I am spending money in different ways now that I don’t have a commute and I eat every meal at home. Just sayin.’ One of the ways I’m spending money is on different entertainment options.
We cut the cable a long time ago, but last year I added Disney+ and Broadway HD to our streaming lineup. For $120/yr, Broadway HD has (to date) provided me with approximately $2500 worth of onstage entertainment (based on L.A. live-theater ticket prices).
The last thing I watched was a San Francisco Opera production of ‘Show Boat.’ Not sure I’ve ever actually seen it before. I knew the score, because my parents owned an original cast recording. There are some very nice songs. There is also a very problematic plot.
A while ago I ranted here about the lousy story of the classical ballet ‘La Bayadere.’ Today I am here to rant about ‘Show Boat.’ Bear in mind this is based on the SFO production from sometime in this century. There are two Major Problems that I would like to see solved. If anyone out there is looking to revive this old-skool musical and get away from some of its worst old-skool elements, feel free to take whatever you like from this.
The thing I liked least: the character of Julie - important in Act One - basically disappears in Act Two. In Act One, Julie (a star of the titular riverboat’s vaudeville-esque show) is outed as mulatto. At the time (1890s) it would have been illegal to employ her in a white cast. It would also have been illegal for her to be married to a white man.
Her husband claims that he is also part Black, which means they don’t go to jail - but they both lose their jobs. Julie’s parts in the show go to Magnolia (‘Nola’), who idolizes Julie and who is the white daughter of some other guy whose significance mostly escaped me. (Honestly, I think he owns the riverboat.) He was played by Bill Irwin who I adore, so there’s that.
Set that aside for a minute and let’s move on to the thing I liked second-least. Nola has fallen in love with Gaylord, a gambler with a shady past. They get married anyway, despite him being denounced as a murderer, though he claims he killed in self-defense. Nola’s father says he’s done the same thing, so who cares. The wedding ends Act One - a celebration for the white people, surrounded by Supportive Negros.
In Act Two, we leave the Mississippi River in favor of a montage of Nola and Gaylord’s rise to riches, then cut to a boarding house in Chicago. (Yes, it sounds like a movie, but it played pretty well on stage.) Two of the riverboat show’s top-billed people, a musical-comedy duo, are now married and making a go of land-based vaudeville. They find Nola abandoned by Gaylord. He’s lost all their money and left her because she and their daughter are better off without him. I hate this plot device. Anyway, the comedians hook Nola up with an audition at a nightclub where - guess what - Julie has been top of the bill.
Then we get a throwaway scene in which Nola muffs her audition and Julie, who is now a bit of a diva and also probably an alcoholic, walks off the job so Nola can have it. That is the last we see of Julie. I HATE THIS.
Following which we basically jump to the 1920s, when Nola is a famous performer on a par with Jenny Lind. She goes home to Mississippi to visit the aged parents. There is a scene indicating very little progress in race relations. There is then a scene in which Gaylord shows up and Nola, it is implied, Forgives All (as does their daughter), because ‘Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man.’
Okay. What the fuck, but whatever. It is what it is.
If it were MY show, here is what would be different.
First of all, Gaylord would not be a shady American gambler. The objection to him marrying Nola would not be based on that plus his alleged past homicide. Instead, he would be upper-class English, perhaps a second son. Touring America in the Gay Nineties, falling in love with Nola because she’s beautiful and talented. Her parents could be all ‘but he’ll take you away from us’ instead of ‘but he’s so shady.’
If you do that, you open up the story to this: Gaylord and Nola do go to England, where she has to overcome prejudice against no-account Americans to become the toast of society. But he, like many if not most English second sons in the early 20th century, will join up when World War One breaks out. So instead of him walking out on her, he is killed. As millions of young men were. It is then possible that Nola would return to the U.S. with her daughter, and perhaps to her dreams of the stage. However …
What if Julie also bailed out of America? What if, having lost her job to racism (and her husband having lost his), they took their show on the road to England? We could get an ‘Anything Goes’ - style number set in steerage on their passenger liner, maybe a reprise of ‘I Might Fall Back On You.’ Then what if they joined the small cadre of Black music-hall performers in London? By the 1920s, she could be a rising star in what will become jazz.
That’s my Act Two. Julie and Bill go to England to start over. We see a lot more of them. Bill might not make it out alive; maybe he is the gambler, and comes to a bad end. That would put a whole new spin on Julie’s original Act Two song, ‘Bill.’ Meanwhile, Gaylord brings Nola to England, they have a few good years in high society, and then he dies heroically, giving Nola a genuine tragedy from which to carry on. A reunion for Julie and Nola is set up, one in which Nola could a) possibly revive her own dreams of performing and b) help Julie become the star she ought to be. Girl Power!
And rather than returning to Mississippi, where very little has changed, we close in London with a scene like the one in ‘Xanadu’ (the one where half the stage is a big-band show and the other half is rock ‘n’ roll; here it could be music-hall operetta and ragtime blues (ooh like maybe ‘She’s Only a Bird in a Gilded Cage’ mashed up with Act One song ‘Life Upon The Wicked Stage’)), and some nifty mechanics could blend the two into a big smash of a fully-integrated production number.
Instead of ending on not even a song but a mopey dialogue scene with a Noble White Female and Chastened White Male surrounded by Supportive Negros. I’m sorry, but that’s how the original ends, and I don’t like it.
Is ‘Show Boat’ still the appropriate title for my version? Yeah, I don’t care.