Word: ferber
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Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II put Edna Ferber's panoramic novel onstage in 1927. It keeps on rollin' in Harold Prince's vigorous Broadway version of the old paddlewheel musical. The story still works, the great score is well sung, and Lonette McKee makes for a lustrous, heartbreaking Julie...
...easy to say what's wrong with Show Boat, the seminal 1927 musical by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II that steamed onto Broadway this week in an $8.5 million blaze of spectacular stagecraft. Based on Edna Ferber's novel about a floating theater on the Mississippi River, the show has always been too long and thematically sprawling. The most engaging characters, the light- skinned black Julie and her white husband Steve, virtually disappear before the intermission, while the coincidence-plagued second act rambles episodically from 1889 to 1927. Over the years, some critics have found the treatment of blacks...
...aspired to be Hamlet or Death of a Salesman is wrong. Even in the heyday of Harrigan and Hart and Cohan, it was the music and the production numbers that drove the action. Who today remembers the plot of a single Gershwin show? True, it was Hammerstein who condensed Ferber and gave her characters sharp, affecting lyrics to sing. But it was Kern, in a majestic score that moves fluidly and freely among such disparate idioms as vaudeville (Life Upon the Wicked Stage), the Viennese waltz (You Are Love) and the flat-out operatic (Make Believe), who gave them life...
This may well be as much attention to blacks as Broadway audiences would allow in 1927, but today the narrative defects of Oscar Hammerstein II's book are too glaring for Prince's razzmatazz to overcome. At best the script is a faint and fractured ghost of Edna Ferber's overstuffed novel. At worst it is a herky-jerky alternation of melodramatic vignettes yanked out of context and escapist bursts of clowning and dance...
...same scene figured prominently in the '50s technicolor classic, Cimmarron, based on a novel by Edna Ferber. And although Howard's sweeping images of the historic land rush are not significantly different from those in Cimmarron, his decision to shoot his movie in 70mm film is invaluable to conveying the scope of the race...