Here Comes the Show Boat! Broadway musical? Or opera in disguise? And does it matter?

By Michael Walsh

Q: When is an opera not an opera?

A: When it's a Broadway show.

Q: Then when is a Broadway show not a Broadway show?

A: When it's an opera.

Q: So how do you tell the difference?

A: That's a tough question.

These days, a very tough question. For too long "opera" has been narrowly + defined as what goes on at the Metropolitan Opera House; a rigid distinction between art and entertainment, fervently defended by a musical flat-earth society, has denied audiences the riches that lie beyond the narrow shoals of the classical repertoire. Today, though, singers and conductors are making the voyage and discovering a brave new world on the other side: America's own authentic artistic heritage. Broadway, say hello to high class.

Since 1985, when Leonard Bernstein's 1957 musical West Side Story was released with an operatic cast that included soprano Kiri Te Kanawa and tenor Jose Carreras -- and sold handsomely -- other shows have got the tony treatment on records: Rodgers and Hammerstein's Carousel (1945) and South Pacific (1949), and Lerner and Loewe's My Fair Lady (1956). Now, most impressive of all, comes Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II's 1927 musical adaptation of Edna Ferber's novel Show Boat.

With a cast that features opera stars Frederica von Stade (Magnolia), Teresa Stratas (Julie) and Jerry Hadley (Ravenal), as well as a cameo appearance by Lillian Gish as the Lady on the Levee, this Show Boat aims high. "Show Boat was thought of as a dusty operetta, but it is really a moving piece of music drama," says conductor John McGlinn, 35, whose passion for the score drove him to record the Mississippi riverboat musical in its complete 1927 version. McGlinn restored the overture, reinstating three important ensemble numbers and, most controversially, insisting on Hammerstein's original dialogue, which includes use of the word nigger. The result is a Show Boat wiped clean of the sentimental and sanitized patina it had acquired over the years. In its place stands a raw, powerful and angry work whose seriousness of purpose and lofty artistic aspirations are umistakable.

Not all the recordings have been as musically successful as Show Boat. In West Side Story, Carreras' Hispanic accent was as wrong for the role of the New Yorker Tony as Te Kanawa's British inflection was for the Latino Maria. In South Pacific, the casting of tenor Carreras, in the role created by bass Ezio Pinza, was a bit of commercialism that necessitated transposing the part and ended up distorting the balance. Further, imagining the New Zealand-born Te Kanawa as an all-American Nellie Forbush was a greater suspension of disbelief than many listeners were willing to make. Yet My Fair Lady was solid and assured, even if Jeremy Irons did not erase the memory of Rex Harrison as | Henry Higgins. And Carousel, with songstress Barbara Cook and opera bass Samuel Ramey as the ill-fated lovers, was thrilling.

Broadway shows, however, do not have to be cast with opera stars to be taken seriously. What they have to be first is respected. "There are great theater pieces of the teens, '20s and '30s that don't exist in performable form," laments McGlinn. "If a show closed out of town, the scores could be thrown out on the last night. A lot of pre-Oklahoma! Rodgers and Hart, Porter and Kern shows are gone forever. We're trying to reclaim from oblivion all the work of America's greatest writers and composers."

It is a worthy cause. What, after all, is the American musical but a transatlantic cousin of the Viennese operetta whose patrimony also includes the harmonic and rhythmic vitality of jazz? The line from Johann Strauss and Franz Lehar to Frederick Loewe and Richard Rodgers is really very short. Far from being an exotic and irrational entertainment, opera is the most vital and popular of musical forms. Is Mozart's The Magic Flute, composed in the vernacular for the Viennese commercial theater, stuffy high art just because it is 200 years old and occasionally performed at the Met? That would be news to Mozart, who craved popular esteem and pointed to it as a proof of artistry. Are Bernstein's Candide, Gian Carlo Menotti's The Saint of Bleecker Street and George Gershwin's Porgy and Bess frivolous musicals just because they were first performed on the Great White Way? Not at all.

Fish got to swim, birds got to fly: the best composers will always write seriously, even when they are frankly dressing their tunes for success. The move from Broadway to opera house -- from quotidian show to stage classic, in other words -- is well under way. The only difference is that now people are finally catching on.

With reporting by Nancy Newman/New York