Back When the Stage First Struck Me

So many choices! How to decide!

 

No, I'm not going to be writing about “Tea and Sympathy.” It’s just that this past Sunday was a dreadfully cold, windy, rainy, dark day that cried out for tea, and since I have no photographs to illustrate today’s opening story from my teenage years, you might as well have pictures of tea.

 

My story begins in the fall of my freshman year of high school. Only fourteen years old, never before had I been on a date with a boy old enough to have his driver’s license. We didn’t have to have a parent deliver us to the high school to see the senior class play, and it wasn’t a double date, either! In both ways, then, that date was a first for me -- and you might expect that having my date as the driver would have been the most important aspect of the evening, then and in memory, but no --. 

 

As it turned out -- I had no way of knowing ahead of time that this would be the case -- the play was the thing. A live stage play: another first for me. 

 

“The Curious Savage,” it was. When that final curtain came down (after the curtain calls, which I loved!), I didn’t want to leave the auditorium, didn’t even want to get up from my seat or speak to my date or have him speak to me (though he was a perfectly nice boy). Given a vision of another world, I was riveted. Spellbound. Indeed, stage-struck.

Crunch to go with sips

Every year our high school also produced what we called an “operetta,” and the production of the spring following my fall evening with “The Curious Savage” was “Show Boat,” but for the operetta my seat was in the orchestra pit, where I was section leader of the second violins, which meant that I attended the show (as it were) over and over, intimately connected to it, part of it, through the course of rehearsals I could only wish would never come to an end. 

 

My music stand partner and I were as close to the stage apron as possible, squeezed in practically under the very edge, so we could see the actors only when the action onstage was directly above us. The first violins, on the outside closer to the audience, had the better view of the stage. All violinists, however, were facing stage left, on the conductor’s left hand, and so when the soloist stood at stage left, at the very edge of the apron, to deliver the haunting, unforgettable “Ol’ Man River,” we missed none of it. That young man could have been on Broadway, I felt sure! 

 

A brief comic moment from the show has always remained in my mind, as well. The owner and captain of the showboat, desperate to fill the unexpectedly vacant position of juvenile lead in time for the next performance, asks Gaylord Ravenal (what a name!) if he is a quick study – that is, can he learn lines quickly. Ravenal, who has just seen the captain’s daughter on the deck and been told that she is the ingenue he would be playing opposite, responds, his eyes on young Magnolia, “Lightning!” Or rather, as I recall it from that high school production, “Lightnin’!”

 

As a member of the pit orchestra, required to be at every rehearsal, eventually I knew every line of the play by heart. Now the spoken lines are gone from my memory, but song lyrics remain, along with melodies. 

Honey first --

“Show Boat” was a ground-breaking event when first staged in 1927, “The first Broadway score ever to have a coherent plot and integrated songs.” (See here for more details.) That is, the show had a story, and the songs amplified the story. Before "Show Boat," a stage musical was a series of unrelated, spectacular, highly choreographed musical numbers featuring young women prancing about to music in scanty, feathered outfits and high heels. But “Show Boat” went beyond just having a story, presenting onstage “two unhappy marriages, alcoholism, the harsh realities of life for Southern Blacks, and the delicate subject of miscegenation.” (See here for more details.) Eventually, musicals with real stories, i.e., plays with music, became the American norm, something we take for granted, but “West Side Story” would not have been possible without the trend “Show Boat” started.

 

Very few people probably care that Edna Ferber was born in Kalamazoo, Michigan (on Burdick Street, I believe), but since I learned that fact, I have always remembered it, having lived in Kalamazoo myself for a number of years. Yet somehow, as far as I recall, I had never read any of her novels. Then, there it was, just the other day -- Show Boat, the book that gave birth to the musical stage show I had loved with such a deep passion at age fourteen, the book available to me as a public library-bound discard priced at one dollar. So on a dreadfully cold, windy, rainy, dark Sunday that cried out for tea, having finished another book the night before and looking for one to go with comforting hot tea, how could I hope for a better choice?

 

Edna Ferber’s novel was written in 1926, with a story beginning (in flashbacks) after the Civil War, shortly before railroads usurped the place of riverboats for carrying passengers and goods throughout America. Although a riverboat such as the Cotton Blossom Floating Palace Theatre was much more than a “houseboat,” it was home to the owner and his family and the cast of players, and as in our old household favorite, Shantyboat, the Mississippi River lends its strong, unconquerable, fluid character to the story, which made me decide immediately that Show Boat needed to be housed in my Michigan farmhouse with all our other 19^th- and 20^th-century books, fiction and nonfiction, featuring life on American rivers, despite the novel’s cringe-worthy casual racist dialogue and commentary. It is a picture of its time, and like any time in history (including our own), there was both beauty and ugliness in it, and, in my opinion, we need to recognize and acknowledge both for what they were. The musical certainly did that, and I think the book does, too.

 

But best of all Magnolia loved the bright, gay, glass-enclosed pilot house high above the rest of the boat and reached by the ultimate flight of steep narrow stairs. From this vantage point you saw the turbulent flood of the Mississippi, a vast yellow expanse, spread before you and all around you; for ever rushing ahead of you, no matter how fast you travelled; sometimes whirling about in its own tracks to turn and taunt you with your unwieldy ponderosity; then leaping on again. Sometimes the waters widened like a sea so that one could not discern the dim shadow of the farther shore; again they narrowed, snake-like, crawling so craftily that the side-wheeler boomed through the chutes with the willows brushing the decks. You never knew what lay ahead of you – that is, Magnolia never knew. That was part of the fascination of it. … But her father knew. And Mr. Pepper, the chief pilot, always knew. You wouldn’t believe that it was possible….