“Present Boat” additionally elevated the musical as an artwork type. To inform the novel’s story of a number of generations and locales, of romance and tragedy, it needed to work as a correct drama, extra like an opera than the extra lighthearted, frivolously plotted musicals that reigned on Broadway. Neither Kern nor Hammerstein had ever written one thing so bold.
The musical introduced out a number of the best work from each: wit, chunk and heartbreak within the libretto, and infectious melodies, cinematic underscoring and operatic sophistication within the rating. Every decade of the story is indicated by way of musical signposts like spirituals and parlor songs within the nineteenth century, and an interpolation of George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” within the Nineteen Twenties.
As a result of music is so central to the plot, Kern and Hammerstein additionally wrote essential diegetic songs. Within the first act Julie, the present boat’s prima donna, sings “Can’t Assist Lovin’ Dat Man,” which Queenie, the Black cook dinner, interrupts by saying, “How come y’all know that music?” She has solely heard “coloured individuals” sing it earlier than, she says, a revelation that presages Julie being unmasked as combined race.
In Act II, years later, Magnolia, who’s white and like a little bit sister to Julie, auditions with “Can’t Assist” at a theater in Chicago. It seems Julie is the star there, and he or she abruptly quits to make room for Magnolia. Magnolia then turns into a star, as if to embody the concept of Black tradition being taken up (or taken over) by white entertainers, which is what occurred with widespread music within the early twentieth century and continues to today.
Kern signified the seriousness of this material with a grand, dramatic A-minor chord within the Overture. Much more of a jolt, within the authentic Broadway run, was Hammerstein’s lyric for the opening refrain, during which audiences heard Black singers establish themselves with probably the most extreme racial epithet. (In revivals, that phrase was modified to “darkies,” “coloured folks” and, benignly, “all of us.”)
