WISH-LIST WEDNESDAY: Show Boat

A photograph from the original 1927 broadway production of Show Boat

This week we're going way back in time, to almost 100 years ago, and a show first produced by one of the fathers of modern broadway Florenz Ziegfeld, best known for his Ziegfeld Follies broadway revues. Premiering at the now defunct Ziegfeld Theatre in 1927, Oscar Hammerstein II and Jerome Kern's best known collaborative effort "Show Boat", with its anthemic tunes like "Ol' Man River", has the distinction of being one of the most revived broadway musicals of all time, having been staged a total of seven times in New York's theatre district, with its first revival in 1932 containing the majority of the original cast from its initial debut.

Show Boat is based on a novel of the same name by Edna Ferber, and follows the lives of performers, stagehands and dock workers on the titular marine vessel named the Cotton Blossom, taking place over a period of 40 years between 1887 and 1927, present day when it first premiered. It is widely considered a prominent ancestor to the modern musical as we know it, and was a revolutionary piece of theatre back in the 1920s.

Artwork from the 2016 London revival

The show premiered in the west end a year after opening on broadway, at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane, and has experienced three London revivals, the most recent of these being in 2016 at the New London Theatre (now the Gillian Lynne), but despite huge critical acclaim, it closed after only a short run. Perhaps it's time it was revived once more in the UK, as the right creative team could turn this into a show to remember.