One Summer: America, 1927

working in Tin Pan Alley. His original speciality was creating new songs for imported plays – interpolations, as they were known in the trade – but soon he was cranking out original scores. Kern might never have become famous. He was booked to sail on the Lusitania in May 1915 on its last fateful voyage, but overslept and missed its departure.
    It was an extraordinarily busy time on Broadway. An average of fifty new musicals a year opened in the 1920s. Kern was amazingly prolific. In 1917 alone, he wrote the music for five plays, and a number of incidental songs as well. But he also developed ambitions. In the same year he wrote: ‘It is my opinion that the musical numbers should carry the action of the play and should be representative of the personalities of the characters who sing them.’ This was, improbable though it may seem today, a revolutionary notion, and it was Show Boat that would make it a reality.
    Kern could have done with a hit. He had already had one notable failure in 1927. Lucky had opened on 22 March to mixed reviews and closed two months later (on the day Lindbergh landed in Paris). The play apparently had one wonderful song, ‘Spring IsHere’, but Kern neglected to get it published and it is now lost. Of Kern’s most recent five plays, just one, Sunny , had been a real hit. The others had mostly been disappointing. Dear Sir closed after just fifteen performances. So Show Boat was both a crucial production for him and a bold gamble, too.
    It had a complicated plot, it covered a span of forty years and it addressed the highly sensitive issue of race – not the obvious makings of a night of light-hearted entertainment. Show Boat began rehearsals in the second week of September, almost three months ahead of its scheduled opening on Broadway, which was much, much earlier than would normally be the case, but its epic production numbers required careful preparation.
    With music by Kern, book and lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II, choreography by Sammy Lee and sets by Joseph Urban, Show Boat debuted at the National Theatre in Washington on 15 November, then moved on to Philadelphia, and finally opened on Broadway at the new Ziegfeld Theatre on 27 December. Rio Rita , the play Charles Lindbergh never quite saw, had to move out to make room for it. The reception everywhere was ecstatic.
    As Lahr put it in 1993: ‘Nothing like it had ever been seen on the American stage.’ It marked the birth of the integrated musical, by which is meant simply that all the elements of a musical – script, songs, dance, sets – contributed to a coherent whole, exactly what Kern had been calling for as far back as 1917.
    Show Boat was racy stuff in every sense of the word. It involved miscegenation and relations between blacks and whites, and dealt sympathetically with the plight of black people in the South. It had a chorus of ninety-six, equally divided between blacks and whites, and was the first production in the history of American theatre 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 Manhattan sent the police to stop it. So for that reason alone the play wastremendously exciting. For people inclined to be enlightened, this was a breakout moment.
    The play contained six songs that are still widely known today – ‘Ol’ Man River’, ‘Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man’, ‘Bill’, ‘Make-Believe’, ‘Why Do I Love You’ and ‘You Are Love’. ‘Ol’ Man River’ turned out to be uncannily like an existing song called ‘Long-Haired Mamma’, published earlier that year. The composer, Maury Madison, thought so, too, and sued Kern. They settled out of court.
    The substance of the play itself was anything but an automatic hit. As well as miscegenation, it seriously looked at gambling and broken marriages. It was also extremely long, not finishing until after 11.30 p.m. But people flocked to it. Several members of the audience were moved literally to tears. From the beginning Show Boat was a smash hit, grossing $50,000 a week during the course of its run.
    It was a memorable week for Edna Ferber. The night after Show Boat opened, a play she co-wrote with George S. Kaufman, The Royal Family , had its premiere. A comedy that deftly parodied the famously temperamental and self-important