A water cooler. Electric guitar. A sash.
Even if you already know that Target margin The production you’re attending will be an experimental reboot of “Showboat,” the great-grandfather of the American musical.You can find three items that greet you on an empty stage.
Maybe, you think, as you settle into your seat. NYU Scrabble In Manhattan, the water cooler points to the Mississippi River — or the aesthetic thirst. Electric guitars, you imagine, indicate director and adapter David Herskovits’ intention to bring the 97-year-old musical into the present. (The title has been slightly rearranged to “Show/Boat: A riverBut the sash draped over the mic stand remains mysterious. In block capitals it says white.
Audiences at the premiere of “Showboat” in late 1927 must have taken it for granted. The musical is entirely the work of white people: Jerome Kern wrote the music and Oscar Hammerstein II wrote the lyrics based on the novel by Edna Furber. It was created by Florence Ziegfeld, a 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’s also about mostly white people. Although black characters are found in powerful subplots, and are more fully rounded than most mainstream depictions from the time, they are still stereotypes. Worse, their stories are usually subdued and disjointed.
In contrast, the main story follows nearly 40 years of the extraordinary life of a white girl named Magnolia who grows up as part of the Cotton Blossom group that runs the Mississippi. She marries a rake named Ravenal, raises her daughter Kim alone and eventually becomes successful singing “colored” songs for white audiences.
In today’s parlance, “showboat” centers whiteness.
“Show/Boat”, the reboot, respectfully tries to undo it. When actors cast, regardless of race, wear sashes like the one seen at the beginning, indicating that the character they’re currently playing is white, that’s clearly the intended point. Changing the look. Being white is the exception here and, in a way, being a criminal. No wonder silk glasses keep slipping.
You can too. To the extent that the production succeeds as progressive optics, it does so at a heavy cost to coherence and thus to pleasure. Like white guilt it mirrors, it is often too much work to encourage meaningful reflection.
If you go to a lot of experimental theater, the homework is familiar. (is part of “show/wrestling”). 2025 Under the Radar Festival.) Confusion is part of your penance. Here, with dozens of characters played by only 10 people, and Magnolia’s mother played by two people for some reason, the colorful story is especially hard to follow, even if you know her well. Perhaps name tags would have been more helpful than sashes.
The lack of strong visual markers – the set, by Kaye Voyce, is never literal – makes it hard to know where you are and, sometimes, who’s talking to whom. A convent scene between Ravenal (Philip Thimio Stoddard) and Kim is usually a sure-fire tearjerker. Because this production doesn’t put Kim on stage to talk, I didn’t even realize it was happening.
Story logic and staging focus is secondary in all cases. Riverboat shows, hosted by Steven Ratazi’s Captain Andy, are deliberately so poorly acted, it seems they could hold an audience. (The acting is often wooden, anyway.) And since Dina Al-Aziz’s partially made-up costumes do more to identify types than individuals, I kept losing Magnolia (Rebecca Vega Romero) in the mix. .
Even more problematic is the misalignment between strong production intentions and strong raw materials, which strongly resist reshaping. Not that the story was ever quite coherent. In turning Faber’s novel into a serviceable libretto, Hammerstein had to pick the turning point, especially in the busy second act. But Karen’s score is a different kind of perfection.invention and emotion. In music that appropriates Mitteleuropean operetta, symphonic doom, folk song, jazz, vaudeville and other genres, it confidently outlines individual characters and groups while also marking the passage of time and taste.
Despite beautiful vocal arrangements (by Dionne McClain-Freeney) and surprisingly rich orchestration (by Dan Schlosberg) for a band of just six players, little of this registers here. Certainly not in “white” songs, which are presented almost entirely in horrific contexts, as if they were evidence of a crime. “Black” songs are much better. “Kent Help Lovin’ Date Man” and “Bill” are standouts for Showboat’s mixed-race star Julie (Stephanie Weeks) who is passing as white. Dockworker Joe (Alvin Crawford) hums the anthemic “Ollman River.”
But even these classics seem to need reforming. (“Showboat” entered the public domain in 2023, so anything goes.) Electric guitars are called into service to stretch the aural timeline uncertainly into the 1950s and beyond. Many of the songs have been given unnecessary new forms or spoken-word introductions, with individual words being twisted around and dug up like dinosaur bones.
Still, it is sometimes effective. I’m thankful that instead of the N-word, which was first heard in the original “Showboat,” the first word you hear in “Show/Boat” is “Listen.” It’s a great way to acknowledge the need to pay attention to history, not bury it. and a rewriting of “In Dahomey,” sung by misfit African artists at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, interrupts the strange minstrelsy of the original with a genuine African folk song, “Dumesa,” sung by Temídayo Amay and a short song. Wale sang very beautifully.
This song made me wish that “Show/Boat” had made itself more unapologetic than “Showboat”. Likewise Caroline Ferman’s choreography, which feels fresh without needing to argue against the original.
This type of argument is usually a bad bet. If something is too objectionable to do, don’t do it. If you want to replace it with a new work told from a new and arguably more authentic perspective, then do so. But half the cure in this case feels like holding out the bathwater and drowning the baby. As many more faithful revivals have proven, what’s great about “Showboat” isn’t really distinguishable from what’s not. Not even with a slash or a slash.
Show/Boat: A river
Through Jan. 26 at NYU Skirball, Manhattan; nyuskirball.org. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes.