The novel that inspired the Broadway classic—a saga of romance, revenge, and a riverboat theater troupe: “First-rate storytelling . . . irresistible.” —The New York Times Book Review Spanning four decades and three generations, and journeying from the post–Civil War South to Chicago to New York, Show Boat has been adapted for radio, stage, and screen, becoming a landmark of American culture. The bestseller by Pulitzer Prize winner Edna Ferber follows a cast of characters who live and work aboard a riverboat, traveling in order to perform for audiences along the banks of the Mississippi. It is a story of adventure, drama, destructive passions, racial conflict, and romantic entanglements, set amid the changing times of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Show Boat: Performing Race in an American Musical draws on exhaustive archival research to tell the story of how Jerome Kern, Oscar Hammerstein II, and a host of directors, choreographers, producers, and performers-among them Paul Robeson-made and remade the most important musical in Broadway history.

"I was born at the tail end of a unique and delightful era and raised on one of the last showboats to struggle for survival against the devastating crunch of progress.... Our showboat's express purpose was carrying entertainment to hundreds of thousands of river-bottom farmers along our water-bordered frontier." —from the book Betty Bryant was a river rat. The Floating Theater was her home, and the river was her back yard. While other children were learning to walk, she was learning to swim. She knew how to set a trotline, gig a frog, catch a crawdad, and strip the mud vein out of a carp by the time she was four. In this colorful memoir, Betty shares her own piece of Americana, the small, family-owned showboat of the early twentieth century. Billy Bryant's Showboat plied the inland waterways of the Ohio River watershed from before the First World War until 1942, bringing a blend of melodrama and vaudeville, laughter and therapeutic tears, into the lives of isolated people in rural communities along the way. Betty made her first professional appearance at the age of six weeks when she played a baby in "Uncle Tom's Cabin." In her twenty years of touring, she acted, danced, and grew up in the tradition of "family entertainment, by families, for families." Here Comes the Showboat! is told with the ageless wonder of a child who loved the showboat and the eager audiences its uniquely American entertainment touched. It is a treasure trove of humorous anecdotes, touching remembrances, and delightful photographs of Betty, the three generations who ran the family showboat, miners, musselers, shantyboaters, farmers, merchants, and actors whose lives intersected along the Ohio River.

A drama more fantastic than any the stage had ever produced was being plotted behind the curtains of the Showboat of Space. And between its presentation and inter-world disaster, waiting for his cue, stood only the lone figure of Investigator Neville.

The Female Complaint is part of Lauren Berlant’s groundbreaking “national sentimentality” project charting the emergence of the U.S. political sphere as an affective space of attachment and identification. In this book, Berlant chronicles the origins and conventions of the first mass-cultural “intimate public” in the United States, a “women’s culture” distinguished by a view that women inevitably have something in common and are in need of a conversation that feels intimate and revelatory. As Berlant explains, “women’s” books, films, and television shows enact a fantasy that a woman’s life is not just her own, but an experience understood by other women, no matter how dissimilar they are. The commodified genres of intimacy, such as “chick lit,” circulate among strangers, enabling insider self-help talk to flourish in an intimate public. Sentimentality and complaint are central to this commercial convention of critique; their relation to the political realm is ambivalent, as politics seems both to threaten sentimental values and to provide certain opportunities for their extension. Pairing literary criticism and historical analysis, Berlant explores the territory of this intimate public sphere through close readings of U.S. women’s literary works and their stage and film adaptations. Her interpretation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and its literary descendants reaches from Harriet Beecher Stowe to Toni Morrison’s Beloved, touching on Shirley Temple, James Baldwin, and The Bridges of Madison County along the way. Berlant illuminates different permutations of the women’s intimate public through her readings of Edna Ferber’s Show Boat; Fannie Hurst’s Imitation of Life; Olive Higgins Prouty’s feminist melodrama Now, Voyager; Dorothy Parker’s poetry, prose, and Academy Award–winning screenplay for A Star Is Born; the Fay Weldon novel and Roseanne Barr film The Life and Loves of a She-Devil; and the queer, avant-garde film Showboat 1988–The Remake. The Female Complaint is a major contribution from a leading Americanist.

When most of us hear the title Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, we think of Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell’s iconic film performance. Few, however, are aware that the movie was based on Anita Loos’s 1925 comic novel by the same name. What does it mean, Women Adapting asks, to translate a Jazz Age blockbuster from book to film or stage? What adjustments are necessary and what, if anything, is lost? Bethany Wood examines three well-known stories that debuted as women’s magazine serials—Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, and Edna Ferber’s Show Boat—and traces how each of these beloved narratives traveled across publishing, theatre, and film through adaptation. She documents the formation of adaptation systems and how they involved women’s voices and labor in modern entertainment in ways that have been previously underappreciated. What emerges is a picture of a unique window of time in the early decades of the twentieth century, when women in entertainment held influential positions in production and management. These days, when filmic adaptations seem endless and perhaps even unoriginal, Women Adapting challenges us to rethink the popular platitude, “The book is always better than the movie.”

Pilbrown covers the history, theory and practice of lighting design, including a section dealing with all the technical data today's designer will need, and interviews with 14 other lighting designers, as well as details of his own career.

Contending that cultural producion gives voice to racism, the authors--anthropologists Carol Tator and Frances Henry and attorney Winston Mattis--here examine how six controversial Canadian cultural events have given rise to a newly empowered radical or critical multiculturalism.

Musicals, it is often said, burst into song and dance when mere words can no longer convey the emotion. This book argues that musicals burst into song and dance when one body can no longer convey the emotion. Rogers shows how the musical’s episodes of burlesque and minstrelsy model the kinds of radical relationships that the genre works to create across the different bodies of its performers, spectators, and creators every time the musical bursts into song. These radical relationships—borne of the musical’s obsessions with “bad” performances of gender and race—are the root of the genre’s progressive play with identity, and thus the source of its subcultural power. However, this leads to an ethical dilemma: Are the musical’s progressive politics thus rooted in its embrace of regressive entertainments like burlesque and minstrelsy? The Song Is You shows how musicals return again and again to this question, and grapple with a guilt that its joyous pleasures are based on exploiting the laboring bodies of its performers. Rogers argues that the discourse of “integration”—which claims that songs should advance the plot—has functioned to deny the radical work that the musical undertakes every time it transitions into song and dance. Looking at musicals from The Black Crook to Hamilton, Rogers confronts the gendered and racial dynamics that have always under-girded the genre, and asks how we move forward.

The openings and closings to radio programs of all types, from comedies (Blondie, The Jack Benny Program, Lum and Abner) to mysteries (Inner Sanctum Mysteries, The Black Chapel) to game shows (Can You Top This?, Truth or Consequences) to serials (Second Husband, Bachelor's Children) to crime dramas (The Falcon, Eno Crime Clues, The Green Hornet, Mr. and Mrs. North) to westerns (Gunsmoke, Wild Bill Hickok, Hawk Larabee) that were aired between 1931 and 1972, are included in this work. Each entry has a brief introductory paragraph that provides information about the storyline, principal cast, sponsors and air dates. Commercials have been included if the programs were under regular sponsorship. Includes three appendices (sponsors; slogans and jingles; and World War II announcements) and an index.