Sold Down the River

“Journey of an Epic Musical,” airing Sunday on KOCE-TV Channel 50 as a prelude to the arrival of “Show Boat” later this month at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, is being billed as “an in-depth look at the historic and creative evolution” of the great Jerome Kern-Oscar Hammerstein II classic.

But it’s hard to imagine how a documentary with footage that runs for all of 23 minutes could trace the journey of what is considered the most significant Broadway musical from its origins in Edna Ferber’s sprawling 1926 novel of the same name through 70 years of stage and screen productions.

In fact, “Journey” turns out to be an infomercial for the acclaimed 1993 Toronto revival, the latest of many, directed and re-conceived by Harold Prince. It’s as slick and classy and as good a tease as they come. But a documentary it’s not. Nor does it have much of anything to do, beyond promotional coincidence, with the national touring production that hits the Costa Mesa center Aug. 26.

“Journey” offers snippets of narrative history, though, sadly, little historic footage and no scenes from any previous Broadway or Hollywood revivals.

What it does have in glorious profusion are truncated excerpts from the stellar Toronto production with Lonette McKee, Robert Morse, Elaine Stritch and Michel Bell, none of whom are in the national touring production.

Only Gretha Boston, who is seen playing Queenie (the cook of the Mississippi showboat Cotton Blossom) and who won a Tony for her Broadway performance, will reprise her role at the O.C. center.

The program presents a lot of talking heads saying very little. Why did Prince want to do a re-conceived “Show Boat”? Because, he says, “It is a ground-breaking American musical. It has one of the most beautiful scores ever written, and it has an extraordinary story.”

He adds: “I’ve seen a lot of ‘Show Boats,’ but I’ve never seen the one that thoroughly satisfies me. I’d love to work on it some just to make the storytelling a little clearer, and I’d like to restore music that no one’s heard before that was written originally, and try to present a different ‘Show Boat,’ which is still true to the spirit of what Oscar Hammerstein tried to do.”

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Now we know. Does it matter that his wordy explanation is a tad contradictory and nothing but the usual public-relations flapdoodle? Apparently not. As if to underscore his point, the camera cuts to McKee singing the famous lyric “fish gotta swim and birds gotta fly.” I get it; that’s why.

Producer Garth Drabinsky assures us that “the most important thing about Harold Prince is that he directs [the show] in a cinematic style.” Such is the level of insight of this “in-depth look.”

But the topper is Drabinsky’s reason for seeing the show: “There aren’t too many opportunities when an audience can cry, and cry at all the right things, cry at the relation of family, cry at the breakup of family, cry at matters that tug at the heartstrings of decent people.”

The most interesting commentaries come from Hammerstein’s sons, William and James, set designer Eugene Lee and choreographer Susan Stroman.

William Hammerstein says, “When my father and Jerome Kern sat down to write ‘Show Boat,’ they didn’t sit down deliberately to do something revolutionary. But they did sit down to do something that was different and turned out to be revolutionary.”

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James Hammerstein, quoting Richard Rodgers, who was influenced by Kern, says, “Anybody who wasn’t influenced by Jerry Kern had to be out of his mind.”

Lee says the showboats that once plied the Mississippi “were really like summer stock on a barge.”

Stroman, describing the dance montage in the second act, says: “What I’ve seized is the opportunity to show where [the Charleston] came from. . . . It was usually the blacks who invented it, and the whites stiffened it up.”

What makes “Journey” worth tuning into is the chance to see flashes of Stroman’s choreography and, above all, glimpses of McKee singing snatches of “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man” and “Bill.”

The program will surely whet the appetite of anybody not familiar with the “Show Boat” score. With even the briefest excerpts of such songs, as well as “Make Believe,” “Why Do I Love You?” and “Ol’ Man River,” how could it not?

* “Journey of an Epic Musical: Show Boat” airs Sunday at 7:30 p.m. on KOCE-TV Channel 50.