Show Boat Quotes

“The Robeson and Morgan plans—the Show Boat that could have been, the Show Boat that came to be—were built on new song-centered, thoroughly gendered performance personas: the spiritual-singing black man and the torch song-singing white woman, both of which marked out new areas of racially defined performance. These were innovative voices and figures, expressions of the changing popular culture landscape of Jazz Age Manhattan.”
― Todd Decker, Show Boat: Performing Race in an American Musical

“reimagining the character in broad, historical terms, going far beyond Ferber, and drawing on the history of popular music”
― Todd Decker, Show Boat: Performing Race in an American Musical

“In those venues, where her characters were made to sing and dance by creative figures such as Oscar Hammerstein, the implications of Ferber’s story of a white girl with a black voice would take Show Boat in unexpected directions.”
― Todd Decker, Show Boat: Performing Race in an American Musical

“But as for themes in fiction—every one of my books has had a theme deep in it that was very important to me. I should say every book except Show Boat, which hadn’t any theme, which was just fun.”
― Todd Decker, Show Boat: Performing Race in an American Musical

“Hammerstein’s transformation of Kim from serious actress to musical comedy star would foil Ferber’s critique entirely, leading to a totally different conclusion as to how the past and present related to each other.”
― Todd Decker, Show Boat: Performing Race in an American Musical

“Ferber redeployed Curtis’s argument about the intuitive genius of American blacks into a critique of the overschooled 1920s stage.”
― Todd Decker, Show Boat: Performing Race in an American Musical

“Both Ferber and Curtis argued that authentic musical expression was untrained, spontaneous, and (often) black, while music that was learned formally was destined to be refined, soulless, and (absent genius) likely to be white.”
― Todd Decker, Show Boat: Performing Race in an American Musical

“spirituals could also be seen as just another mode of blackness on the New York scene, taking their place beside jungle motifs, decadent displays by the denizens of Harlem, and lingering minstrelsy stereotypes. All of these would find a spot in the musical Show Boat.”
― Todd Decker, Show Boat: Performing Race in an American Musical

“the original Show Boat forged in the crucible of the Jazz Age, when black music and musicians arrived in the white mainstream in powerful new ways.”
― Todd Decker, Show Boat: Performing Race in an American Musical

“They were the songs that Magnolia had learned from black Jo and from Queenie, the erstwhile rulers of the Cotton Blossom galley. Swing Low, Sweet Chariot, she sang. O, Wasn’t Dat a Wide River! And, of course, All God’s Chillun Got Wings. … Magnolia sang these songs, always, as she had learned to sing them in unconscious imitation of the soft husky Negro voice of her teacher.”
― Todd Decker, Show Boat: Performing Race in an American Musical