Show Boats

Show Boats. Although their origins are uncertain, these floating playhouses, which brought theatre to towns along the great rivers of the United States, are a singularly American phenomenon. Possibly the earliest figure of note in their development was Samuel Drake, who in 1815 took his family of actors and other performers from Pittsburgh to Kentucky by means of the Allegheny River. However, while Drake's band gave performances along the way, he seems not to have actually used his small boat for these theatricals but rather selected sites ashore. It remained for the young actor‐manager Noah Ludlow, who had first worked and traveled with Drake, to take a flat‐bottomed boat with a small enclosed space at one end to travel down the Cumberland and Mississippi Rivers offering plays on board in 1817. But he, too, preferred where possible to stage his plays on land. Credit for conceiving and running a boat specifically designed to present plays seemingly goes to William B. Chapman Sr. (1764–1839), who launched his earliest venture, apparently called the Floating Theatre, around 1831. It was described by Ludlow as “a large flatboat with a rude kind of house built upon it, having a ridge‐roof, above which projected a staff with a flag attached, upon which was plainly visible the word Theatre.” The boat, or at least the enclosed structure on it, was about 100 feet long and 14 feet wide. The enclosure had a shallow stage at one end and benches running the width of the auditorium. Like Drake before him, the core of Chapman's company was his own family. They traveled annually from Pittsburgh to New Orleans, stopping mainly at smaller towns and plantations that lacked even the semblance of a permanent playhouse. As a rule, stands were for one night only. When the ship reached New Orleans, Chapman would sell it rather than attempt the difficult northward passage and, returning north, commission another ship for use the following season. After Chapman's death in 1839, his widow sold the latest boat to Sol Smith, who operated it briefly and then joined Ludlow in a famous managerial partnership. By the 1830s show boats had spread to other waterways and sometimes presented more than melodramas, comedies, and primitive olios. In the late 1830s and early 1840s one Henry Butler plied the Erie Canal with his combination museum and theatre. Not surprisingly, his repertory leaned heavily toward nautical comedies and dramas, such as Black‐Eyed Susan. In 1845 New Yorkers and Brooklynites could enjoy entertainments on a vessel at first called the Great North River Opera House, which was moored at the foot of Spring Street and which was described as “a floating dramatic temple—with galleries, boxes, pit, scenes, and machinery, as well as with commodious cabins, for the dressing rooms of the artistes.” It was said to have been a large, converted “Man‐of‐War Built Steamship” and to have seated two thousand playgoers. When Manhattan drama buffs tired of it, it was moved to a pier at Fulton Street in Brooklyn. Spaulding and Rodgers' Floating Circus Palace, built in Cincinnati in 1851, featured clowns and equestrians and other animal acts on an unusually short, wide vessel. The offerings were done in arena style and presented olios and dramas as well as circuses.

The Civil War disrupted the spread of this entertainment form, but after the conflict it made a quick comeback. One of the first was the Will S. Hays, built in 1869 by the famous clown Dan Rice. Even more elaborate and enduring were the five vessels known as French's New Sensation, all constructed and operated by Captain Augustus Byron French. The first was launched in 1878 and the second a few years later. Since Mrs. French was the only woman on the Mississippi to hold both a pilot's and a master's license, the couple was able to run two ships concurrently. Despite French's celebrated flamboyance, he maintained a strict discipline among his small company and presented no play capable of provoking controversy or offense. This, combined with the relative luxury of his boats, gave these crafts a new cachet and respectability. Two other celebrated Mississippi captains were E. A. Price and E. E. Eisenbarth, who later became curiously linked in the romantic story of these boats. Eisenbarth was believed to be the first to name a boat the Cotton Blossom and the first to attempt an opera aboard ship. Price built the long‐popular Water Queen in 1885. It was his boat that was used in the famous 1936 film version of Show Boat, although Edna Ferber had called the boat in her story the Cotton Blossom. Members of the Bryant family were also well‐known owners and captains, and Billy Bryant's Children of Ol' Man River (1936) provides one of the most interesting stories of life on these vessels. The romanticized picture of show boats with huge side or rear paddle wheels and towering smokestacks is historically inaccurate, since most show boats were not self‐propelled but were pushed along by small tug boats. (The 1994 Broadway revival of Show Boat was the first to realize this concept on stage.) The show boats themselves were customarily three decks high, the first two decks being enclosed and containing not only the long, narrow auditorium, but living quarters for the company. The top deck was open except for a sort of cupola, which served various functions on different vessels. The repertory remained conservative and with time came to appear absurdly out of date to more sophisticated city theatregoers. However, admissions more or less matched those of small‐town theatres with a 50‐cent top ticket prevailing until the Civil War and many charging $1 thereafter. The quality of acting in these plays undoubtedly left much to be desired, and the boats, unlike minstrel shows, vaudeville, or burlesque, seem to have failed to produce any great stars of their own or even have served as a training ground for stars in other fields. However, the frequent employment of an olio between the acts or before and after the main attraction remains unexplored as a possible source for the later burgeoning of variety or vaudeville. The boats began to go into a sharp decline with the development of larger cities and, even more so, with the coming of films. The coup de grâce came with the Depression. A few surviving boats remain moored at city docks, where they serve as dinner theatres or more or less as living museums.