THEATRE / Big and meant to stay that way: Hal Prince's revival of Hammerstein and Kern's Broadway classic, Show Boat, combines dramatic spectacle with sharp political insight. Edward Seckerson reports from New York

The year 1927 was a watershed in Broadway history. Two hundred and seventy shows opened during that season - a record that still stands. One of them was Show Boat - music by Jerome Kern, book and lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II - and it redefined a genre. At a time when 'American Musical Comedy' was precisely that - two parts fun and three parts froth, a happy-ever-after confection where little rich girls wooed college football captains with monotonous regularity, and titles like Leave It to Jane left little to anyone's imagination - Show Boat was unprecedented, daring, seminal.

Just imagine the atmosphere in the Ziegfeld Theatre on the night of 27 December 1927, as the sombre opening bars of the overture first rang through the darkened auditorium. Imagine the curtain rising on a bunch of black stevedores singing 'Niggers all work on the Mississippi'.

Thus began this epic drama of the Old South, a 40-year family saga where laughter and tragedy co-existed as never before in a musical, where sensitive issues like racism, miscegenation and marital dissension took the stage alongside the hoofing and crooning.

When the curtain rang down that night, American musical theatre could be divided into two eras - before Show Boat and after Show Boat. Oscar Hammerstein was quoted as saying that Show Boat was born 'big and meant to stay that way'.

It sure was. Hal Prince's new production - a radical refit culled from the 1927 original, the subsequent London staging, the 1946 Broadway revival, and the 1936 movie - has sailed into New York's Gershwin Theatre via Toronto, with a cast of over 70, an orchestra of 30, and a budget of many millions of dollars riding on its continuing ability to pull an audience and hold it there.

Prince and his enormous team have reworked the show from below the waterline, reinstating, discarding, borrowing material from its various manifestations in an attempt to fix up problem areas while still keeping faith with the original conception. Ever since its first Washington tryst (15 November 1927), when the curtain rose at 8.30pm and came down at 12.40am, Show Boat has been a masterpiece in progress.

There are more gains than losses in Prince's restoration. He has, for instance, cracked the problematic passage of time in Act 2 with audacious, all-new dance montages, duly spiriting us from the turn of the century to the whirl of the flapper era. In Susan Stroman's sharply etched choreography and Florence Klotz's beautifully observed costumes, times change, fashions change, the headlines on the news-stands change, but 'Ol' Man River' just keeps rollin' along. And racial prejudice dies hard.

Central to the dramatic pulse of Show Boat, and Prince's grasp of it, is the shameful sense that the white experience moves on apace while blacks remain mired in servitude and humiliation. Civil rights, circa 1927. And Show Boat did not flinch from that reality. At the close, The Cotton Blossom, Cap'n Andy's floating theatre, sails upstream into the roaring Twenties, all decked out with fancy new illuminated signs. But the sign at the ticket-box still reads: 'Balcony: Colored Only'.

Show Boat is designed by Eugene Lee (of Sweeney Todd fame), mixing solid Broadway traditions with a dash of reality. Faded photographic drop-cloths are a stark reminder of a past drained of all colour, all romantic illusion. And this Cotton Blossom has steamed straight out of those photographs - Broadway-bound but a little the worse for wear.

We see her from every angle and perspective, modern stage technology allowing Prince to move his action from scene to scene with all the fluidity and busy detailing of a film narrative. When Andy and his irascible wife Parthy plan their surprise visit to Chicago, Prince effectively counterpoints that scene with the sorry spectacle of Magnolia, Ravenal and little Kim being evicted from their hotel into the snow.

There are other vintage Prince theatrics: a backcloth of cotton fields defiantly ripped down by its slave-labour groups of workers toting sections of scenery. And if I occasionally craved a little more of the gaudiness and shameless razzle-dazzle of old Broadway, there was at least a sense in which this classic of its time wassomehow being reconciled with our own.

So too with Kern's wonderful score. William David Brohn has recast the orchestrations of his great mentor, Robert Russell Bennett, preserving their unique colour and flavour but lending them a discreet contemporary sophistication. The portentous brass chorale (no strings) for the verse of 'Ol' Man River' is new - a case in point.

Kern's extensive underscoring remains a revolutionary feature of his score (Brohn and the dance music creator David Krane have cleverly incorporated one or two of the cut numbers into these narrative links), and no one before or since has mastered the power of reprise as an expressive device quite like Kern. 'Make Believe' goes from gently ironic love duet to poignant lullaby as Ravenal bids his daughter farewell. I must say I regret the deletion of all but the opening bars of the overture, and it was a mistake on Prince's part to deprive Magnolia and Ravenal of their duet 'Why Do I Love You?' in order to provide Elaine Stritch's Parthy with a number of her own. Stritch is marvellous, but the inimitable sandpaper voice is all but shot now, and this is one of the score's great melodies.

Otherwise, every other Show Boat standard gets the singing it richly deserves. This is a dream cast. In Rebecca Luker (Magnolia) and Mark Jacoby (Ravenal) you've two of the most lustrous show voices Broadway has to offer, then there's Michel Bell's towering Joe, a real bass with unreal resonance, and Gretha Boston's Queenie, dignified now by the restoration of 'Mis'ry's Comin' Aroun' ', a stunning number never before heard on Broadway.

Lonette McKee's Julie has arguably the show's greatest song, 'Bill', and despite perhaps a shade too much latterday soulfulness in the style, she's a heartbreaker. As for the old-timers - Stritch and John McMartin (Cap'n Andy) - the spirit of Vaudeville lives on. And with it comes a truth without which Show Boat would not have the power to move us. You really understand why this crusty, seemingly ill-matched old couple stay together.

One final truth is fudged: the opening line of the show. Was it really necessary, in 1994, to go with the soft option and substitute 'coloured folks' for 'niggers'? Hammerstein's original lyric was an indictment, not an endorsement. Surely we've learnt that much. And, should we still harbour doubts, we should look to the words of another of his songs (from South Pacific): 'You've Got to Be Carefully Taught'.

'Show Boat' runs to 5 March. Booking: 0101-212 307 4100

(Photograph omitted)