When you think of the 1927 musical Show Boat, you don’t tend to think edgy, experimental downtown theatre. And yet, a new production of the Oscar Hammerstein II-Jerome Kern musical is currently running (through January 26) as part of the Under the Radar Festival of experimental theatre. Sure, the Target Margin Theatre-NYU Skirball co-production has re-christened the work Show/Boat: A River, but does all that new punctuation make this old school warhorse of a musical experimental all of a sudden?

According to director David Herskovits, that new title is really just a signal to audiences. “I don’t want them to expect a traditional musical, because we’re not doing a traditional musical,” Herskovits says. The staging is a new production of the old show, but one that is re-examining it far more than your typical revival. The typically large cast has been swapped for an ensemble group of 10, and watching it feels as much like watching the story of Show Boat as it does watching a discussion about the show’s very existence itself, to say nothing of its enduring popularity over the last almost-100 years. When you applaud a number at Show/Boat: A River, you might also be grappling with why you’re clapping.

Though, according to Show/Boat's co-music director and vocal arranger Dionne McClain-Freeney, this is not out of the ordinary for Show Boat. In the last 98 years, the show has been revised numerous times with at least three different versions available for licensing.

“Show Boat still has questions to ask, and has not fully answered them,” says McClain-Freeney of why this particular musical is worth bringing back, warts and all. “I think those questions is why every time it’s produced, there’s some kind of rewrite, some sort of editing. The ideas it poses are not done yet. They’re not wrapped up in a little bow.”

Show/Boat began years ago as Target Margin Theatre, known for their re-examinations of older plays, began to set their sights on doing what they do best to a musical. “I’ve always been interested in old American stuff,” Herskovits explains. “It’s very problematic, a lot of that material, and we’ve had exciting times working on it.” Add in that Show Boat passed into the public domain in 2023, opening the floodgates for freewheeling new adaptations without approval from the authors’ estates, and you get Show/Boat: A River.

READ: If You've Ever Wanted to Rewrite Show Boat, Now's Your Chance

It’s arguably easy to see why the musical is still being performed almost 100 years after it premiered. Kern and Hammerstein’s score is packed with bona fide classics—“Ol’ Man River,” “Can’t Help Lovin’ That Man,” “Make Believe,” “Why Do I Love You?,” “Bill,” and “You Are Love” all are on the songlist. And elements of the story—which primarily tracks a young woman from her formative years growing up on her parents’ showboat to rebuilding her life after her river gambler husband abandons her with a daughter and little else—are certainly moving.

But Show Boat is still, in Herskovits’ words, “old American stuff.” Which is to say, it’s got issues. 

Hammerstein’s adaptation of the Edna Ferber novel did not shy away from how race plays into the story. A formative moment in the heroine’s childhood comes when an actor and surrogate sister is forced to leave when the locals at the ship’s Mississippi docking point learn she’s biracial and has been passing as white. The original production featured an entire chorus of Black characters, and one of the main supporting characters (the “Ol’ Man River”-singing Joe) was developed expressly for concert singer and civil rights icon Paul Robeson (he ended up not originating the role on Broadway, but was in the musical’s original London cast and a 1936 film version).

In a revolutionary move for the time, Hammerstein and Kern wanted the show’s Black characters to be sympathetic, including their plight and experience of racism. The problem is trying to tackle those ideas as white men in 1927, to a mostly white audience, makes things tricky—particularly in a modern lens. “I really believe Hammerstein and Kern were trying to bring progress to the world, and they meant this work with good intentions,” says Herskovits. “And yet there are these moments where it’s just cringy.”

Of the many cringy moments one could select, none is more infamous when it comes to Show Boat than its very first song. In the original production, Hammerstein wanted to immediately telegraph to his audiences that this show would not shy away from talking about and depicting racism. He chose to do that by making the N word the very first sung lyric in the show, the first word in the show. “[N words] all work on the Mississippi, [N words] all work while de white folk play” is the first lyric to the opening number of Show Boat. And this isn’t even a situation where a more racist world made that seem acceptable at the time. It was, reportedly, as shocking then as it would be now, so much so that the lyric was only sung in that original staging, later being swapped for a number of alternatives, most commonly the somewhat problematic “colored folks.”

“That is a choice, and I say that very intentionally,” says McClain-Freeney of that original opening number. “As a Black woman, my first response was we are not singing that word ever in this piece, because I don’t believe that’s necessary. If you want to tell the story of what Black people are experiencing or what they’re doing, just tell the story. There are other words that can be used to talk about this group of people and what they’re doing.”

To say that Hammerstein’s heart was in the right place might be overly charitable, but then his body of work seems to indicate as much. The injustice of racism is a topic he returned to throughout his career, perhaps most notably (and most successfully) in his Pulitzer Prize-winning South Pacific. He and composer Richard Rodgers reportedly had many powerful voices advocating for the removal of the score’s “You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught”—about the pernicious ways racism is unnatural, an unfortunate learned bias that gets passed down generation to generation—during the show’s pre-Broadway tryout, but they refused.

But whatever Hammerstein’s intentions were, they only took him so far. As McClain-Freeney puts it, “I wish the creators had understood more about impact versus intention.”

And it’s not just slurs that can make Show Boat tricky. The show uses a framing device in which we repeatedly return to dock worker Joe and his anthem “Ol’ Man River,” which essentially likens the quiet strength and power of the Mississippi River to the human strength to persevere in the face of trauma and heartache. On its face, that seems like a fine poetic device. But in the context of Show Boat, you have this song sung by Joe, whose personal struggles as a Black man are the virulent racism of the early 20th century, from unjust incarceration to violence and lack of opportunity. And that song is used as a poetic backdrop for the story of Magnolia, the main protagonist, a white woman whose primary trauma is being abandoned by her husband and having to suffer the indignity of rejoining the workforce.

Needless to say, those two stories have nothing to do with each other. Magnolia’s strife is real. But as we watch her successfully overcome these struggles over the course of the musical’s story, it shows how inappropriate it is to link them to the experience of the show’s Black characters, who are systematically denied any real happy ending—which the show as originally written also fails to acknowledge.

“There’s a pretty common belief that [the show] is about miscegenation, it’s about race,” says McClain-Freeney, referencing the famous Act 1 scene where the showboat actor is outed as biracial, an even bigger problem for the Mississippi locals because she’s married to a white man. But that scene is not the entirety of Show Boat, and is ultimately just background lore for Magnolia. “Whose story is this?” McClain-Freeney says the team found themselves asking of the work. And that question became the center of this new take. “We’re trying to create a broader understanding of this story about sacrifice and struggle and suffering,” she explains.

And Herskovits and McClain-Freeney did that mostly by making their Show Boat very much about race, specifically whiteness. In this version, the mostly non-white cast play characters that choose to wear whiteness, first as a sash and later as a ribbon. And that’s not just to prevent confusion at the sight of non-white actors playing white characters. When, by the end of the story, most of the white characters have stopped wearing their sashes and ribbons, it becomes clear that these markers are not just signifying a character’s skin tone. In Show/Boat: A River, whiteness can be a physical shield, a tool that can be and is wielded purposefully, and to a variety of ends.

This new version of Show Boat also brings back a song that is rarely performed today, “In Dahomey.” In the original production, the song was little more than an excuse for an “exotic” production number in the second act. Magnolia and her husband Ravenal have moved to Chicago and are visiting the 1893 World’s Fair, where one of the offerings is a sort of human zoo of supposed African Zulus. The “natives” came on stage singing faux-Zulu gibberish, scaring the chorus of white fairgoers. Once the white people leave, the “natives” drop the scary gibberish and “savage” dancing and start dancing to a lovely English tune in which they also reveal their true home isn’t Dahomey but Avenue A in New York. The moment has nothing to do with the plot, and that’s just one of endless reasons it hasn’t been performed with any regularity since the 1960s.

But McClain-Freeney recognized a painful piece of American history in the scene and wanted to bring a version of it to this Show Boat, albeit in a form Hammerstein and Kern could have never conceived. “This is one of those parts of not just America’s history, but of world history that we do not talk about,” she says, referencing real-life figures like Sarah Baartman, a Black woman who was put on display at various fairs as the “Hottentot Venus,” notable to white onlookers for her voluptuous curves. And then there’s the likely unintentional racism on display in the very premise of the scene, that we’re supposedly seeing natives from Dahomey (a West African kingdom in what is now southern Benin) even though the natives themselves have been identified as Zulu, a real nation of people not from Dahomey or even West Africa, but from Southern Africa. “People think of Africa as a single country versus an entire continent, and real people as ‘wild men,’” McClain-Freeney explains.

What was, in the original Show Boat, a comedic display felt to McClain-Freeney like an extension of the indignities Show Boat’s Black characters are experiencing throughout the musical. They are stereotyped, overlooked, misunderstood, and largely present only for the benefit of the white characters. In McClain-Freeney’s “In Dahomey,” she’s inserted “Dumisa,” a traditional South African folk song. “I wanted to include it with ‘In Dahomey’ in order to restore the dignity that had been stripped away from these Black folks who were on display for the amusement of these white onlookers.” “Dumisa” is a song of praise, both non-secular and otherwise. McClain-Freeney uses it as a prequel to “In Dahomey,” replacing Hammerstein’s nonsense lyrics while still depicting the white onlookers as making incorrect assumptions about what they’re singing. “It has a kind of melancholy, because this moment of joy that these Black folks have had has been taken away.”

The result is that this Show Boat is meta in construction, exploring the show's very existence and what its enduring popularity has to say about all of us. In Herskovits and McClain-Freeney’s expert hands, Show Boat is now very clearly about race, though in ways that might surprise even its writers.

“What’s exciting is that the piece does lift people up in an important way, and does honestly try to address some tricky issues,” Herskovits says. “It has to be possible to be honest about the racial difficulties and preserve the good heart in it.” In other words, this team knows people love Show Boat, and have for decades. But they want us to ask ourselves why.

And ultimately, that’s how Herskovits landed on re-christening this production Show/Boat: A River. The Mississippi River is a powerful and recurring theme in the original musical, a constant in an ever-changing world, and Herskovits says that is ultimately the meta image for this production as much as it is the events of its story.

“We are making a new work,” he says. “I feel that looking at Show Boat today in a new way allows us to bring it into the present day, just like Hammerstein was doing in 1927. It helps us reflect on ourselves and our own moment in this country. It’s not just looking at an old thing. It is itself a new thing, and it is very much in the present tense. A River… it allows me to say yes, that’s where our eyes are. Show Boat, moving forward.”

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Photos: Show/Boat: A River Off-Broadway

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