Theatre in Review: Show/Boat: A River (Target Margin Theatre/Skirball Center)The Cotton Blossom has been put into dry dock, stripped of its appurtenances, and its motor subjected to an examination. That's the approach taken in Show/Boat: A River, which probes the landmark musical for...what? Take it away, adaptor/director David Herskovits: "We are not simply staging a 100-year-old classic, but recreating Show Boat, a famously unresolved work, for today's audiences with a slew of contemporary considerations, especially when it comes to casting. While certain key roles will have dedicated performers, everyone in the ensemble will take on different moments, songs, text, and then let them go, sometimes very rapidly. Words and music will be shared fluidly in this process. I believe this approach allows us to truly reconsider who we are as a nation and as human beings." About the methodology, you may take Herskovits at his word; the results are another matter. A groundbreaking achievement in 1927, Show Boat set the stage for a more sophisticated, integrated form of musical theatre. Written by the descendants of German Jewish immigrants -- librettist Oscar Hammerstein II, adapting Edna Ferber's novel, with music by Jerome Kern -- it boldly commented on racism while filling the stage with showgirls and spectacle courtesy of producer Florenz Ziegfeld. It also prefigured the book musicals that Hammerstein would pioneer with Richard Rodgers, beginning with Oklahoma! This, of course, is Musical Theatre 101. It's also worth noting that, down through the decades, Show Boat has been cut, condensed, revised, and continually fiddled with, first by Hammerstein and Kern in the rather different 1936 film and 1946 Broadway revival, and, later, by directors like Harold Prince, whose 1994 staging re-assigns key musical numbers and foregrounds the Black characters. Kern's superb score has become a patchwork, with the song list shuffled like a deck of cards. (Concord Theatricals licenses three distinct versions, so take your pick.) As they say in certain academic circles, Show Boat is an unstable text. At its core, Show Boat is always the story of Magnolia, the winsome daughter of Captain Andy, the head showman of the Cotton Blossom, and Parthy, a professional scold; Gaylord Ravenal, a charmer who lives by his wits at the card table; and Julie, the biracial singer whose tragic setbacks ironically often redound to Magnolia's favor. Serving as an unofficial Greek chorus are the Black characters: Queenie, the Cotton Blossom's cook, and Joe, a dock worker, whose ballad "Ol' Man River" provides a kind of emotional throughline. The action traverses nearly five decades, from the Old South circa 1880 to the global wonders of the Chicago World's Fair and the worlds of Broadway and radio. It's a nervy creation by artists who, throughout their careers, weren't afraid to speak their minds: In shows like Carmen Jones, The King and I, South Pacific, and Flower Drum Song -- all of which remain in circulation -- Hammerstein did more than anyone of his generation to diversify the Broadway stage. Despite their potboiler elements, Ferber's novels often featured strong doses of social criticism. As her niece, Julie Gilbert, points out in a new book Giant Love, Ferber's portrayal of Texas society in the novel Giant made her persona non grata in the Lone Star State. (According to a recent review of Gilbert's book, "A woman who read an excerpt in Ladies' Home Journal detected Ferber 'trying to weave in the race prejudice you Northerners, especially Jews, are always raving about,' and declined to buy the book.") But yesteryear's classics must be subjected to the three degree, it seems, so here we are. Still, Show Boat resists radical reinterpretations for two reasons. For one thing, the musical's assumptions and conflicts are all on the surface: The sentimentalized white characters whose romantic and domestic conflicts take precedence over the struggles of their Black counterparts, especially Julie, who embodies the out-of-date stereotype of the tragic mulatto. Two: Show Boat still works. Scene after scene confidently steers us through the characters' changing fortunes with Kerns' melodies adding infinite colors to the show's emotional palette. Look closely and you'll notice that, under the high operetta gloss, Show Boat carries an implicit social criticism, featuring a gallery of white characters caught between real life and the processed version offered for entertainment. Gaylord and Magnolia become infatuated while playing lovers in Victorian melodramas; not for nothing is their first duet titled "Make Believe" ("Others find peace of mind in pretending/Couldn't you?/Couldn't I?/Couldn't we?") But their marriage rests on a foundation of sand: When Gaylord's gambling luck runs out, so does he. Abandoned and strapped for cash, Magnolia makes a comeback, peddling sentimental songs to boozy revelers. The denial extends to Captain Andy, who pretends that his fractious Cotton Blossom crew is one big happy family, and Parthy, who adheres to a moral code everyone else finds laughable. In "Life Upon the Wicked Stage," Ellie, the professional soubrette, reluctantly admits, "Wild old men who give you jewels and sables/Only live in Aesop's Fables." And then there's Julie, greeted as a glamorous siren when everyone believes she is white and an outcast when her truth is revealed. Only the Black characters remain solidly connected to reality, as unhappy as it might be. Their daily lives are dreary and fraught with peril but at least they don't try on so many masks. Herskovits' production reduces the action to a single set, designed by Kaye Voce, a white upstage drop with entrances titled "Black" and "White." Actors often wear sashes announcing their character's race; it's a terrible idea -- they keep slipping off -- and it is eventually abandoned. The actors favor the kind of flat-affect line readings often found in John Doyle productions, leaving the impression that nobody quite believes what they are saying. Staging comes and go: The Black characters code-switching in front of whites. Occasionally, two actresses simultaneously deliver Parthy's lines. The first lines of musical numbers are spoken rather than sung. I assume Herskovits is working from the 1927 script -- the only version currently in the public domain -- and he makes some strange edits, most notably cutting the central Act II scene in which Magnolia, haltingly making her Chicago stage debut, is cheered on by Captain Andy, culminating in a rousing version of "After the Ball." All this editorializing might not matter -- or might make sense -- if the score was treated with respect. But you'll have to take potluck: Philip Themio Stoddard handles Gaylord's numbers with assurance and, as Joe, Alvin Crawford does full justice to "Ol Man River." In a show that desperately needs some levity, Caitlin Nasema Cassidy makes a charming thing of "Life Upon the Wicked Stage." But, too often, both Rebekkah Vega-Romero (Magnolia) and Stephanie Weeks (Julie) veer alarmingly off-key; Weeks subjects the ballad "Bill" to the full Nicole Scherzinger treatment, ruining a supremely poignant moment with a full-scale assault that feels like an act of vandalism. Among the cast, Steven Rattazzi, a Target Margin stalwart, is a solid Captain Andy. Temidayo Amay strikes a fine figure as Frank, Ellie's partner on and offstage, but the role is diminished by the loss of the number "I Might Fall Back on You." Dina El-Aziz's costumes at first glance look casually conceived but notice how carefully she has deployed certain details, especially color, to provide a coherent visual scheme; it's a thoughtful piece of work. Megumi Katayama's sound design is first-rate. Cha See's lighting gets the job done but I struggled to find a coherent line of thought supporting it; whatever she is doing, I'm sure she is supporting her director's vision. It's difficult to know for whom Show/Boat: A River is intended and who might enjoy it. The older audience at the performance I attended thinned out noticeably after intermission. If they were expecting a straightforward performance of the score, they were sorely disappointed. This is another entry in the Under the Radar Festival, but one wonders what a youngish, avant-garde-oriented audience would make of Show Boat, or if they have ever heard of it. (The last major New York revival was thirty-one years ago; one suspects it is too big, expensive, and controversial for most companies today.) But compared to the original, everything Herskovits and company do to it feels puny; nothing on the Skirball's stage comes near the scale and impact of what Hammerstein and Kern originally wrought. --David Barbour 
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