Show Boat was racy stuff in every sense of the word. It involved relations between blacks and whites, including miscegenation, and dealt sympathetically with the plight of black people in the South. It had a chorus of ninety-six singers, equally divided between blacks and whites, and was the first production in the history of American theater in which blacks and whites sang together on stage. Just three years earlier, when authorities learned that Eugene O’Neill’s play All God’s Chillun proposed to show black and white children playing together as if that were normal, the district attorney for
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Show Boat, races mixed
