A water cooler. An electric guitar. A sash.
Even if you know beforehand that the Target Margin production you’re attending will be an experimental reboot of “Show Boat,” the great-grandfather of American musicals, you may find the three items that greet you on an otherwise blank stage disorienting.
Perhaps, you think, as you take your seat at NYU Skirball in Manhattan, the water cooler alludes to the Mississippi River — 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 “Show/Boat: A River.”) But the sash, draped on a mic stand, remains mysterious. In block capital letters it says WHITE.
Audiences at the premiere of “Show Boat” 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’s 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.
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.
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 “colored” songs for white audiences.
In today’s parlance, “Show Boat” centers whiteness.
“Show/Boat,” 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.
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.
The chore is familiar if you go to a lot of experimental theater. (“Show/Boat” is part of the 2025 Under the Radar festival.) Confusion is part of your penance. Here, with dozens of characters played by just 10 people, and Magnolia’s 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.
The lack of strong visual markers — the set, by Kaye Voyce, is never literal — 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.
Story logic and staging focus are in any case secondary. The riverboat shows, hosted by Steven Rattazzi’s 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’s partly deconstructed costumes do more to identify types than individuals, I kept losing Magnolia (Rebbekah Vega-Romero) in the mix.
Even more problematic is the misfit between the production’s strong intentions and the stronger raw material, which vigorously resists reshaping. Not that the story was ever quite coherent; cutting Ferber’s novel down to a serviceable libretto, Hammerstein had to cherry-pick the turning points, especially in the hectic second act. But Kern’s score is a marvel of variety, 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.
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 “white” songs, which are presented almost entirely in scare quotes, as if they were evidence of a crime. The “Black” songs fare much better. “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man” and “Bill” 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 “Ol’ Man River.”
But even these classics apparently need reframing. (“Show Boat” 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.
Still, this is sometimes effective. I’m grateful that instead of the N-word, which was the first thing heard in the original “Show Boat,” the first word you hear in “Show/Boat” is “Listen.” It’s a smart way of acknowledging the need to pay attention to history, not bury it. And a rewrite of the song “In Dahomey,” sung by faux-African performers at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, interrupts the original’s queasy minstrelsy with a real African folk song, “Dumisa,” sung gorgeously by Temídayo Amay and a small choir.
That song made me wish “Show/Boat” had further unmoored itself from “Show Boat.” So did Caroline Fermin’s choreography, which feels fresh without needing to build an argument against the original.
That kind of argument is usually a bad bet. If a work is too objectionable to perform, don’t 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’s great about “Show Boat” is not really separable from what isn’t. Not even with the help of a sash or a slash.
Show/Boat: A River
Through Jan. 26 at NYU Skirball, Manhattan; nyuskirball.org. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes.
