Can one of our most problematic musicals finally overcome its racist past?

By Rebecca Salzhauer
January 14, 2025

When Show Boat opened on Broadway in 1927, it was an instant hit. Now, as co-music director and orchestrator of Show/Boat: A River Dan Schlosberg said, “People don’t want to touch it.”

Show/Boat: A River, directed by David Herskovits, founding artistic director of Target Margin Theater, reexamines Show Boat as a deeply flawed piece of Americana. For much of the 20th century, Show Boat endured as a beloved classic, thanks to a lush, romantic score by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II. In recent years, the show’s dated treatment of race has made revivals all but untenable. Show/Boat: A River, now running in the experimental theater festival Under the Radar, marks the show’s return to New York after 30 years. Herskovits’s adapation seeks to celebrate the material’s beauty while dissecting its ugliness and holding it up to light.

Although I am a person with an alarmingly robust knowledge of musical theater, I barely knew Show Boat before I started reporting on it. I knew songs from Show Boat. I knew that I should know Show Boat. I’d opened the libretto in high school and saw that it started with the n-word — I didn’t read past page three.

Set between the 1880s and 1927, Show Boat follows a group of people on the Cotton Blossom, a floating theater (or, um, show boat) on the Mississippi River. It traces the tragic love story between Magnolia, the ship captain’s wide-eyed daughter, and Ravenal, a rogue with a gambling problem; Magnolia goes from ingénue to world-weary woman to jazz club star in the story’s 50-year timespan. But the show’s anthem comes from Joe, a Black dock worker, in the song “Ol’ Man River”: The world is unfair, and life is endless suffering, but he wants to be like the Mississippi, that “keeps rollin’ along.”

To tell the story of Show Boat is to reckon with the beginning of an American art form — and how it’s always been tied to appropriation. Show Boat is a sweeping, tragic romance that wove elements from vaudeville and operetta into what’s recognized as the first entry in the musical theater canon. It’s also a treatise on racism in the American south written nearly a century ago by two white, Jewish progressives from New York. The opening number calls out oppression, but the first lyric is a slur. Black characters sing about injustice with gravitas and insight, but their speech is filtered through Hammerstein’s wild imitation of African American Vernacular English.

“This is wonderful material, and it’s shot through with this problematic stuff,” Herskovits said. “Well, welcome to American culture.”

Show/Boat: A River is billed as a “daring reimagining” of the musical. Aesthetically, it is. Target Margin’s stripped-down, metatheatrical approach is a far cry from the unabashed maximalism of 70-person casts and life-size ship deck sets. Still, every major revival of the Show Boat could be called a reimagining of the last. Hammerstein and Kern retooled the libretto for a 1928 West End transfer with the original production still running on Broadway. Songs got replaced and scenes got cut for a 1946 revival and again, to varying extents, for three film adaptations. More recently, director Hal Prince overhauled the musical for a 1994 Broadway revival with a more cynical eye to its depiction of racial inequity.

“There’s no fixed version of Show Boat, and there never has been, and it’s enormously problematic,” Herskovits said. “It’s both completely iconic and completely unstable.”

Going in, Herskovits knew the show was dated and offensive. He also knew that it was written with progressive intent. “I am interested in Hammerstein and Kern as Jews,” Herskovits said. “I think where this work is coming from is an attempt to really make the country a better place.”

Herskovits first read Show Boat with Target Margin Theater over a decade ago. When Jay Wegman, the director of NYU Skirball, approached him in 2018 about doing a musical, Herskovits brought it up as a possibility. It wasn’t until 2023, when Show Boat entered the public domain, that Herskovits returned to the material. Then, he and his collaborators could have total freedom exploring — and adapting — the original text.

Herskovits has framed Show Boat as a show within a show: A predominantly non-white group of 10 actors assembles, as if to remember the musical. The approach allows for a prismatic approach to the original text – and a juxtaposition of actors and characters. Actors repeat lines with and without affect. They pass characters back and forth. They stretch some sung notes, pumping them full of pain, and speak others plainly. When playing white people, they wear white sashes; they shed them to play people of color. The result is a Show Boat that feels more like a science experiment than a Golden Age musical. It scales back the passion and melodrama to make room for a kind of critical interrogation that often keeps the audience at an intellectual distance.

“Because it’s really pared down, it’s very naked, in a way,” said Stephanie Weeks, who plays Julie, the ship’s leading actress, who is mixed-race and passing as white. “You get to hear the text in a new way because we’re drawing attention to it.”

Rather than cutting the show’s most jarring racist sequences, the company used them as fodder for creative intervention. “Dealing with the racial content of the show is an important part of the challenge of doing it, but it’s also, for me, a central reason to do it,” Herskovits said.

Dionne McClain-Freeney, the show’s co-music director and vocal arranger, reframed one of the show’s most egregious scenes with new, contrasting material. When Magnolia’s family visits a “Dahomey Village” exhibition at the Chicago World’s Fair, its “African inhabitants” sing gibberish syllables that get called Zulu. McClain-Freeney decided to arrange a song in the actual Zulu language for Black members of the ensemble to sing in its place, “to return some dignity to the Black folks who essentially are on display,” she said.

When we do hear the original score’s language, it comes from the white tourists singing in counterpoint, a jarring reflection of how they see the people in the exhibition. “We could have cut it,” Schlosberg said. “But it’s nice to just sometimes see things for what they are.”

“I really love that this piece is dealing with what it means to be American and how the American identity has been constructed through entertainment,” Rebbekah Vega-Romero, who plays Magnolia, said. “That has roots in African American history and also Jewish history.”

It’s disingenuous to say that Show Boat is about Jews. The show takes place in a world absent of Jews entirely. But every iteration of the story has been framed by Jewish artists — from Edna Ferber, who wrote the 1926 novel, to Hammerstein and Kern to Prince. Its questions of assimilation, prejudice, and American identity run parallel to Jewish history. Deliberately or not, Hammerstein told the story of being an American Jew by funneling it through the characters of Show Boat. He pioneered an American art form that continues to wrestle with the idea of America while erasing himself and appropriating from others.

In Show/Boat: A River, Herskovits looked at Show Boat with all of that complexity in mind. “I think that my interest in the conversation of layered and contradictory text is essentially an extension of the hermeneutic Jewish practice in Talmudic study,” Herskovits said. “Peeling that apart is very much what I’m interested in.”