Free Enchanted Evenings:The Broadway Musical from 'Show Boat' to Sondheim and Lloyd Webber by Geoffrey Block Page B

assumed a still more important role, especially in the montages staged by choreographer Susan Stroman. 42 The powerful “Mis’ry’s Comin’ Aroun,’” restored for the Houston Opera production on Broadway in 1983, was again featured.
    In earlier productions act II opened with a crowd scene at the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago. Prince drops this scene along with its two songs (“At the Fair” and “In Dahomey”) and takes the duet between Magnolia and Ravenal, “Why Do I Love You?,” which was sandwiched between these songs, and gives it to the otherwise songless Parthy (Elaine Stritch) to sing to her granddaughter. Perhaps inspired by the 1936 film, which, unlike the stage version, shows the birth of Kim and Parthy rocking her, the effect of this change is enormous. With this one gesture, the shrewish, bigoted, and largely unsympathetic Parthy gains a humanity denied in all previous staged versions.
Musical Symbolism and Dramatic Meaning
     
    In an article that appeared in
Modern Music
during
Show Boat
’s initial New York run, Robert Simon, a staff writer for the
New Yorker
and an opera librettist, wrote about what he perceived as Kern’s operatic predilections:
In
Show Boat
, Kern has an opportunity to make much of his dramatic gift. The action is accompanied by a great deal of incidental music—although “incidental” is a misleading trade term, for Kern’s music heightens immeasurably the emotional value of the situation.… Themes are quoted and even developed in almost Wagnerian fashion. 43
    Without further elaboration Simon suggests that Kern, like Wagner and several of the Broadway theater composers considered in this study, embraces his principal dramatic themes within a family of leitmotivs. 44 All of thesemotives in Kern and Hammerstein’s “leit-opera” (a term perhaps coined by Simon) can be seen against the backdrop of the Mississippi, arguably the principal protagonist of the drama, much as the “folk” form the heart and center of Musorgsky’s
Boris Godunov
and Gershwin’s
Porgy and Bess
.
    In its purest form, closest to nature, like Mahler’s cuckoos in his First Symphony (1888), Kern has chosen to represent the river by the interval of a perfect fourth (the same interval that begins “Taps” and “Reveille”). As shown in Example 2.1a , “Fish got to swim [B-E], and birds got to fly” [E-B]), Kern uses this perfect fourth to connect the force of the natural world with the central human theme of the work embodied in “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man”: a woman in love is destined to love her man forever, even when he abandons her. The theme first appears early in the work as underscoring for the dialogue in which the unrequited lover Pete questions Queenie about how she acquired the brooch he had given Julie. Since audiences have not yet heard the words to this song, its meaning cannot be fully grasped during the exchange between Pete and Queenie that interrupts choruses of “Cotton Blossom.” But with Example 2.1a , the lyrical version of Julie’s song that whites would not know (it was sung by her African-American mother when Julie was a child), Kern and Hammerstein have successfully connected Queenie and Julie from the outset of the show. Julie’s identity as a mulatto otherwise remains undisclosed until two scenes later, when the meaning and impact of her association with Queenie’s race will be clarified.
    Significantly, the five three-note
Show Boat
themes shown in Example 2.2 are sung by and to people–or in one case to an anthromorphized boat—who are part of the river and close to nature. 45 The largest group of these “river” motives, nearly all introduced in
Show Boat
’s opening scene, consist of short musical figures, in which Kern fills in the perfect fourth of “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man” with a single additional note. The four notes of the “Cotton Blossom” ( Example 2.2a ) when reversed provide the opening musical material for the main