Theatre Review by Ron Fassler . . .
According to the U.S. copyright office, “All works first published or released in the United States before January 1, 1930, have lost their copyright protection 95 years later, effective January 1, 2025.”
Therein tells the tale of why the estates of Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II are powerless to prevent anyone from tinkering with their 1927 masterwork, Show Boat. Now nearly 100 years later, nothing can be done if someone decides to produce something like Show/Boat: A River, a new interpretation from Target Margin Theater billed as “a classic reimagined.” This new version, which has just opened a two-week engagement as part of the 2025 Under the Radar Festival at NYU Skirball, may call itself a reimagining, but honestly, so little imagination has gone into this they’ve got to be kidding. From what I can tell, whatever its good intentions, its adapter and director David Herskovits (also Target Margin’s Artistic Director) fails the musical on nearly every level by way of a dull and muddied production, almost defiantly miscast.
Its ten-member ensemble consists of too many actors who can’t sing and singers who can’t act. If that sounds cruel, I’m only reporting what was obvious onstage (and not just to me). Most of the score’s brilliant songs (“Ol’ Man River,” “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man of Mine,” “Only Make Believe,” “Why Do I Love You?) were met with perfunctory applause at best and I almost expected booing at the conclusion of the exquisite ballad, “Bill,” due to the indulgent and histrionic performance by Stephanie Weeks, as painful as it is misguided. And the fact that the character has been cast with someone with such a serious pitch problem—one who is supposed to be the undisputed star of the show boat’s Cotton Blossom— makes it a total head-scratcher. It left me wondering if this is a company Herskovits works with all the time, because I find it hard to fathom that after holding auditions that Weeks as Julie and Rebbekah Vega-Romero as Magnolia were the best choices. Alvin Crawford doesn’t do badly by “Ol’ Man River” (at least he can sing), but nowhere is a director in sight to help with any of the performances. The failure of that lies at Herskovits’s feet. With the actors all playing multiple roles, it appears as if little work was done to help them to distingish their characters. Caroline Fermin’s sub-standard choreography adds nothing to the proceedings and there is little in the way of scenic design or costumes and lighting to take your mind off the under-performing actors front and center for more than 2.5 hours. The musical direction and vocal arrangements are by Dionne McClain-Freeney, with an assist from Dan Schlosberg as co-music director and orchestrator, and she manages to keep her head above water with five musicians employed for the occasion. There is sort of a concept here that these are actors doing a reinterpretation of Show Boat for us, but it’s barely articulated or thought through.

It’s important to note that before Show Boat, most musicals consisted of negligible plots that had more in common with vaudeville that what we know today as the modern book musical. The seriousness with which Kern and Hammerstein approached Edna Ferber’s novel was unprecedented, especially in the way it depicted race relations. Taking things to a whole other level of empathy, they took its miscegenation storyline and developed it in the musical from a sub-plot to front and center treatment. Though I’ve never read it, reportage has it that Ferber was far less sympathetic to its Black characters than its white ones. Hammerstein, a progressive liberal, admirably made sure to take Joe and Queenie from minor players in the book to major ones in the musical.
By its very construction, Show Boat is gargantuan. It spans a period of forty years from 1887 to 1927, following as it does a troupe of performers on a show boat in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It deals with the relationships between white and Black people of that era with a boldness and understanding that was beyond brave in its time. Here, attempting to find new ways into the piece a hundred years later, all that Herskovitz has come up with is to tie sashes that say “WHITE” when the cast, almost exclusively people of color, take on the dozens of roles in the play.

By limiting the cast to ten, Herskovits has taken a famously unwieldy musical and has attempted to say something with its reduction, as he recently told Playbill: “While certain key roles will have dedicated performers, everyone in the ensemble will take on different moments, songs, text and then let them go, sometimes very rapidly. Words and music will be shared fluidly in this process. I believe this approach allows us to truly reconsider who we are as a nation and as human beings.”
A worthy goal, but little if any of that has been successfully achieved. Without a sharp eye and ear, the entire affair is a complete muddle. After all, when a boat is out of its depth, it is referred to as “running aground,” meaning it has touched the bottom of the waterway and is unable to move due to lack of water depth. Sadly, this Show Boat is out of its depth as well.
Performances of Show/Boat: A River are scheduled through January 26 at NYU Skirball, 566 LaGuardia Place, NYC. For further information, visit https://www.targetmargin.org/showboat/.
Headline photo by Marissa Tornello. All other photos by Greg Kessler.