A True American Musical!

The original production of "Show Boat" was a landmark in musical theatre, literally inventing the modern musical as we know it. For the first time, the musical tackled serious subject matter (race relations, broken marriages, forty years of our country's history), and did it with taste, intelligence, and one of the most beautiful scores ever written for the stage. The show broke the color barrier in its casting and, for the first time, songs moved the plot forward and were specific to the characters who sang them.

"Show Boat" is truly an epic. It takes a realistic family of characters from 1887, shortly after the South's disasterous Reconstruction period, up to 1927, the height of the roaring twenties and just two years before the stock market crash would again change everything in America. The characters in teh show are three-dimensional human buings who struggle to preserve a sense of family. The show not only changed the way we look at musicals, but our idea of what was possible in how an epic story could be told in musical terms.

-Marc Jacobs, Director