Cape Town Opera’s Show Boat - Song walk to freedom

Cape Town Opera’s production of Show Boat is a powerful commentary on race and rights — and you will feel its meaning anywhere in the world, writes Jo Kerrigan

NEXT Tuesday is going to be a big night at Dublin’s Bord Gáis Theatre. That’s when the massive production of Show Boat, by the legendary Cape Town Opera, Africa’s premier opera company, comes to town, and if even half the accolades heaped on it to date are true, we are in for a stunning experience. Based on the novel by Edna Ferber, Show Boat is one of the first American musicals ever written. Created in 1927 with music by Jerome Kern and book and lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II, it tells a story of the old American South as it follows the lives of the performers, stagehands, and dock workers on the Cotton Blossom, a Mississippi River show boat, over a 40-year period from 1887 to 1927.

Unusually for a musical, it highlights the harsh truths of racial segregation and cruelty that were a fact of life back then, albeit softened by the gentle touch of a family show rich with nostalgia, humour, love stories and delightful melodies. Show Boat was revolutionary in being the first Broadway show ever to feature black and white actors together on stage, the first to use ‘the N-word’ and the first to depict an interracial marriage (not legal across the US until 1967).