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''Show Boat'' is a 1926 novel by American author and dramatist Edna Ferber. It chronicles the lives of three generations of performers on the ''Cotton Blossom'', a floating theater that travels between small towns on the banks of the Mississippi, from the 1880s to the 1920s. The story moves from the Reconstruction-Era river boat to Gilded-Age Chicago to Roaring-Twenties New York, and finally returns to the Mississippi River. ''Show Boat'' was adapted as a Broadway musical in 1927 by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II. Three films followed: a 1929 version that depended partly on the musical, and two full adaptations of the musical in 1936 and 1951. ==Background== In August 1924, Edna Ferber watched as the opening performance of her play ''Minick'' (co-written with George S. Kaufman) was disrupted by an invasion of bats that had been nesting undetected in the chandeliers and dome of the playhouse. Alarmed theatergoers scurried for the exits. As the crew recovered from this debacle, Winthrop Ames, the show's producer, jokingly remarked "Next time... we won't bother with tryouts. We'll all charter a show boat and we'll just drift down the rivers, playing the towns as we come to them."〔Ferber, pp. 297-304〕 Show boats were floating theaters that traveled along the major rivers of the United States from the 1870s to the 1930s. The performers lived aboard the vessels. With song, dance, and dramatic productions, show boats provided entertainment for small riverside towns that were otherwise quite isolated. Ferber, who had never heard of show boats, was immediately intrigued.
In the spring of 1925, Ferber traveled to Bath, North Carolina and spent four days aboard one of the few remaining show boats in the country, the ''James Adams Floating Theatre,'' which plied the Pamlico River and Great Dismal Swamp Canal.〔 An entertaining account of Ferber's visit to Bath can be found at http://www.nchistoricsites.org/bath/edna-ferber.htm.〕 The material she gathered, especially the reminiscences of Charles Hunter, the director and chief actor, provided her with "a treasure-trove of show-boat material, human, touching, true."〔Ferber, pp. 297-304〕 Ferber spent the next year in France and New York writing the novel, and published it in the summer of 1926. The mix of romance, realistic depiction of racial issues, and nostalgia for a vanishing American past was an immediate hit with a still war-weary American public, and the novel was number one on the bestseller lists for twelve weeks. The critical reception was more cautious but still positive. In his New York Times review, Louis Kronenberger wrote:
By the time the ''James Addams Floating Theatre'' was destroyed by fire in 1941, the era of show boats had ended, supplanted by the motion picture theater.〔 The history of the ''James Addams Floating Theatre'' can be found at http://floatingtheatre.org/perils.shtml, retrieved October 2011 〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Show Boat (novel)」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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