Show Boat is a 221-minute studio album of Jerome Kern's musical, performed by a cast headed by Karla Burns, Jerry Hadley, Bruce Hubbard, Frederica von Stade and Teresa Stratas with the Ambrosian Chorus and the London Sinfonietta under the direction of John McGlinn. It was recorded from June 1 to Aug. 31, 1987 at Abbey Road Studios.
Background
Show Boat was first staged on 15 November 1927 at an out-of-town tryout at the National Theatre in Washington, D.C.. In accordance with normal practice, the creators of the show made several changes to it before its Broadway premiere at the Ziegfeld Theatre six weeks later. The Pantry scene (Act 1, Scene 2) and the Waterfront saloon scene (Act 1, Scene 3) were shortened, "Mis'ry's comin' aroun'", "I would like to play a lover's part" and "It's getting hotter in the north" were discarded, and "I might fall back on you", "Why do I love you?" and "Hey, feller!" were added.
The performing score that John McGlinn constructed for his album is a conflation of Jerome Kern's Washington and New York versions, and more comprehensive than either. The Pantry and Waterfront saloon scenes are recorded in their abbreviated versions, but the three numbers deleted before the show's Broadway premiere are reinstated, and the three new numbers composed for New York are included too. Nearly all of the dialogue for which Kern composed underscoring is present as well. An hour-long appendix presents further material. McGlinn provides the original, longer versions of the Pantry and Waterfront saloon scenes; "Kim's imitations", a number written for the first Kim, Norma Terris, when she declined to sing "It's getting hotter in the north" on the grounds that it was "lousy jazz"; "Dance away the night", a number written for the show's first London staging in 1928; "Gallivantin' aroun'", "I have the room above her" and "Ah still suits me", numbers composed for Universal's 1936 Show Boat movie; "Nobody else but me", the last song that Kern wrote, composed for a revival of the show in 1946; and four numbers that were dropped in rehearsal, "Yes, ma'am", "A pack of cards", "The Creole love song" and "Out there in an orchard". A fifth number excised before the Washington tryout, the Trocadero opening chorus, is included in the main body of the album.
The three songs from the 1936 film are heard with orchestrations that Larry Moore transcribed from its soundtrack. The orchestrations for the five numbers discarded during rehearsal were composed by Russell Warner. The remaining orchestrations are all the original versions crafted by Robert Russell Bennett. Thought lost for decades, they were found just a few years before the album was made: Bennett and the musical theatre historian Miles Kreuger unearthed one batch in 1978 in the Rodgers and Hammerstein's Music Library's Queens warehouse on West 52nd Street, and a further cache was found in 1982 in Warner Brothers' music archive in their warehouse in Secaucus, New Jersey. The vocal score of "A pack of cards" was recovered even more serendipitously: the only copy of it known to have survived turned up amongst a sheaf of old sheet music in a second-hand book store in Sacramento, California.
The making of the album was beset by several difficulties. While the estates of Kern and Edna Ferber were enthusiastic about the project, Oscar Hammerstein's son William thought it fundamentally misconceived, believing that the alterations that had been made to the show in its tryout phase had been done with good reason and ought not to be reversed. Moreover, Warner Brothers and the Kern estate spent five years wrangling over who owned the copyright of the hundreds of pages of Kern's manuscripts that had been disinterred in Secaucus. The Secaucus material that McGlinn needed for his album did not become available to him until three days before he recorded it, and then only because Beverly Sills, operatic eminence and a director of Warner Communications, prevailed upon the company to sell McGlinn and EMI the scores that they wanted for a sum in five figures. (The cost of making the entire album exceeded half a million dollars.)