Copyright © 2020 by Wendy Waszut-Barrett
In 1917 Carl Holliday wrote a one-page article entitled “The American Showboat” for “The Theatre” magazine (May 1917, page 296).
As a student, much of my scenic art training occurred in the spring at the University of Minnesota – (Twin Cities). Lance Brockman’s scene painting class produced roll drops and painted wings for the the department’s fifth theatre space known as Minnesota Centennial Showboat. While working in the 1950s at U High, the University of Minnesota’s high school program, my mother attended some of the earliest productions, and continued to attend even after a new boat was constructed for a St. Paul location. The venue was near and dear to our family even before I began painting roll drops and learning scenic art skills.
Unfortunately the University of Minnesota Department of Theatre Arts and Dance gave away this 2 million dollar asset a few years back. In the end, the boat was purchased for a small fraction of its worth and is currently docked down stream in Winona, awaiting a future. This was an unfortunate loss of not only history, but also a technical training ground for future generations of students. However, I still look back with great fondness at the venue, as do many who experienced working on an American showboat.
The Showboat was unique to theatre history, part of an American legacy that included “water gypsies” and “showboat players.” Here is Holliday’s article in its entirety, as this one should not be forgotten:
“On a sultry day far up the Mononghela, the Kanawha, or the Missouri River the small boy, languidly fanning himself with a tattered straw hat, is suddenly thrilled into mad energy by the wild, weird shrieks of a calliope echoing far up and down the startled valley. “The showboat! The showboat!” and away he skurries to the river bank. I do not know whether these “floating palaces” are known to all American boys; but to the youngsters of the Middle and Southern States they are harbingers of joy – visions of splendor to dream of and wonder over many months after they have come and gone.
There are about 95,000 persons in America engaged in the work of entertaining the public – acrobats, minstrels, singers, vaudeville actors, dancers, magicians and what not. But of them all doubtless the most mysterious to the general public, the most happy-go-lucky, are the water gypsies, the showboat players. Often floating or steaming six thousand miles in the course of a season, playing from the green hills of the Kanawha in West Virginia to the brown plains of the Missouri in far Montana, these crafts and their motley crew of players saw more of real America and real American life than probably any other institution or class of people. There is a genuine glamour of romance about such a life – to those who do not live it. When the “Sunny South,” the “Golden Rod,” the “Cotton Blossom,” the “Dreamland,” or the “Evening Star” comes to town every boy is immediately seized with the wanderlust and would fain become an expert on the calliope.
It would be difficult to say how these floating theatres originated. They are almost entirely an American form of entertainment, formerly seen now and then on French and German rivers, but now almost confined to the Mississippi and its many tributaries. Probably such floating troupes developed from the itinerant actors who played the cabins of canal boats and “flat bottoms” on Eastern rivers soon after the Revolution. Just such a player, N. M. Ludlow, who had shaken the beams of those early stuffy cabins, was the first to appear with a showboat on the Mississippi. In 1817 he and a little band of actors travelled overland to the Cumberland River, playing as the many wayside inns as they went, and in the fall of that year transformed a huge flatboat into a commodious theatre, floated down the Cumberland into the Ohio, and thus passed into the Mississippi.
It was a dangerous occupation in those rough days. Often all hands, actor, actresses, and crew, had to turn out to “pole” the theatre around some dangerous sand bar, and when such notorious spots as Rowdy Bens and Plum Point were reached, every man and woman of them was armed with a flintlock to repel the possible attacks of river pirates. One night the ropes of Ludlow’s boat were cut by practical jokers, and the troupe awoke to find themselves floating amidst the snags and treacherous currents of the uncharted Mississippi. Then, too, a rival soon appeared in the person of the once famous actor, Sol Smith, but fortunately for Ludlow, Smith’s floating palace was cut in two in 1847 in a collision with another boat, and Ludlow’s company could boast itself as the “only original.”
In those early days a showboat was used for many purposes not exclusively theatrical, such as prize fights and horse-back specialties, but during the past forty years the average river theatre has presented only plays and the features usually seen in vaudeville. As early as 1847 an English actor, William Chapman, with his numerous sons and daughters, went by water from Pittsburgh to New Orleans, playing “The Stranger and Cinderella,” and from that time to this many an inland boy has gained his first vision of drama through seeing on a boat-stage such light comedies as “The Girl in Brown,” “Under Southern Skies,” and “The Minister and the Maid.” Heavier drama is sometimes undertaken, however, and not infrequently “Faust” has thrilled the awe-struck audience of river towns.
The equipment on some of these showboats is nothing short of astonishing. From $40,000 to $50,000 is not an unusual price for the finer ones – a cost far exceeding that of many good city theatres. Often designed after the plans of famous playhouses, such as the Blackstone of Chicago, these water auditoriums are scientifically built and lavishly furnished. For instance, the “Golden Rod,” a source of wonder to many a river boy, possesses an auditorium one-hundred and sixty-two feet long and forty-six feet wide, with nineteen upholstered boxes and a seating capacity of fourteen hundred. Many a city of fifty thousand people cannot boast of such a stage – forty-six feet wide, twenty-four feet deep, with six elaborate drop curtains and numerous “set” pieces and many changes of scenery.
Sometimes the handbills of these crafts proudly – and truthfully – announce a “family circle” with cushioned settees for five hundred and a “dress circle” with a thousand arm chairs, while steam heat in winter and cold-air blowers in summer make the audience forget the weather on shore. In the days immediately after the Civil War hundreds of gas jets and innumerable mirrors made the white walls of the boat glisten; but now a thousand electric lights glow within and without and send their many colors shimmering far over the rippling waters. An inspection of one of the larger boats casts out all doubt as to the cost of the building. For example, the “American Floating Theatre” finds necessary two steam engines, one gasoline, a thousand-pound ice-plant, a steam laundry, an electric vacuum cleaning outfit, two large dynamos, electric fans, a well equipped printing plant, a telephone system, a complete hot and cold water system, a thousand electric lights, a huge American flag composed of seven hundred and fifty colored incandescent globes, and, of course, the joy of every American boy, a huge calliope.
Music is indeed an essential factor in showboat life, and many floating theatres have not only a calliope but expensive chimes which on a quiet summer night echo from hill to hill of the long river valleys with a melody wholly entrancing. Often a pilot house is built upon the plan of the second bookcase, and may contract or expand with surprising rapidity to accommodate the band. And when the steam-organ, the bells, and the band unite to rouse the night, mothers should have care for their little ones.
One may well fancy that no mere handful of people can attend to the many duties of such a theatre. The manager of a showboat must indeed be not only a thorough business man, but a student of humanity; for besides the regular boat crew there may be on board from forty to eighty theatrical specialists, all possessing that excitable trait known as artistic temperament. For some of these rooms, with private baths and cozy furniture, are as well equipped as in fashionable hotels; while the food for all, often bought day by day from river farmers, is far more wholesome than that obtained in many a metropolitan restaurant. Such a venture, then, as running floating palaces takes money and plenty of it, and the larger farms have large amounts invested in what may be truly called “watered stock.”
It was not always thus, however. In the days before the Civil War and immediately afterwards any “flat bottom” would do for a showboat and actors, who also served as captain, pilot and engineer, and cook, frequently gave performances that were anything but conventional. For many years, in fact, the showboat business was the last resort of human river-rats. Broken down gamblers with a knowledge of flashy card tricks, deck hands who had learned ventriloquism, drunken acrobats, medicine fakers whose long black hair and swarthy complexion enabled them to pose as “noble red men” – such fellows brought together by ill-luck, could always make a living by giving river shows.
Sometimes patent-medicine companies came to their aid and paid for a lecturer of a singer. In fact, one showboat presented for some years a play in which the heroine seeking health was rescued from a villain by a hero who soon brought her new life by means of a patent medicine.
Old actors will seldom confess that they ever played on a floating palace; but secretly many of them remember such a life with pleasure. The slow gliding past green fields and forests, the night breeze softly ruffling the water on every side – all these things posses a romance and mysterious thrill not found in the stuffy, formal theatres of the city.”
To be continued…
