David Herskovits said, “Show Boat is famously unresolved; it has been endlessly reworked, cut, emended, added to, and rearranged. Its gorgeous songs pulse through a chaotic story that is a back-stage ...

A musical comedy behaved like a comic opera last week. It came back to Broadway just as if it had been written by Gilbert & Sullivan or Franz Lehar or Victor Herbert. It set people to singing again ...

This minimalist staging strips 'Show Boat' to its bones, scraping away a century of cultural rust and sentimentality to reveal an often deeply sad and frequently funny masterpiece of music-theater.

Unlike the waterway of its most famous song, the landmark 1927 musical “Show Boat”—which integrated song and story with a sophistication that set the American musical on its path to full ...

When Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II first adapted Edna Ferber’s epic novel “Show Boat” for the stage, in the nineteen-twenties, they were the wild-eyed experimenters of their day. The American ...

In other days, it would have been called Gems from Show Boat. Ol’ Man River rolled in on the violas and bass clarinet. A muted-trumpet statement of Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man led into a tricky blues ...