Show Boat (1936)–Part Three

As we said in Part Two, Victor Baravalle was the music director for the Broadway production, where he worked quite closely with the composer, Jerome Kern, and Kern’s favorite orchestrator, Robert Russell Bennett. This musical team was reunited in Hollywood for the 1936 movie. As on the stage, the beauty of the music is reserved for the duets between Gaylord and Magnolia (“Make Believe,” “You Are Love” and “Why Do I Love You”). Here in Part Three, it is time for the love songs.

Many things change in Show Boat, but the one thing that we can say with a high degree of certainty is that Gaylord Ravenal and Magnolia Hawks fell in love the first time they saw one another and continued to love one another for as long as they lived. In order to express this kind of “forever” love, Kern needed to write operatic songs for the lovers, and he did.

Kern and Hammerstein made one concession to accommodate Magnolia’s strict upbringing; when the lovers first meet, Magnolia is reluctant to talk to Gaylord because they have not yet been formally introduced. So Gaylord invents the game of “Make Believe.” This song is an ice-breaker, a device to let the two lovers express their thoughts. The artifice is pulled away at the end, when Gaylord kisses Magnolia’s hand as he sings “For to tell the truth, I do…”

First, let’s listen and watch Irene Dunne and Allan Jones sing “Make Believe.”

Now, let’s watch and listen to Frederica von Stade and Jerry Hadley sing the same number; and keep in mind that these are two excellent opera stars at the height of their power in 1990.

“You Are Love” is quite different, in that it begins as a confession by Gaylord that he had been a “ne’er-do-well” and had viewed life as a “joke.” In the transition to love, Gaylord makes a second confession–that Magnolia’s love has saved him. The lyric at the end of the song (sung before they are married) ties back to their love song after they are married and living in Chicago. At the end of “You Are Love,” they sing “Where you go with me, Heaven will always be.” At the beginning of “Why Do I Love You,” Magnolia sings “I’m in the seventh heaven…”

Again, let’s start with Irene Dunne and Allan Jones.

We will follow this with the 1990 version with Frederica von Stade and Jerry Hadley.

We will follow the same pattern with the song “Why Do I Love You.”  Unfortunately, the only version that we could find for Irene and Allan was an audio recording.

And here is Frederica and Jerry in living color. Notice the introduction of jazz into the sung by Henry Lewis, the conductor, when the chorus comes in.

But we must remember that Gaylord and Magnolia are not in heaven; Gaylord has a fatal flaw that ruins their marriage. We hear this as Gaylord sings “Till Good Luck Comes My Way” in Act One: “If I am losing today/I will take my loss and I’ll pay/For I know that in time my luck will turn,/It’s bound to turn.”

The saving grace of the movie script is that Gaylord and Magnolia are reunited on Broadway with a reprise of “You Are Love.”