Rough Sailing for a New Show Boat

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

Just having tickets has not been enough to get audiences into Harold Prince's spectacular, 71-actor, $6.5 million staging of Show Boat at the opulent new North York Performing Arts Centre in suburban Toronto. It has also been necessary to pass in front of black hecklers shouting insults and waving placards reading SHOW BOAT SPREADS LIES AND HATE and SHOW BOAT = CULTURAL GENOCIDE. The protest, under police guard, has not deterred many ticket holders but may have had a striking impact on potential sales: inside the theater, the only black faces readily apparent belong to ushers. As often happens when a work of art becomes a political symbol, those who denounce this Show Boat admit they have not seen it, and meanwhile their venom makes it uncomfortable for other members of the black community to judge for themselves.

Paradoxically, it turns out that for all the wrong reasons, the protesters are right. The 1927 musical is racist. The problem is not the epithet "niggers" in the opening song, which was not meanly meant in the first place and which in any case has been expunged in favor of the less incendiary "colored folks." Nor is it the historically accurate portrayal of blacks as mostly compliant, if resentful, field hands and laborers. The real problem is that the show follows the wrong story. It assumes that black people are inherently less interesting than whites.

The white clan of song-and-dance people who own the riverboat theater are a bland and predictable lot, living through formula heartaches: economic ups and downs, marital tussles, the twinges of age, dreams of what might have been. By contrast, the mulatto singer Julie, who passes for white, has a much more distinct and provocative situation. She is a leading lady desired by every man. The fellow actor who marries her knows and accepts her ethnic identity -- a remarkable thing in the Deep South of the 1880s, yet never explored in the script. Her moments, superbly acted and sung by Lonette McKee, have an emotional power and tragic heft far beyond almost anything else in the show. But she vanishes halfway through the first act, save for two fleeting glimpses later on.

This may well be as much attention to blacks as Broadway audiences would allow in 1927, but today the narrative defects of Oscar Hammerstein II's book are too glaring for Prince's razzmatazz to overcome. At best the script is a faint and fractured ghost of Edna Ferber's overstuffed novel. At worst it is a herky-jerky alternation of melodramatic vignettes yanked out of context and escapist bursts of clowning and dance.

Like so many show-business musicals since, Show Boat reserves its deepest passion for the stage itself, not the players who inhabit it. That may account for its enduring fascination among show people -- five Broadway productions, three movies and a four-hour 1988 recording that includes minor bits of orchestration and songs dropped from the original. Director Prince and his co- creators acknowledge their backstage affinity, although they also cite the show's literary significance as one of the first musicals to take on political subjects, integrate song and dance into the plot and range from barroom tunes to operetta. Prince calls Show Boat "the first great modern musical."

For audience members, the abiding appeal is probably Jerome Kern's score, stuffed with standards like Make Believe, Can't Help Lovin' Dat Man, Bill and You Are Love. Prince and producer Garth Drabinsky, the team behind the Broadway hit Kiss of the Spider Woman, have added almost unprecedented production values. The cast is two to three times as big as that of an average Broadway musical. Eugene Lee's sets eschew his customary found-object minimalism in favor of substantial-looking streetscapes, tenements, nightclubs, levees, and above all a boat with decks that rise and fall and, inside, a theater with stage, boxes and balcony. Drabinsky says that if the show had been mounted on Broadway it would have cost $15 million -- half again as much as any musical has ever cost.

It is tempting to say that the grandeur overpowers the actors, because most are mediocre or miscast. In the latter category are Elaine Stritch and Robert Morse as the riverboat owners. They handle the comedy well enough -- Stritch is a convincing sourpuss and Morse gets maximum mileage out of a bit where he talks a spellbound audience through a fight that they have been prevented from seeing. Both, however, look at least 65 from the opening moment, yet are said to be the parents of a girl young enough to have just begun wearing her first long skirt. As that blushing innocent, Rebecca Luker appears to be well into her 30s. Mark Jacoby could not be duller or less dashing as Gaylord Ravenal, the rakehell gambler who wins, and breaks, her heart. As the riverboat comedy queen, Dorothy Stanley is never, ever funny.

The supreme irony is that for all its grandiosity of scale, the moment when this Show Boat most vividly comes alive is when Michel Bell stands alone and first sings Ol' Man River. In a role barely written, and inhabited by the spirit of its most eminent performer, Paul Robeson, Bell conveys the depth of a man's hard life with a sound glorious enough to stand comparison to anyone. If only Prince could have achieved this kind of emotional power and physical appropriateness from the rest of the cast.