177 Quiz Answer

Here’s this week’s quiz answer.
Show Boat is a 1927 musical with music by Jerome Kern and book and lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II. The show features the lives of the performers, stagehands, and dock workers on the Cotton Blossom, a Mississippi River show boat, over forty years, from 1887 to 1927. Its themes include racial prejudice and tragic love.
(Also for Three Word Wednesday and ABC Wednesday: "A" is for "Al")

Here’s this week’s Berownial quiz question.
I wrote the following, hoping it might suggest a famous musical.  Your assignment, assuming you accept it, is: name the musical.
 
“I came as soon as I heard the news.  You’ve decided not to invest in our production?”

“I thought you’d be dropping around.”

“You understand, Al, without your financial backing, this show hasn’t much of a chance to be produced!”

“That’s the great thing about being a backer.  I can always back out.  I just got a copy of the completed script.  I couldn’t believe it.  This is a ‘musical’?  A show full of dancing girls, comedians, great scenery, beautiful music?  But you traverse the whole theatrical spectrum with a few ‘extras’ – such as poverty, suffering, misery, miscegenation, racism?  You folks wrote this?  You’re out of your minds!”

“But Al, you haven’t grasped the main point.  This is 1927!  It’s a different century!   We're through with pretense.  It’s time Broadway began to deal with real life, with reality.  With this production we’re going to create something that will be a watershed in theatrical history.  They’ll be talking about our show a hundred years from now.”

“Right, still trying to recover the dough they invested in it!  Look, I recognize good theatre.  You may well have a fine play here, the one that’s serious and a kind of tragedy.  But that’s a different show.  You’re trying to insert it into a typical ‘Follies’ type of musical revue.  It’s a terrible idea.”    

“But it’s not as though there are solid, etched-in-stone rules for musicals.  If there are, it’s high time they were broken.”

“You don’t break the rules if they are what sells tickets, decade after decade.  You have to assign gorgeous dancing girls, for the tired businessman in the audience, along with beautiful love songs for his wife’s enjoyment.  Everyone’s happy.”

“And we’ve got all that.  Look at the creative crew, the greatest names in the business!”

“You don’t have to tell me – music by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein!  No bones about it, it’s a show that couldn’t possibly fail and yet you’re doing all you can to make it do just that.  Your opening scenes don’t show happy-happy folks singing and dancing.  Instead, you have bitter, depressed people doing tough, back-breaking work and complaining angrily about it.  You don’t want the audience to leave the theatre feeling good; you want ‘em to feel miserable.”

“No, Al.  Today’s audiences are more sophisticated, more grown-up.”

“Okay, let’s talk about grown up.  Do you realize that if you perform this in certain parts of the South today they might very well toss the whole cast in the lockup?”

“Luckily, we’ll be here up north, on Broadway.”

(Also submitted to Sunday Scribblings.)