Life, like show business, puts you in the spotlight before making you miserable.
It is easy enough to think why the Mozart-Da Ponte triptych should be included in the Western literary canon because the three operas expand the consciousness so as to include women. “Don Giovani” shows that women are not to be trifled with; “The Marriage of Figaro” shows that other than aristocrats can create an independent family; “Cosi Fan Tutte” shows that women are onto men even if they do not admit it. It is harder, however, to include any American musical comedies into the canon because the plots are so mannered, so artificial, and so without depth or resonance despite the attractive tunes. “Pal Joey” and “Cabaret” are too pointedly cynical while “Fiddler on the Roof” and Rodgers and Hammerstein are too sentimental to meet literary muster even if Billy Wilder does turn the trick even if he is cynical because he adds suspense to “Double Indemnity”, poignancy to “Ace in the Hole” and vaudeville slapstick to “Some Like It Hot”.
A candidate for entering the literary-cultural canon is “Showboat”, the Kern, Hammerstein and Ferber collaboration, which was introduced in the Twenties and was radical at the time because the play was sympathetic to miscegenation and treating blacks as fully formed figures while Jim Crow was at its height. There are artistic shortcomings in the musical comedy. That include lyrics that don’t fit the metrical line and a telegraphed plot line in that riverboat gamblers are not likely to be trusty breadwinners whatever their charm and personal rectitude. But the themes of the show, which go beyond the political to the existential, are strong enough to give the world it creates plausible, ingratiating and even deep. The only comparison worth considering is Lerner and Lowe’s “My Fair Lady” which owes so much to the today underappreciated George Bernard Shaw who also offered a way of life, the Edwardian aristocracy and its low class counterparts, flower girls and shiftless cockneys, as well as distinguishable characters and a political agenda for female emancipation that goes to the heart of male-female relationships, still not fully plumbed a century after Shaw and a half century after Lerner and Lowe.
One theme of “Showboat”, a musical which is hardly a comedy even if it mixes music with dialogue, is established by “Old Man River”, which functions as a Greek Chorus to carry the plot’s message. At first blush, the song suggests that the river representing time or change is indifferent to what happens to people. They will struggle and then it, being life, is over. But a deeper consideration of the plot and songs suggests something more easily enough grasped even if not appreciated by the casual theater goer. Consider that the play is a saga in that it contains multiple generations each one a bit or more than a bit askew from the predecessor generation.. There is Captain Andy, a comic figure with a henpecked wife, who nevertheless presides over the theatrics, and who is succeeded by his daughter Magnolia who loves theatricality despite her mother's opposition to it, and eventually becomes successful as a singer, thanks to her father’s circumstantial intervention, and whose own daughter is even more successful a star, that bringin the story up to the present day, the Twenties, from the origin showboat days in the 1880’s, Kern carefully trolling out tunes suitable to the decades as they evolve. And then there is what might be called a half-generation where the adult Julie, star performer with a husband, is the mentor toward Magnolia when she was still an ingenue.
The second theme of the play, which is independent but intertwined with its first theme, both of them quite familiar and perhaps trite to theatergoers, because the second one is as old as Shakespeare and the first as old as Heraclitus, is the idea that life is itself like theater. That second theme of life as theater is spelled out in a number of the songs in the show. “Make Believe” actually has some depth rather than just being a cute way for the riverboat gambler to meet Magnolia. The idea is that courtship leads to love, which a more skeptical mind might think develops gradually as a result of similar demographics and propinquity, but begins, rather, in the hope and imagination of love, transferring from fakery to reality. Anticipation is all. You pretend to be in love and then it happens and so a very unlikely prospect becomes loved at first sight by being in a position to think of love, and so love is dangerous because it depends on appearances before encountering traits and circumstances in reality. A gambler can be imagined as reliable.
Then there's the song “Life On The Wicked Stage” which is another song about the relation of reality to illusion. This time,the stage is not an image of glamorous make believe, but some sad facts of life where girls are not offered money, much less weddings, by stage door johnnies, but are more likely to have one night stands. So the stage is indeed wicked, however much the lyrics and music make fun of that, and yet the girls will come back for the next season, attracted to this deplorable life and so indeed part of a wicked enterprise. The song is warning that romance turns crestfallen or sorrowful but difficult to avoid once it has the taste for being on the stage, which is what everybody does for some moment in their life. Life and not just the stage is wicked.
And so it goes, each couple coming onto center stage to go through their drama, though sometimes lost from sight only later found out so as to show how people turned out. The high point of Julie’s drama is when she is revealed as mulatto, though the that drama is forewarned in that she had a prior life that allowed her to know she knew songs only Negro people knew. That prior life was in the shadows and her life after she is found out alsopasses into the shadows, leaving hints of what had occurred after her drama. Julie’s husband is not followed to the time when Julie sings in Chicago, now a saddened woman who is unreliable. The same happens to Magnolia who is rediscovered in Chicago by the comic couple who knew her in the old days at a not too fashionable rooming house deserted by her husband because he could not support her. Each romance is center stage until it is eclipsed, the story leaving the footlights.
That second theme allows recasting the meaning of the first theme. “Old Man River” is not just indifference in that time will just move on. It also means that each individual drama unfolds and then is enfolded by time, absorbed into the flow of time rather than indifferent to time, but there being only one chance within time.That people have star turns for better or ill, and perhaps with a reprise or a new drama, is a bit of an insight into thinking otherwise, that life is mostly minding its steady course once major decisions have been made, settling into life rather than centered on their dramatic moments, as when they fell in love and still think about that rather than the quotidian.
The end of the story is when Gay and Magnolia are reunited many years later at the time of their daughter becoming a star. There is poignancy in the years between the couple had been apart and that is a plot device Ferber used in another novel, “Cimarron”, where the male figure abandons his beloved wife for unneccesary reasons-- a need to be adventurous rather than remain in the now much too much civilized part of Oklahoma. But that is what happens. People bounce back gto their natures and so the moment of make believe breaks, having already done its part and that moment therefore significant not only for its unifying drama at a time and in a place.
The great artistic achievement of what seems only popular art was the full development of the feeling of melancholy, an emotion that did not exist before the Romantic Era. Milton’s “Il Penseroso” invokes melancholy but all that means is feeling pensive or philosophical, concerned with how such a tone can be overcome by religion, while Coleridge is full of deep sorrow found in magical figures like Cristabel and magical nature in “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” while Wordsworth does trace melancholy to childhood in his “The Prelude” and later on, in Bronte’s “Jane Eyre”, where the title figure is named as suffering melancholy and that is readily enough established as the result of her wretched childhood. I should point out that Jane Austen, a Georgian in a later age and yet fully a Romantic as well, given that matching up was the great drama of life, did not posit melancholy. Anne Elliot, in “Persuasion”, is saddened at the way her life turned out, having denied her true love, but she does not linger with it, meant to make do with the grim life she faces as a spinster who takes care of the children of her family. Push ahead. Thinking otherwise, being melancholy, would be disgraceful. Later on Freud finds deep set melancholy as the lingering effects of childhood traumas. The Freudian view ends Romanticism and contributes to the beginning of Modernism by transposed melancholy into a perverse fascination with the past whereby the feeling of melancholy turns into defense mechanisms rather than just overwhelming sadness, the sense that people cannot contemplate in the present the remembrances of what has gone past and so revisit it, like the moment Julie was uncovered and expelled from the showboat rather than move on beyond it. For Freud, It is heroic to be in the present and so have resolved the horrors that have been drowned in time that has moved away from the past.
More strictly speaking, melancholy is not just about childhood things. It is about sadness about passing things, at whatever age, and the poignancy of leaving them, however painful that may be. This emotion is paired with nostalgia which is warmth at things experienced as past in one’s own time. “Showboat” is both, so its comedy is about times not so long ago that warrants some appreciation, as is the case with “Gone With the Wind”, which shared a tender mindedness for the antebellum South, but was also melancholy because this past could not be resurrected and was just as well ended.
Apparently, the audience leaving the theater on “Showboat” ‘s opening night were silent, the reviews some hours later showing it a great success. “Showboat” was one of those rare pieces that combine popular entertainment, like Bugs Bunny or the circus, with serious art, which is Joyce. Dickens did the combination and so did “Showboat”.That original audience was not left silent by its existential issues; it was because of racism at the height of Jim Crow. I can think of no popular work that so deeply offends the current day beliefs. Not “Cabaret”, which happens thirty years after the fall of Hitler, or “The Enemy of the People”, which is just about the water supply. But I suspect and argue that “Showboat” was about deeper and more existential issues that were spectacularly effective in managing to make concrete what is abstract: that time doesn’t march on but flickers in the candled footlights.