Class 3: "A Watershed Work"

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3. A Watershed Work. Most books on the American musical single out Show Boat, the 1927 work by Oscar Hammerstein and Jerome Kern, as a landmark in the genre. They talk about its integration, meaning the seamless way in which dialogue and musical numbers interact (at least in Act I), each advancing the story of Edna Ferber’s 1925 book. The second hour of today’s class will consist of a series of excerpts to demonstrate the truth of this point.

But Show Boat also demonstrates another kind of integration. It includes both leading and chorus roles for both White and Black characters, and racial intolerance in the Jim Crow South is a target of its plot, albeit a secondary one. Taking this as a cue, we devote the first hour to looking at how African Americans have been portrayed on the Broadway stage before Show Boat, including three remarkable musicals written, directed, and performed entirely by Black artists. rb.

The script, videos, and images will be posted immediately after class.

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Q AND A

When and why did the "Great White Way" turn completely white?
As we have heard, there were numerous all-Black Broadway shows from the beginning of the century through the 1920s. Most of these, however, still followed the Minstrel tradition of black stereotypes. Eubie Blake's Shuffle Along (1921) and Gershwin's Porgy and Bess (1935) were exceptions, and Jerome Kern's Showboat (1927) included two Black characters and a major racial element in the plot. However, the Depression made it hard to fund such shows, and Broadway became virtually all-White for the next three decades.

When did Black performers begin to reappear in Broadway musicals?
I have found three online articles on the Black presence on Broadway: here for a general overview; here for a photo portfolio, and here for detailed coverage of the Civil Rights Era. I recommend all three. Two dates popped out. One was 1964, when Golden Boy, Clifford Odets' 1937 play about a boxer, was turned into a musical starring Sammy Davis Jr; you can find clips from it here (audio) and here (video). The other was in 1967, when the entire all-White cast of Hello Dolly was replaced by an all-Black cast highlighting Pearl Bailey; the show ran for another two years; you can get a sample here.

VIDEO LINKS

All the clips in the first hour are available on YouTube at the links below, although some are audio only, without the words or scores that I added for playing in class. I also threw in a link to a program on Shuffle Along by the Harlem Opera Theatre that attempts to recreate the spirit of the original production, after a substantial introduction.

For Show Boat, however, we have a different situation. The San Francisco production we saw is represented only by a trailer—but that is substantial, at almost 8 minutes. There is one complete production on YouTube, from the Paper Mill Playhouse in New Jersey in 1989; it is split into several parts—the link is to a playlist—and though it is in mediocre video, every effort was taken to make this as authentic as possible. Otherwise, I include links to trailers and excerpts from other revivals and the two feature films (1935 and 1951) that you may find of interest. *Asterisks indicate clips not played in class. rb.

CLIPS IN THE FIRST HOUR
	Cook: Clorindy	* Overture (the composer on a piano roll) * Darktown's out tonight (Dick Hyman and others; audio only)
	Cook: In Dahomey	* On Emancipation Day (William Brown, audio) * Brown Skin Baby Mine (Austin Rivers, live)
	Blake: Shuffle Along	* Documentary (partly shown in class) * Love will find a way (Rachel Simone Webb and Phillip Attmore, live ) * Medley at 2016 Tonys * Harlem Opera Theater (centenary reconstruction, with intro)
	Kern: Show Boat (original)	* Ol' Man River (Paul Robeson, 1936 film) * In Dahomey (Ambrosian Chorus)

OTHER SHOWBOAT CLIPS
	1936 film	* Ol' Man River (Paul Robeson) * Can't help lovin' dat man
	1951 film	* Trailer * Make believe (Howard Keet & Kathryn Grayson) * Ol' Man River (William Warfield)
	Paper Mill Playhouse, 1989	* Complete, in 9 parts
	Broadway, 1994 (Harold Prince)	* Trailers * Can't help lovin' dat man * Dance excerpt at Tony Awards
	San Francisco Opera, 2014	* Substantial trailer (production watched in class)


IMAGES
The thumbnails below cover the slides shown in class, though there may be a few small discrepancies. Click the thumbnail to see a larger image. Click on the right or left of the larger picture to go forward or back, or outside it to close.

Here are brief bios of the artists, composers, and writers considered in the class, listed in order of birth.

	Will Marion Cook, 1869–1944. American composer. Cook's father was Dean of the Law School at Howard University. The son attended Oberlin College, then devoted himself to music, studying with Dvorak in New York and Joachim in Berlin. He was the composer of the first all-Black musicals on Broadway: Clorindy in 1898 and In Dahomey (1903), both with the poet Paul Laurence Dunbar.
	Paul Laurence Dunbar, 1872–1906. American poet. Born to formerly-enslaved parents in Dayton, Ohio, Dunbar already showed signs of literary talent in school, where he was a friend of Wilbur and Orville Wright. Although they helped him, his success was cemented through the advocacy of critic William Dean Howells, who appreciated his conventional poems but especially admired those he wrote in Black vernacular dialect. He died of tuberculosis at 33.
	Edna Ferber, 1885–1968. American writer. Ferber was born in Kalamazoo to Hungarian Jewish parents. After a short career as a reporter, she began writing fiction, including the Pulitzer-winning So Big (1924), Show Boat (1926), which would become the basis of the Broadway musical, and Giant (1952), made into a movie with Elizabeth Taylor and James Dean.
	James Hubert "Eubie" Blake, 1887–1983. American musician. Blake was born in Baltimore to former slaves; his father was a stevedore. He started "foolin' around" on a music-store organ at age 5, and the owner persuaded his mother to buy him an instrument; he was playing in a Baltimore bordello in his teens. As well as the composer of several standards, he is best known as the creator (with Noble Sissle) of the first Black musical Shuffle Along (1921).
	Oscar Hammerstein II, 1895–1960. American lyricist. Oscar Hammerstein's father, a German immigrant, was manager of the Metropolitan Opera and active also on Broadway. His son quickly established a career as lyricist, working with Rudolf Friml, Sigmund Romberg, Jerome Kern (Show Boat, 1926), and a very long partnership with Richard Rodgers from Oklahoma! (1943) to The Sound of Music (1959).
	Jerome Kern, 1885–1945. American composer. The son of German and Bohemian immigrants in New York, Kern became one of the most famous songwriters of his age. He also wrote several Broadway musicals, of which the most famous is Show Boat (1926), which occupied new territory by making the music support a story dealing with real issues, as opposed to being a fantasy concocted simply to contain the music.
	Noble Sissle, 1889–1975. American lyricist and performer. Born in Indianapolis, Sissle served in WW1 as a member of the US Army Band credited with introducing syncopated music in to Europe. Around the same time, he met Eubie Blake. The two went into partnership after the war, creating songs such as "I'm just wind about Harry" and the first all-Black musical, Shuffle Along (1921).