On 24 May 2010 at 14:03, Christopher Smith wrote: > On Mon May 24, at MondayMay 24 12:58 PM, David W. Fenton wrote: > > > On 24 May 2010 at 12:51, John Howell wrote: > > > >> I take > >> "Oklahoma!" as the tipping point, even though "Showboat" had tended > >> that way earlier (and significantly with the help of Hammerstein). > > > > Hmm. The Showboat issue is quite complicated. There exist about 5 > > distinct versions of the show. It was tinkered with quite > > extensively in revivals and in the movie versions, and really think > > most of the "innovations" are later tweaks to the original (at > > least, in comparison to the original of Oklahoma). > > The social conscience part of Showboat (stories sympathetic to black > principal characters, black actors and white in the same scene and > singing the same song) were part of the original, I think. Please > correct me if I'm wrong, but I got a look at an original engraving of > the Showboat score, and I think I remember this stuff. You may be > right about dramatic innovations.
OK, you're talking about something different than I was -- I was referring to the musical innovations of Oklahoma (the ballet, the integration of music and plot). Showboat is said to be the first Broadway musical with a through story line (as opposed to a loose plot that barely holds together a bunch of songs that don't have much to do with each other), and Oklahoma was the next stage of that evolution. But I think that a lot of what we see in Showboat in that regard was altered after the original production. The major tweaks to the thing were explicitly described in the Playbill of the 1994 Broadway production (which I saw with my parents in 1995), and that production made a point of enhancing the racial inequality aspect of the story line, if I'm remembering correctly. The Wikipedia article is interesting, though, it seems to me, somewhat incomplete. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Show_Boat -- David W. Fenton http://dfenton.com David Fenton Associates http://dfenton.com/DFA/ _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
