Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II's collaborative effort in musical theatre, Show Boat, is a celebration of family, both nuclear and extended. Working together as a team and with other collaborators, Kern and Hammerstein pushed the boundaries of the 20th century musical theatre at a time when musicals typically used flimsily designed plots which only served to accommodate song and dance.

In their early careers the duo contributed greatly to the popular music of the day, but as they matured professionally their work began to expand the conventions of the medium. They found, not to their surprise, that audiences welcomed serious subjects, well-developed characters, and thoughtful lyrical content enhanced by sophisticated musical composition.

Show Boat, their musical adaptation of Edna Ferber's epic novel of the same name, was a culmination of their ambition and achievement. Kern and Hammerstein embraced the opportunity to deal musically and dramatically with serious subjects and tragic events, but never lost sight of the need to season their efforts with humor and visual entertainment, bright, colorful locales and costumes, lively choreography, and soaring, memorable melodies. These elements were all suitably crafted with carefully measured portions of honest sentiment.

Show Boat's story covers one of the most dramatic eras in American history. It begins in the U.S. South, in Natchez, Mississippi, during the Post-Reconstruction of the 1880's, as survivors of the terrible destruction of the Civil War strive to reconstruct the basis of American democracy. Some seek to restore their lives; others struggle to preserve their hard-fought freedom. Against this historical panorama, the romance of Show Boat unfolds.

Time flows on like the Mississippi river, often placid, occasionally turbulent. The story moves from the Southern agrarian environment to turn-of-the-century Chicago in the industrialized North. The advent of electricity and World War I again changes the course of people's lives in America and around the world. Show Boat ends in 1927, the exciting height of the Roaring Twenties, the Jazz Age, and the eve of the Stock Market Crash and the Great Depression. Like a river, time exerts its power over the characters of Show Boat. It was an era when the destiny of a land and its people was transformed forever.

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