‘Show Boat’ Navigates Traditional Waters

“Show Boat” is a fabulous mess of a musical. The score, by Jerome Kern and lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II, is chockablock with some of the most beautiful songs ever written for the stage. But the book, which Hammerstein adapted from Edna Ferber’s sprawling novel, struggles to coherently compress 41 years’ worth of action.

Though the show was a hit when it opened in 1927, Kern and Hammerstein kept reworking their material, ultimately generating numerous drafts of the script and a number of additional songs, as well as multiple endings.

The challenge for anyone presenting the show today is to piece together a cohesive version of the story--a challenge magnified when the production is taking place at the massive Hollywood Bowl.

Happily, the task was well met Sunday night in a concert staging that kept the focus resolutely on the music, while thinning the script to brief dialogue scenes connected by narration.

Conductor John Mauceri and the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra worked from the 1927 orchestrations by Robert Russell Bennett, while the Mitch Hanlon Singers and Douglas Sills, Alice Ripley and Susan Egan sang the original Will Vodery vocal arrangements.

Though the staging by John Bowab didn’t feel as meticulously rehearsed as last summer’s “Carousel,” the presentation was such a success musically that the Bowl audience listened with uncharacteristically quiet attention.

The original arrangements preserve a crisp, percussive, up-tempo period sound, which--from the very first notes of the overture--transported the audience back in time.Sills was already a favorite of local theater audiences before his Broadway success in “The Scarlet Pimpernel.” Tall and dashing, he proved to be an inspired choice to play Gaylord Ravenal, the man of smooth manners and questionable morals who happens upon a traveling showboat and promptly wins the heart of its owners’ nave, idealistic young daughter.

Vocally, Sills was a pleasure, too. A tenor capable of impressive pyrotechnics, he floated phrases of such songs as “Make Believe” and “You Are Love” in a hushed bel canto, then punched the high, climactic notes into the stratosphere.

As his beloved Magnolia, Ripley charted a believable progression from flighty youth--characterized by a fluttery soprano singing voice and skipping demeanor--to time-tempered adulthood--with the flutter and bounciness reined in.

As the showboat hand Joe, Gregg Baker delivered a rich, resonant version of “Ol’ Man River,” while, in a twist that brought a tear to many an eye, William Warfield, who sang that song so memorably in the 1951 film and served as Sunday’s narrator, reprised a verse of it as old Joe at the story’s end.

Unfortunately, this presentation had two actresses suitable to play Magnolia but none right to play Julie, the mixed-race showboat actress struggling to make a place for herself in a still heavily segregated America at the turn of the century.

Egan’s shimmering soprano would have worked well for Magnolia, but her lack of a deeper, smoldering mezzo robbed texture from bittersweet showstoppers “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man” and “Bill.”

Providing background vocal texture, the Mitch Hanlon Singers were badly miked and insufficiently prepared--resulting in a muddied sound that deflated the novelty of a rarely performed mock-African tribal number at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, which in turn set up the little-performed duet between Joe and his spouse, Queenie, called “Ah Still Suits Me”--a comic, bickering number from the show’s 1932 revival. (This and the jazzy “Nobody Else but Me”--Kern’s last composition, written for the 1946 revival--provided the evening’s two intriguing interpolations into the 1927 score.)

But Mauceri coaxed vibrant sounds from the 51-piece orchestra, and his passion for authenticity propelled this “Show Boat.”