A spectacular new production of the American musical SHOW BOAT to dock at Lyric Opera of Chicago Feb. 12 - Mar. 17 starring Ashley Brown, Nathan Gunn, Alyson Cambridge, Morris Robinson, Angela Renée Simpson, Ross Lehman, Cindy Gold, Ericka Mac, Bernie Yvon John DeMain, conductor and Francesca Zambello, stage director.
Show Boat, the seminal American masterpiece with music by Jerome Kern and book and lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II, will have its Lyric premiere in a stunning new production starring Ashley Brown, Nathan Gunn, Alyson Cambridge, Morris Robinson, Angela Renée Simpson, Ross Lehman, Cindy Gold, Ericka Mac, and Bernie Yvon conducted by John DeMain and directed by Francesca Zambello.
Show Boat is among the great works of American musical theater that have a place in opera houses nationally and internationally. It is the first great musical that was truly American; what came before it was predominantly European in style. Based on the great Edna Ferber novel of 1926, Show Boat compellingly tells the story of a group of performers while also addressing the racial and societal upheavals of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It is a captivating drama, all-American in its subject, in its musical style and inspiration. This new production anticipates Lyric’s annual commitment to American music theater, starting with a new production of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma in the spring of 2013, which is part of the Renée Fleming Initiative.
Francesca Zambello has directed Show Boat twice previously: in a fully staged production at London’s Royal Albert Hall in 2006, and in a semi-staged production at New York’s Carnegie Hall in 2008.
“Show Boat is a work that set a benchmark for everything to come,” says Zambello.” We could not have had Gershwin, Rodgers and Hammerstein, or Sondheim without this work. Nor could we have found a bridge from opera to our own American art form. I have long believed that musical theater is ‘our’ version of opera. We now need to find a way to allow opera and musical theater to live harmoniously in our American theater and opera-house landscape.
“Show Boat has it all,” Zambello declares. “It gives us a rich musical study in opera, operetta, vaudeville, and musical comedy, but – equally important – a compelling American story of social and political importance. Based on the classic Pulitzer-Prize winning novel, it tells a complex tale of the inhabitants of a Mississippi River show boat from the1880s through the 1920s, in which the lives of the Hawks family and their troupe on the boat parallel the vast social changes of the time. Through Magnolia Hawks, a young girl coming into womanhood, the story confronts the powerful issues of miscegenation and racial injustice along with the tenderness of youthful love and the tragedy of abandonment with a child. Ferber’s story took a clear-eyed, revolutionary look at the sprawling, messy society of the post-Emancipationyears, the Industrial Revolution, and the conflicts between the North and South – issues still with us today. Kern wrapped it in joyous and heart-breaking songs that have become part of the fabric of our lives. The work is compellingly historic and contemporary all at once.”
