On a late-summer evening, the Mississippi slipped solemn and silent through downtown St. Paul, whispering at bridge piers and murmuring to the old municipal grain elevator. But as it sidled up to Harriet Island, you’d swear you could hear the river chortling beside the Minnesota Centennial Showboat. Or maybe you caught the current humming along with one of the musical numbers that students were singing inside.
The two-deck, gingerbread-crusted showboat belongs to the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, and it is among only a handful of showboats operating in the United States. During its summer season, its all-student cast puts on eight shows a week, in a style that showboat patrons on the Mississippi a century ago would recognize.
There are traditional painted-drop, forced-perspective sets, old-fashioned footlights, and musical interludes called “olios.” There are also numerous opportunities for audiences to boo and hiss at villains, ooh and aah for young lovers, and generally interact with the actors in a way that would leave serious theatergoers aghast over in Minneapolis at the classy, world-renowned Guthrie Theater.
This year’s showboat offering was Is There a Doctor in the House?—a comic production that took Molière’s The Imaginary Invalid and added a few subtle touches: Blagojevich and Madoff jokes, cancan dancers, and references to Evita and Titanic. Also a mime, jetés, and, for good measure, hints of drag shows, Stephen Sondheim, Gilbert and Sullivan, and Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey.
Actually, “subtle” isn’t the right word: Is There a Doctor in the House? did everything it could for laughs short of shooting an actor out of a cannon—and only because you can’t do that indoors.
The fact that Molière’s plot turns on an apparently endless series of enemas might have caused trepidation for some other director. For this one—Kenneth Noel Mitchell, who teaches acting at the university and also adapted the play—all those enemas occasioned glee. They gave rise to so many jokes, double takes, and double meanings that night after night Minnesotans who had probably never uttered the word “enema” in public found themselves snorting with laughter.
The actor playing the invalid Argan certainly helped. He was Skyler Nowinski, who graduated this spring from a B.F.A. program that the university and the Guthrie run together. Mr. Nowinski seemed part of the time to be channeling Groucho Marx and part of the time to have been drawn in three lively dimensions by a Disney animator from the 1930s. By the time the outrageous Nurse Fannay LaFloush turned up in Act Two—played by Anna Hickey, a senior, in a costume that no family newspaper could begin to describe—audiences were well prepared to take in Argan’s mix of anticipation and fear. He bent slowly over the bed with cartoon-wide eyes and full piano accompaniment.
If an 80-show, waterborne season seems unusual for a university theater group, well, the showboat is pretty unusual to start with. Once common on the Mississippi and its tributaries, showboats traveled from town to town with theatrical offerings aimed at entertaining the masses. The 1927 musical Show Boat, written by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II and based on a 1926 novel by Edna Ferber, made people in other parts of the country familiar with the showboat tradition.
But by the middle of the 20th century, showboats had largely disappeared. One original showboat—the 1923 Majestic—survives and still offers performances. It has been owned by the City of Cincinnati since 1967, but before that had been operated for years by Hiram College and Kent State University and then by Indiana University.
The Minnesota Centennial Showboat got a later start. In the 1950s, the theater-department chairman on the Twin Cities campus, Frank M. Whiting, began talking about the possibility of a student-run showboat. But it was a chance meeting in 1957 with the director of Minnesota’s Centennial Commission, Tom Swain, that led to a plan for a boat that would mark the state’s 100th birthday, in 1958, by traveling the state’s rivers and presenting a play.
A search for a suitable boat turned up the General John Newton, a decommissioned Army Corps of Engineering sternwheeler that had been built in 1899 to carry judicial officers up and down rivers so they could settle maritime disputes. The boat arrived in Minneapolis in the spring of 1958, and its wood superstructure was hastily torn apart and reconfigured with a theater.
The showboat and its student casts were immediate hits. For the first 10 years or so, the boat spent part of its summer docked in Minneapolis and the rest traveling to towns like Red Wing, Stillwater, and Wabasha (paddle wheel notwithstanding, it was towed from town to town, since its steam engine was worn out). But after that, the Coast Guard’s increasingly strict regulations kept the boat permanently moored in Minneapolis.
By the early 1990s, the boat was in need of a serious overhaul. After multiple rounds of fund raising and several missed seasons, work began in late 1999—only to end abruptly in January 2000, when a spark from a welder’s torch set a fire that destroyed almost the entire vessel in under an hour.
Fans and especially showboat alumni were devastated. “The night the boat burned I had alumni calling from all around the country,” said Sherry L. Wagner-Henry, who had been hired as the showboat’s managing director while the renovation was being planned. But in retrospect, the fire was a blessing. Out of it arose a deal with St. Paul’s Padelford Packet Boat Company, which operates a trio of excursion vessels. Padelford offered to build the university a new showboat in return for being allowed to rent it out for parties and other events during the nine months of the year when the university wasn’t using it. Construction of the new boat, named the Frank M. Whiting, was completed in 2002.
The new boat’s big advantage is that it is twice as wide—50 feet—as the General John Newton, so actors racing offstage don’t run right into walls. It also has space enough for a lobby and restrooms, so patrons don’t have to run to an onshore pavilion at intermission. It is permanently moored at Harriet Island, a St. Paul city park.
Ms. Wagner-Henry said the 209-seat showboat had an annual operating budget of about $250,000. It supports itself on ticket sales (tickets cost $12 to $25), and student cast and crew members are all paid, she added. This year, about 85 percent of the seats were filled—a figure that’s low for the showboat, she said, but that “anybody else would be totally over the top about.”
The boat’s audiences tend to be older, and many audience members seem attached to its traditions. Actors in costume greet patrons as they board and begin the show by encouraging the audience to boo or ooh, as appropriate. The olios—vaudeville-style interludes staged in front of what was originally an oilcloth curtain so that scenery could be changed behind it—are particularly beloved. Vern Sutton, the former head of the university’s opera program, staged the olios for years and said they were a key part of the old showboating tradition. “The boats all did it. Even when the play was bad, people loved the olios,” he said.
But the real point of the showboat, according to Mr. Sutton, is the experience it offers student performers. “It’s a chance to do one piece eight times a week for three months and hone your performances,” Mr. Sutton said. “You do so many different things, and you have to do them consistently.”
Ms. Hickey, a senior who played Nurse LaFloush and several other roles, has spent two summers on the boat. Such a long run “takes a lot more patience and endurance, not to get sick of who I’m playing and the rest of the cast,” she said. “It’s really solidified my desire to be an actor.” Michael Mercier, who plays Dr. Purgon, the mime, and others, said the long season was also an exercise in maintaining professional relationships. “You’re dealing with Type A personalities for the most part. It’s hard to be onstage together if you’re not getting along backstage. We’ve had our little things.”
But he and Ms. Hickey said it was all worthwhile when audiences started booing the show’s villains—the way showboat audiences always have—or roared with laughter as Mr. Nowinski, in the show’s best moment, did a perfect, unforgettable imitation of a deflating balloon. After an evening performance, Ms. Hickey and Mr. Nowinski stood on the riverbank, in costume, bidding audience members goodnight. “You were so wonderful,” an elderly woman said as she made her way past them with a walker. “You made so many of us laugh.”
And always there was the river. “There are doors in the theater that you can open up and have the water three feet away,” said Mr. Mercier, adding that the cast took “a lot of lunch breaks outside"—watching towboats push barges past, listening as the Mississippi eddied beneath the showboat’s hull.
