In 1927 Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II took the courageous step of basing a musical on Edna Ferber’s novel exploring 40 years of a theatre company ‘s life on a Mississippi Riverboat. By doing so, they set off a chain reaction in the world of musical theatre that proved that this then trivial art form could comment on more serious aspects of the human condition. In Show Boat, alongside the usual but more developed vicissitudes of love, they threw the spotlight on racial prejudices in society.
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