Showboat

As part of my ongoing resolutions - I am reading the original novel of Show Boat by Edna Ferber. Granted, it is a slow process for me. I got it last year at a garage sale, started it in March and am now only halfway through it. But it is mesmerizing in so many ways. First to think that the publishing date was 1926. We look at it as nostalgia, but back then it was barely of a time past. The depiction of the classes, race and the perception of theater people is boggling.

The Ava Gardner film was one of the first classics I gravitated to. As the Show Boat pulls away with Miss Julie in tears on the banks. It was melodrama, history and musical theater all at the same time. The score is epic. The writing of the novel colorful and demanding. I am amazed how much films vary from page to stage nowadays. But other than a few character twists, the story is exactly the same. I can see Agnes Morehead and Kathryn Grayson in every turn of the page.


I just read the onset of Chapter VI and it is timeless;


"It was the theater, perhaps, as theater was meant to be. A place in which one saw one's dreams come true. A place in which once could live a vicarious life of splendour and achievement; winning in love, foiling the evildoer; a place in which one could weep unashamed, laugh aloud, give way to emotions pent-up. When the show was over and they had clambered up on the steep bank, and the music of the band had ceased, and there was only a dying glow of the kerosene flares, you saw them stumble a little and blink, dazedly, like one rudely awakened to reality from a lovely dream."