\n<\/p>\n
A water cooler. An electric guitar. A sash.<\/p>\n
Even if you know beforehand that the Target Margin<\/a> production you\u2019re attending will be an experimental reboot of \u201cShow Boat,\u201d the great-grandfather of American musicals, you may find the three items that greet you on an otherwise blank stage disorienting.<\/p>\n Perhaps, you think, as you take your seat at NYU Skirball<\/a> in Manhattan, the water cooler alludes to the Mississippi River \u2014 or to aesthetic thirst. The electric guitar, you imagine, marks the intention of the director and adapter David Herskovits to bring the 97-year-old musical into the present. (The title has been modishly restyled \u201cShow\/Boat: A River<\/a>.\u201d) But the sash, draped on a mic stand, remains mysterious. In block capital letters it says WHITE.<\/p>\n Audiences at the premiere of \u201cShow Boat\u201d in late 1927 would have taken that for granted. The musical is entirely the work of white people: Jerome Kern wrote the music and Oscar Hammerstein II the words, based on Edna Ferber\u2019s novel. It was produced by Florenz Ziegfeld, that self-proclaimed glorifier of the (white) American girl. The character of Queenie, a riverboat cook, was originally played by a white actor in blackface.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n It is largely about white people, too. Though Black characters figure in powerful subplots, and are more fully rounded than in most mainstream depictions from that time, they are still stereotypes. Worse, their stories are generally subservient and intermittent.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n By contrast, the main story closely follows 40 years in the unusual life of a white girl named Magnolia who grows up as part of the Cotton Blossom troupe plying the Mississippi. She marries a rake named Ravenal, raises their daughter, Kim, alone and eventually becomes successful by singing \u201ccolored\u201d songs for white audiences.<\/p>\n In today\u2019s parlance, \u201cShow Boat\u201d centers whiteness.<\/p>\n \u201cShow\/Boat,\u201d the reboot, honorably seeks to undo that. When the actors, cast without regard to race, put on sashes like the one seen at the start, signifying that the character they are currently playing is white, they are implicitly reversing the expected point of view. To be white is to be the exception here and, in a way, to be culpable. No wonder the silky sashes keep slipping off.<\/p>\n You may too. To the extent the production succeeds as progressive optics, it does so at a huge cost to coherence and thus pleasure. Like the white guilt it mirrors, it is too often too much of a chore to encourage meaningful reflection.<\/p>\n The chore is familiar if you go to a lot of experimental theater. (\u201cShow\/Boat\u201d is part of the 2025 Under the Radar festival<\/a>.) Confusion is part of your penance. Here, with dozens of characters played by just 10 people, and Magnolia\u2019s mother played for some reason by two, following the rangy story is especially difficult, even if you know it well. Perhaps name tags would have been more helpful than sashes.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The lack of strong visual markers \u2014 the set, by Kaye Voyce, is never literal \u2014 makes it harder to know where you are and, sometimes, who is speaking to whom. A convent scene between Ravenal (Philip Themio Stoddard) and Kim is usually a surefire tear-jerker; because this production does not put Kim onstage for the interaction, I did not even realize it was happening.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Story logic and staging focus are in any case secondary. The riverboat shows, hosted by Steven Rattazzi\u2019s Captain Andy, are so deliberately poorly acted, it seems impossible that they could have kept an audience. (The acting is often wooden anyway.) And because Dina El-Aziz\u2019s partly deconstructed costumes do more to identify types than individuals, I kept losing Magnolia (Rebbekah Vega-Romero) in the mix.<\/p>\n Even more problematic is the misfit between the production\u2019s strong intentions and the stronger raw material, which vigorously resists reshaping. Not that the story was ever quite coherent; cutting Ferber\u2019s novel down to a serviceable libretto, Hammerstein had to cherry-pick the turning points, especially in the hectic second act. But Kern\u2019s score is a marvel of variety<\/a>, invention and emotion. In music that appropriates Mitteleuropean operetta, symphonic doom, folk song, jazz, vaudeville and other genres, he confidently sketches individual characters and groups while also marking the passage of time and taste.<\/p>\n Despite lovely vocal arrangements (by Dionne McClain-Freeney) and surprisingly rich orchestrations (by Dan Schlosberg) for a band of just six players, little of that registers here. Certainly not in the \u201cwhite\u201d songs, which are presented almost entirely in scare quotes, as if they were evidence of a crime. The \u201cBlack\u201d songs fare much better. \u201cCan\u2019t Help Lovin\u2019 Dat Man\u201d and \u201cBill\u201d are highlights for Julie (Stephanie Weeks), the mixed-race star of the showboat who has been passing as white. The dockworker Joe (Alvin Crawford) gets to rumble the anthemic \u201cOl\u2019 Man River.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n But even these classics apparently need reframing. (\u201cShow Boat\u201d entered public domain in 2023, so anything goes.) The electric guitar is called into service to extend the aural timeline unconvincingly to the 1950s and beyond. Many songs have been given unnecessary new shapes or spoken-lyric introductions, turning individual words this way and that like dinosaur bones from a dig.<\/p>\n Still, this is sometimes effective. I\u2019m grateful that instead of the N-word, which was the first thing heard in the original \u201cShow Boat,\u201d the first word you hear in \u201cShow\/Boat\u201d is \u201cListen.\u201d It\u2019s a smart way of acknowledging the need to pay attention to history, not bury it. And a rewrite of the song \u201cIn Dahomey,\u201d sung by faux-African performers at the 1893 Chicago World\u2019s Fair, interrupts the original\u2019s queasy minstrelsy with a real African folk song, \u201cDumisa,\u201d sung gorgeously by Tem\u00eddayo Amay and a small choir.<\/p>\n That song made me wish \u201cShow\/Boat\u201d had further unmoored itself from \u201cShow Boat.\u201d So did Caroline Fermin\u2019s choreography, which feels fresh without needing to build an argument against the original.<\/p>\n That kind of argument is usually a bad bet. If a work is too objectionable to perform, don\u2019t perform it. If you want to replace it with a new work told from a new and arguably more authentic perspective, do that. But the halfway treatment in this case feels like keeping the bath water and drowning the baby. As many more-faithful revivals have proved, what\u2019s great about \u201cShow Boat\u201d is not really separable from what isn\u2019t. Not even with the help of a sash or a slash.<\/p>\n Show\/Boat: A River<\/strong>
Through Jan. 26 at NYU Skirball, Manhattan; nyuskirball.org<\/a>. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n