FAQ for
Show Boat (1951) More at IMDb Pro »

The show covers a period of forty years, from the 1880's to the late 1920's (which is when the show actually premiered on Broadway). This means that everyone who is in their 20's and 30's at the beginning is at least 60 in the final scene, and Kim is a grown woman rather than a little girl. Cap'n Andy is supposedly in his 40's at the beginning of the story, and 82 at the end. This was the pattern also followed in the 1936 film version.

In the 1951 film version, only about five or six years pass, and all the adults look pretty much the same age at the end as they did at the beginning. Cap'n Andy, played by the then sixty-year-old Joe E. Brown, looks sixty (or perhaps sixty-five) throughout the film.

Three things:

1) The "N" word was included in it (the first two lines were "Niggers all work on the Mississippi; niggers all work while the white folks play"). The word has been changed to what was considered a more acceptable term in later revivals as well as the 1936 film version and the 1989 television version - although the 1936 film did use the now unacceptable word "darkies" instead of "niggers". The 1989 version used the term "colored folks".

2) The opening chorus was not completely a lighthearted piece intended to make the audience forget their problems, as most opening choruses in shows were. The very first thing the audience heard and saw was the dock workers singing about how difficult their work was.

3)This was the first show in which African-Americans and whites sang together in unison onstage.

No. In the show, the first half of it is sung by the black dock workers (who are referring to the "cotton blossom" growing on the levee rather than the boat), and the second half of it is sung by the white townspeople waiting to see the troupe of actors and the show boat parade. The song ends with both groups singing different lyrics simultaneously. In more modern productions, because of advances in stage machinery, the song begins before the boat's arrival, and concludes as the boat actually pulls into the dock, whereas productions up until the late 1960's had the boat already onstage as the curtain went up .

In the 1951 M-G-M film, it is sung and danced by a chorus in colorful costumes who dances down the boat ganglank and onto the dock, and partly because of this, some of the lyrics are changed. The section sung by the dock workers is omitted in the film.

In the 1946 M-G-M biography of Jerome Kern, "Till The Clouds Roll By", the number is sung nearly complete, and more or less as it is done in the stage version, though the dock workers seem improbably light-hearted.