Shipshape `Show Boat' Well-Worth A Trip To B.C.

----------------------------------------------------------------- Theater review

"Show Boat." Music by Jerome Kern, book and lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II. Directed by Harold Prince. Produced by Livent Inc. at the Ford Centre for the Performing Arts, Vancouver, B.C. Runs 8 p.m. Tuesdays-Saturdays; 2 p.m. matinees Wednesdays, Saturdays and Sundays. Tickets: $42.50-$82.50 (Canadian); 292-ARTS. -----------------------------------------------------------------

Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly. And the Harold Prince revival of "Show Boat" has to be a roaring hit to justify all the hoopla and expense it took to dock it safely at the new, $24.5 million Ford Centre for the Performing Arts in Vancouver, B.C.

Judging by last Sunday's gala opening of the Jerome Kern-Oscar Hammerstein II musical at the 1,824-seat Ford, Canadian impresario Garth Drabinsky (who bankrolled the show, and the Ford Centre) has little to fear. "Show Boat" looks and sounds splendid in Vancouver. As in its Tony Award-winning, still-running Broadway incarnation, the Prince production conjures a deeply satisfying, panoramic experience - a sublime, soulful blending of show biz past and present.

The past, of course, is the 1927 musical itself - a nostalgic float down the Mississippi in a seaworthy clapboard theater christened The Cotton Blossom with the trouping Hawk family, here led by George Grizzard's warm, twinkly Cap'n Andy and Cloris Leachman as Andy's grumpy wife, Parthy.

Spanning the four decades also covered in the popular Edna Ferber novel Hammerstein based his libretto upon, "Show Boat" nods affectionately to changing music and theater tastes from the 1880s to the 1920s, from hokey melodrama to Jazz Age razzmatazz. Kern's richly varied score is filled with tunes that became instant standards. Some are sentimental ("You Are Love," "Make Believe"), others rag and swing ("Can't Help Lovin' Dat Man"), and one is the stirring leitmotif that gives the rambling tale its spiritual cohesion ("Ol' Man River").

Brilliant sets, capable cast

So what's new here, that hasn't already been done in countless modern "Show Boat" resurrections?

Prince's refocusing of the epic story within a biracial Southern milieu. Eugene Lee's eye-popping, historically detailed settings, which whisk off and on with a silent grace only high-tech stagecraft can guarantee. And with spiffy contributions by lighting designer Richard Pilbrow, costumer Florence Klotz, inventive choreographer Susan ("Crazy for You") Stroman, and a highly capable cast of 75 (many alumni of the production's premiere Toronto), it is a shipshape vessel indeed.

You also have, for a nice change, Prince's extravagant showmanship lavished on a work of melodic genius and human interest rather than on an overblown creep fable like "Phantom of the Opera."

Hammerstein's book for "Show Boat" is sketchy, yes, and psychologically basic. It yields the typical stock characters of its era: the bickering but settled older couple (Grizzard and Leachman), the sweet young ingenue and dashing but flawed leading man (sure-voiced Teri Hanson as Magnolia Hawk and J. Mark McVey as her gambler love Gaylord Ravenal), and the dancing comic-relief pair (sprightly Keith Savage and Jacquey Maltby as Frank and Ellie).

African-American emphasis

But one of several innovations that distinguished the musical from its 1920s peers is its attention to African-American characters. The deckhand Joe (given a hearty, basso portrayal by Joe Tullis Jr.) and his wife, the cook Queenie (radiant Anita Berry), deliver some of the score's finest songs: "Ol' Man River," the rollicking "Can't Help Lovin' Dat Man," and "Misery's Comin,' " a haunting tune cut from the 1927 original production because producer Flo Ziegfeld thought it was a downer.

Though the show was picketed by some black Canadians on the eve of its Toronto run, African Americans are treated with far more dignity in this "Show Boat" than they were in both Hollywood film versions of the musical. And Prince's staging cleverly stresses the interdependence of blacks and whites as members of an extended, if unequal, Southern family, by having the black chorus members shift scenery and maintain a constant presence onstage.

The doomed figure of Julie, sung and acted very attractively by Valarie Pettiford, is the most problematic racial emblem. A show boat singer who "passes" for white, Julie is the epitome of the patronizing "tragic mulatto" stereotype in many turn-of-the-century novels and plays.

Adrift after leaving the Cotton Blossom, Pettiford's Julie sings a smoky-perfect "Bill" in a gaudy Chicago saloon before she drops out of the plot. Her noble gesture toward Magnolia is one of the least palatable strokes in the show, and it's too bad Hammerstein left Julie's saga on that bathetic note.

But you don't go to "Show Boat" looking for a discourse on contemporary race relations any more than you expect a treatise on radical feminism from "La Boheme." (There's some unfortunate sexism here, too, in the relentless battle-ax grouchiness of Parthy.)

On its own terms the show offers pleasures galore, all burnished and buffed to a high sheen by gifted artists of today who respect Broadway's yesterday. Since "Show Boat" will be moored in its Vancouver, B.C., berth for at least six months and likely longer, a jaunt north to see it is a worthwhile investment for musical-theater lovers throughout the Northwest.