`SHOW BOAT' : GENRE'S FLAGSHIP PLIES CULTURE'S TURBULENT WATERS.

Byline: Reed Johnson Daily News Staff Writer

History has not always been kind to ``Show Boat,'' and some would argue that ``Show Boat'' hasn't treated history so well, either.

Picture the landmark musical and what springs to mind? Genteel belles played by the likes of Ava Gardner inflaming the hearts of dapper rakes. Long-suffering yet resilient African-Americans, stirringly portrayed by actors such as William Warfield. A Mississippi River levee swarming with Ziegfeld chorines and a couple waltzing through Technicolor fantasies of the 1893 Chicago World's Fair.

This version of ``Show Boat'' holds a central, mythic spot in the national culture. Before the Cotton Blossom steamed up Broadway on Dec. 27, 1927, American musicals were frivolous affairs, either cliche-besotted girl-meets-boy comedies or creamy imitations of Viennese operettas.

Virtually overnight, ``Show Boat'' minted a new genre.

Drawing on Edna Ferber's 1926 novel, composer Jerome Kern and lyricist-librettist Oscar Hammerstein II became the first Broadway team to address serious subjects like racism and marital strife. Theirs was the first score to flow naturally out of character motivation, rather than wedging overblown emotions between choruses of tra-la-las.

In ``Show Boat,'' great themes engulfed unsinkable characters: Cap'n Andy Hawks and his grouchy wife Parthy; their daughter, Magnolia, and the dashing gambler she falls for, Gaylord Ravenal; Joe and Queenie, the stalwart black couple who keep the Cotton Blossom afloat; and Julie, the self-sacrificing ``tragic mulatto,'' archetypal symbol of a divided society.

Instantly deemed an artistic breakthrough, ``Show Boat'' quickly became a founding icon of the contemporary musical. Director Harold Prince, whose $6.5 million revival opens its Los Angeles engagement tonight at the Ahmanson Theater, calls ``Show Boat'' ``a panoply of American history.''

But some argue that there's another ``Show Boat,'' a ``Show Boat'' that, wittingly or not, puts a nostalgic gloss on an ugly past. No matter how high-minded the updating, this ``Show Boat'' seems to keeps resurfacing, like an emulsion ghost in an old daguerreotype.

``It's always been a very racist show,'' says James Burks, director of the William Grant Still Art Center in Watts. Though he hasn't seen the current revival, and doesn't intend to, Burks questions why anyone thought the musical worth revisiting again.

``Sometimes we want to let sleeping dogs lie,'' he says. ``It's better that way.''

Among the criticisms leveled at ``Show Boat'' is that it is limited in its view of African-Americans, portraying them as only civil and accommodating, and failing to take into account that there were protests and uprisings going on during the 40 or so years covered by the story.

Dr. Jacqueline Cogdell DjeDje, a professor of ethnomusicology at UCLA, hasn't seen the production either, but doubts if the show's offensive elements ever have been visible to nonblacks anyway.

``I guess for nonblacks the show probably has no racial overtones, because this is probably the way in which they perceive cultures and groups at that time,'' she says.

After 60 years, the question persists: Did Kern and Hammerstein, two avowed liberals, inadvertently write a paean to the epoch of mint juleps and Jim Crow justice - a kind of paddlewheel-powered ``Birth of a Nation''?

Or did they succeed in wrestling Ferber's melodramatic prose into a righteous rebuke to intolerance, which also happens to contain three or four of the best pop standards ever penned (``Ol' Man River,'' ``Bill,'' ``Can't Help Lovin' Dat Man'')?

Both perceptions may have a place in this hulking epic's complex legacy.

Contrary to a widespread and damaging misconception, ``Show Boat'' doesn't take place during the slave era. It opens on a Natchez, Miss., wharf in 1887 - Reconstruction's death rattle - and ends later during the height of the Jazz Age.

Historically, ``Show Boat'' has boosted the careers of innumerable African-American performers, including Warfield and Paul Robeson, who played Joe both on stage and in one of the three Hollywood versions (1929, 1936 and 1951). Nobody's idea of an Uncle Tom, the outspoken, left-leaning Robeson made ``Ol' Man River'' into a personal anthem of stoic defiance.

If the original ``Show Boat'' had been free of racial caricature, it would have stood far outside the mainstream of its time. It's worth remembering that ``Show Boat'' premiered the same year that white star Al Jolson was in blackface, crooning ``Mammy'' in the first ``talkie,'' ``The Jazz Singer.'' In that context, ``Show Boat's multiracial cast of 96 was something of a radical act in itself.

``That was just history in the making, where black and white lead characters are on the stage at the same time,'' says Valarie Pettiford, who plays Julie in the new revival.

A longtime staple of summer stock, ``Show Boat'' has seen its popularity rise, fall and rise again. It appeared to have permanently run aground in the '60s and '70s - perhaps not coincidentally the height of the Civil Rights and black power movements - only to roar back in the '90s. But apart from a Houston Grand Opera version in 1982, this production is the show's first major reassessment in decades.

In planning his Tony Award-winning revival, director Prince had unprecedented leeway to rework the score and make the show conform to his views of the period. His intent was to steer ``Show Boat'' away from its pastel prettiness toward a grittier, more realistic look and attitude.

``Whatever Hal Prince does, it's very political,'' says Susan Stroman, the show's highly acclaimed choreographer. ``It was very important to him to bring

out the politics of `Show Boat' and to make that be what the upfront concept is about. That's what keeps this `Show Boat' from being a musical comedy.''

Recruiting an A-list production team - Stroman, set designer Eugene Lee, costumer Florence Klotz and lighting designer Richard Pilbrow - Prince paints his ``Show Boat'' in tans, browns and sepias, the brawny palette of a war-torn republic poised to reinvent itself as an industrial giant. His opening tableau of two water barrels, one labeled ``White Only,'' the other ``Colored Only,'' sets the overwhelming fact of racial inequity squarely before the audience.

Prince also chose to restore ``Mis'ry's Comin' Aroun','' Queenie's aching gospel premonition, which was dropped from the original show.

``It's really a haunting melody and really gets through to the plight of the African-Americans,'' Stroman says.

Time and again, Prince's production strives to highlight African-American threads in the national fabric. Black company members literally heave the show into existence, hauling the sets in place with ropes and pulleys. In one of Stroman's second-act dance montages, white gawkers watch black tap dancers do an early version of the Charleston. Later, a group of white flappers co-opt (and sanitize) the hip-grinding dance for themselves.

It's exactly the darkly ironic approach you'd expect from Prince, a Broadway legend who insists on holding a cracked mirror up to virtually every show he touches (``Cabaret,'' ``Sweeney Todd,'' ``Evita,'' ``Kiss of the Spider Woman'').

``To put a semi-pretentious point on it all, I'm always happiest when scenery and performers are metaphorical,'' says Prince, speaking by phone from New York City. ``At the beginning of a show, if you can't provide an all-encompassing metaphor, then why are you doing the show in the first place?''

But is metaphor enough to sensitize a libretto laden with ``dese-es'' and ``dats''? Can proper attribution redeem a play whose original opening lines were, ``N-----s all work on da Mississippi''? (Hammerstein later changed it to ``colored folks'').

``There are some people who say that appropriation is the highest form of flattery,'' notes UCLA's professor DjeDje. ``I take that with a grain of salt.''

The question historically, some argue, is who has benefited in the economic long term from appropriating another culture's ideas? Little Richard or Elvis? George and Ira Gershwin, or the 19th-century African-American pastors whose gospel-blues refrains inspired ``Porgy and Bess''?

Kern and Hammerstein, or the children of slaves who used to make up new dance steps together on the wharves of the Old South?

``If there's been some give and take here, where both can benefit, that's another issue,'' Dr. DjeDje continues. ``But when one is constantly downtrodden, that's when the whole exchange and the appropriation does not really sit well.''

It didn't sit well in Toronto, where the production first opened three years ago amid picket signs and calls for a boycott by local blacks.

At the height of the furor, Stephanie Payne, a black suburban Toronto school trustee, described Ferber's novel as ``hate literature in the name of entertainment,'' and declared that ``usually a Jewish person is doing plays that denigrate us.'' Her comments were widely denounced as anti-Semitic slurs not only against Kern and Hammerstein, but director Prince and Canadian entertainment mogul Garth Drabinsky, chairman and CEO of Livent Inc., the show's producer.

Though Payne later apologized, battle lines had been drawn. In the days leading up to the debut, the ``Show Boat'' crew had to pass by protesters on their way to rehearsals. On opening night, ticket-holders in black tie had to weave their way through a phalanx of riot cops.

``I have to say it didn't really affect us,'' says choreographer Stroman. ``We knew it was out there, but we're all artists and we were oblivious to a lot of that. We just did the work, and it disappeared after opening night.''

Yet James Burks, of the William Grants Still Arts Center, suspects there might have been protests in Los Angeles this week, too, if much of the city's black leadership hadn't lately been preoccupied with trying to defeat Proposition 209, the so-called California Civil Rights Initiative.

``I guess it all depends upon the times in which a production like that may be presented,'' comments UCLA's Dr. DjeDje. ``These are times that are not good, at least in the state of California.''

Perhaps the most painful aspect of the Toronto affair was that it echoed the growing tension between North American Jews and blacks, both in politics and popular culture. In the 1920s and '30s, Jewish and Yiddish folk traditions combined with black blues-gospel to produce a musical hybrid that awed and inspired the world. In the 1950s, blacks and Jews stood shoulder to shoulder against Bull Connor's police dogs.

Repeatedly, both in politics and popular culture, Jews and blacks have found a common idiom in the language of the Old Testament, in God's promise of deliverance from oppression, and in the image of a mighty river that is the Mississippi's spiritual father.

In ``Show Boat's'' most unforgettable moment, its most unforgettable character, Joe, sings of that faraway stream:

Let me go 'way from the Mississippi,

Let me go 'way from de white man boss;

Show me dat stream called de river Jordan,

Dat's de ol' stream dat I long to cross.

``You think of the Holocaust or you think of us going way back, taken from our homes, and being stripped of our heritage, and you'd think we would come together,'' actress Pettiford says sadly. ``Because we have the same struggle.''

Asking this production of ``Show Boat,'' or any other, to speak equally to everyone about that struggle may be asking too much.

But if ``Show Boat's'' long history teaches anything, it's that America still hasn't given up trying.

CAPTION(S):

Drawing, 7 Photos

Drawing: (Cover--Color) `Show Boat'

rolls in

The lavish production of the classic American musical arrives in L.A. carrying a lot of historical baggage

Photo: (1--2--Color) Above, ``Show Boat'' marked the first Broadway production to address such serious subjects as racism and marital strife, to the detriment of empty emotional tra-la-las. Right, Cap'n Andy (Beatty`) navigates the Big Muddy and the whims of his surly wife (Cloris Leachman).

(3--Color) The unsinkable Cap'n Andy (Ned Beatty) buoys ``Show Boat.''

(4--5--Color) Tiffany Stoker is a dancer in the musical production at the Ahmanson Theater. Anita Berry, below, plays the indispensable Queenie.

(6) ``Show Boat'' opens during Reconstruction's death rattle and ends during the heyday of jazz.

(7) Valarie Pettiford's Julie embodies the symbol of a divided society.