Song Character Analysis Worksheet - The University of North ...

ackground, characters, and local color.” 28 Kern had less difficulty in persuading Oscar
Hammerstein II to join him in creating an operatic “comedy” where the plot would be the
primary consideration. Somehow the team also convinced Florenz Ziegfeld to produce
this innovative concept within a two-year contract span, an unprecedented amount of
preparation time for the 1920s. This was not to be the “typical Ziegfeld girlie show,”
according to musical theatre historian Miles Kreuger. 29 Ziegfeld did not quite understand
Kern and Hammerstein’s commitment to creating such a tightly integrated drama, nor its
extended gestation period. 30 But he allowed the collaborators time to construct and
improve the musical version of Show Boat through many revisions and out-of-town
tryouts until its eventual opening night at the new Ziegfeld Theater in New York, 27
December 1927. 31
An immediate success, Show Boat established a new standard of musical drama in
American theatre with its blend of comedy, operetta, and melodrama characteristics.
Joseph Swain explained this new plot-driven integration in “the songs, the generous
28 David Ewen, The World of Jerome Kern: A Biography (New York: Holt & Co., 1960), 86.
29 Show Boat: The Story of a Classic American Musical (New York: Da Capo Press, 1990), 26.
30 Show Boat was also the theatre introduction of a young orchestrator named Robert Russell
Bennett. Stacy Wolf compared Kern’s vision of a fully integrated production to Wagner’s realization of
Gesamtkunstwerk in A Problem Like Maria: Gender and Sexuality in the American Musical (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 2002), 27.
31 The premiere of Show Boat in Washington, D. C. lasted four hours and forty minutes as
Hammerstein sought to remain true to the expanse of Ferber’s text. Many songs and scenes were revised
during tryouts there, in Cleveland, and in Philadelphia before the premiere in New York City. There is an
urban myth that Show Boat was intended to be the grand premiere for Ziegfeld’s new theater in January
1927, but its production delays allowed Rio Rita to steal that distinction. Miles Kreuger dispels that myth
and many others in his fascinating and exhaustive account of all details related to this musical, Show Boat:
The Story of a Classic American Musical. Rio Rita (Harry Tierney, music; Joseph McCarthy, lyrics; Guy
Bolton and Fred Thompson, libretto) ran 494 performances and was the first successful film adaptation of a
musical. See Stanley Green, Broadway Musicals, Show by Show, 5th ed., ed. Kay Green (Milwaukee: Hal
Leonard Publishing, 1996), 55.
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