Race and the Legacy of the World’s Columbian Exposition in American Popular Theater from the Gilded Age to Show Boat (1927)

Abstract

The second act of the musical Show Boat begins on the bustling Midway Plaisance, storied entertainment district for the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago (figure 1). In the original production, which premiered at the National Theatre in Washington, DC, on November 25, 1927, and made its Broadway debut on December 27 of that same year, the exposition visitors were played by members of an all- white chorus. A second chorus, constituted of Black singers, did not appear onstage until near the end of the scene. Dressed as Dahomians, they sallied forth from the entrance to their “village,” stage right on Joseph Urban’s set (figure 2). Jerome Kern, the musical’s composer, heralded their arrival with primitivist fare: a rhythmic ostinato played in unison by the orchestra, joined by an ominous melody in the lower brass. The men in the Black chorus sing first, laying into an aggressive motive. Eight measures after their entry the whole complex shifts up a half step, and the intervallic content is amplified, the prominent perfect fourth replaced by a minor sixth. At this juncture the women enter and engage in antiphonal exchanges with the men. The section culminates with the Black chorus—men and women—singing together, emphatically land-ing on an F- sharp dominant seventh chord. The lyrics, penned by Oscar Hammerstein II, are the chanted nonsense syllables of a stereotypical David C. Paul