=showboat+musical&qid=1590332195&s=music&sr=1-12

John McGlinn's Show Boat is a staggering achievement and a recording for the ages.

You didn't mention it, but a lot of dialogue is also included. I thought that it was all the dialogue, but it says the "underscored dialogue," which I'm guessing means dialogue spoken over background music. And all for $12.28.

I have a Rebecca Luker anecdote. I had a crush on her when Show Boat arrived in New York. She took some questions that were submitted to her through America Online. I had seen her given a credit on McGlinn's collection just for saying as a passerby in the last scene, "Good Evening, Captain Andy." I thought that it would impress her that I knew this. She explained that she had just arrived in New York and McGlinn was her only contact. So she found him just as they were recording that last scene and she was pressed into duty as a passerby.

O.K. Not a great anecdote.

I was just about to say the same thing about the Zambello opera house SHOW BOAT - I didn't get to see it but I very much enjoyed listening to the radio broadcast from Lyric Opera of Chicago. I really think the opera house is the best home for it, and other golden age musicals.

A couple decades back I was studying opera in my undergrad at Indiana University, and I said at the time that I'd love to one day be the conductor that opera houses bring in to conduct classic musicals like R&H and Bernstein. I was very curtly informed that such a thing would never occur, that the musical standards of the opera house fundamentally excluded such musically worthless drivel and that opera houses would never add things like CAROUSEL or ON THE TOWN to their rep. Which, even at the time German opera companies were doing so I thought it was a snobbish opinion, but you didn't buck the classical faculty at Indiana in the '90s.

And now Lyric Opera has not only done SHOW BOAT, they've done all the major R&Hs and JESUS CHRIST SUPERSTAR to boot. And they do them huge with a full symphony orchestra and appropriately-sized choruses of singers and dancers.

I think that's the future home of classic shows. Commercial theatre just isn't set up for it. There's not enough of a consistent audiences to make a profit and do the shows right so you have to start trimming and compromising. Opera operates under a completely different production model and having a SHOW BOAT that can be shipped around to various companies who do a limited run every few seasons seems like the best way to keep it alive. I'm glad my stuffy opera professors were wrong and people are taking these shows seriously and I think it's a better home for them than in a commercial setting.

I think a new film adaptation could work, IF DONE RIGHT.

I want to add that with some creativity, less can be made to seem like more. We did a production in South Florida in the mid-1970s that cost nothing compared to a Broadway revival. Musical director Richard Parinello--with careful doubling and the use of mikes in the pit--made 12 musicians (the maximum we could afford) sound like 35. Director John Driver did various things, like using a scrim behind the boat during "Old Man River" so the white cast could double as dockworkers in the shadows. (I'm sure this would be called "virtual blackface" nowadays and a protest would ensue, but not a single African American lost his or her job because of this staging; it simply gave the song the majesty it deserves.) Laurence Guittard and Kathy McCauley sang Gaylord and Magnolia as well as they have ever been sung, and Julie Wilson was a wonder as Julie. Harvey Evans and Virginia Sandifur practically stole the show as Frank and Ellie.

The show had to play both our smaller theater (1200 seats) in Fort Lauderdale (with a smallish stage) and then our giant barn (3,000 seats in what had been the Jackie Gleason Theatre; you could land a 747 on stage) in Miami Beach.

I found it superior in almost every way to the 1983 Houston Grand Opera revival on Broadway, a production I also enjoyed. But as I said, less can be made to look like more.

In the 1951 movie, Ava Gardner sang "Can't Help Lovin' Dat Man" as a ballad. It's much more fun when it's a cakewalk, as in the 1936 movie and tbe Prince stage revival.

goodlead said: "In the 1951 movie, Ava Gardner sang "Can't Help Lovin' Dat Man" as a ballad. It's much more fun when it's a cakewalk, as in the 1936 movie and tbe Prince stage revival."

In the scripts I know, it is done both ways. As a cakewalk by Julie and Magnolia in Act I and as a ballad with guitar when Magnolia auditions for the "club" in Chicago in Act II. In the 1970s production I described above, Kathy McCauley's coloratura ballad version was exquisitely moving--which made it all the more ironic that the club owner wants it "ragged".

The Prince production may have run 1000 performances but only because the producer was playing a financial shell game that landed him in prison and tanked an entire theatrical enterprise taking multiple productions down with it. And even that was a production model that was hypothetically closer to Disney than traditional commercial theatre where you can do SHOW BOAT as a loss leader by buttressing it with PHANTOM profits, except in his case he was doing it illegally.

Outside of LCT and Roundabout revivals just aren't sustainable and almost always lose everything. And I don't want to see SHOW BOAT with a 12-piece orchestra regardless of how skillfully the reduction might be done anymore than I want to see DER ROSENKAVALIER that way. I think opera companies can get better at the way they do musicals and do them more authentically and less like classical people working in a genre they don't totally fit, but I think that's the direction it's moving. And it's a boon for them because a popular SOUND OF MUSIC can balance out a Thomas Adés piece that has a much more limited audience. And let Broadway do things meant for Broadway, not scaled-down versions of things that lose the whole investment anyway.

Rather than a revival, I think a new film adaptation would be better.

Others can fill in greater details, but essentially the show was produced by Livent, a Canadian production company led by Garth Drabinsky who started the company with the Canadian rights to PHANTOM and produced the original RAGTIME and KISS OF THE SPIDERWOMAN and SHOW BOAT and several others. Basically he was using the profits from the successful productions to cover the losses on the unsuccessful ones and was preparing cooked books for the whole thing and it eventually collapsed and he went to prison. Here's an article about the sentencing:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/livent-co-founders-drabinsky-gottlieb-convicted-of-fraud-and-forgery-1.778879

CarlosAlberto said: "Interesting that both the 1983 and 1994 revivals played the very same theater. The 1983 revival played the theater when it was still known by itsoriginal name: Uris. When the 1994 played the theater it had already been re-named to the Gershwin.
And that '83 production was thoroughly sublime.


In fact, the theater was re-named the Gershwin near the end of the '83 revival's run. The theater was re-named on June 5, 1983 and the show closed on June 26, 1983."

Lincoln Center is certainly where a Show Boat revival should be done - the original was a Ziegfeld production, remember!

Interesting how people want to change the ending "without changing a word." Would be quite difficult with Show Boat as I don't think a single major production has used the same script/score. I would be intrigued by a production that was mostly based around the original script - see how much of it is workable and would play well nowadays.

My favorite recording is a 60s studio cast starring Barbara Cook and John Raitt - it is heavenly listen to their "Make Believe!" Curiously, a Lincoln Center production starring Cook also received a recording, and I find it rather lackluster - and these are people who actually played the roles! The score is just so sublime, and every musical theatre lover should have a recording on their iPhone (or CD/record collection).

The curious paradox concerning opera houses doing musicals is that most of them are still (though teetering in recent years) able to do lavish productions with gorgeous sets and full orchestras, but I often find opera singers unable to do justice to musical theatre songs. Regardless of what some people say, I will always prefer Sweeney Todd as a musical - even if, when done by an opera house, not a single word or note is changed. Something happens when Opera singers do broadway because of their training. Renee Flemming's "Lay Down Your Head" is a glorious art song, but it is a far cry from the blue-grass ballad Tesori wrote.