Showboat: Music by Jerome Kern, lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein. First performed on Broadway December 27, 1927, running for one and a half years. A film version released by MGM in 1951 was viewed for this assignment.
The cultural influences that have shaped American musical theater have naturally varied from one era to another. Many of these musicals mirror social norms and mores (Lubbock, 755). The dominant genre that emerged in the middle of the twentieth century was of a musical theater in which the play was the thing and the integration of song, humor, and production numbers into a single and inextricable artistic entity established an authentic musical theatre in the United States. One important musical, viewed in a 1951 film version from MGM, is the Kern-Hammerstein collaboration, Showboat.
The story is set in the 1880s on an American riverboat and depicts the lives and loves of a troupe of performers that work under the command of Captain Andy on the Cotton Blossom. In Natchez, Mississippi, the performers encounter racial prejudice when the sheriff discovers that the leading lady, Julie, is partially black. The captain's daughter and her gambler boyfriend save the show and the play then focuses on their romance. After a number of years have passed, many of the original performers return to the boat and stage a reunion performance ("American Musical Theater: An Introduction" 1)..
Showboat is a fairly standard Broadway musical revolving around the thematic links of love and abandonment and regeneration. The music in Showboat is meant to move the action forward, track the progress of a romance, and otherwise knit together the threads of a very human drama. Showboat uses repetition to make melodies easy to remember and uses songs to tell a story with a clearly delineated beginning, middle, and ending ("Showboat" 1).
The chorus serves as a background for the action of the central characters; dance is integr...