Fashion
In a ‘Show Boat’ Reboot, Ol’ Man River Gets an Extreme Makeover
“Show/Boat: A River” reverses the racial lens on the great-grandfather of American musicals.
A water cooler. An electric guitar. A sash.
Even if you know beforehand that the Target Margin production you’re attending will be an experimental reboot of “Show Boat,” the great-grandfather of American musicals, you may find the three items that greet you on an otherwise blank stage disorienting.
Perhaps, you think, as you take your seat at NYU Skirball in Manhattan, the water cooler alludes to the Mississippi River — or to aesthetic thirst. The electric guitar, you imagine, marks the intention of the director and adapter David Herskovits to bring the 97-year-old musical into the present. (The title has been modishly restyled “Show/Boat: A River.”) But the sash, draped on a mic stand, remains mysterious. In block capital letters it says WHITE.
Audiences at the premiere of “Show Boat” in late 1927 would have taken that for granted. The musical is entirely the work of white people: Jerome Kern wrote the music and Oscar Hammerstein II the words, based on Edna Ferber’s novel. It was produced by Florenz Ziegfeld, that self-proclaimed glorifier of the (white) American girl. The character of Queenie, a riverboat cook, was originally played by a white actor in blackface.
It is largely about white people, too. Though Black characters figure in powerful subplots, and are more fully rounded than in most mainstream depictions from that time, they are still stereotypes. Worse, their stories are generally subservient and intermittent.
By contrast, the main story closely follows 40 years in the unusual life of a white girl named Magnolia who grows up as part of the Cotton Blossom troupe plying the Mississippi. She marries a rake named Ravenal, raises their daughter, Kim, alone and eventually becomes successful by singing “colored” songs for white audiences.
In today’s parlance, “Show Boat” centers whiteness.
“Show/Boat,” the reboot, honorably seeks to undo that. When the actors, cast without regard to race, put on sashes like the one seen at the start, signifying that the character they are currently playing is white, they are implicitly reversing the expected point of view. To be white is to be the exception here and, in a way, to be culpable. No wonder the silky sashes keep slipping off.
