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Show Boat Composer Jerome Kern and librettist Oscar Hammerstein II staged the operetta Show Boat, for the first time on December 27, 1927. This musical broke away from tradition play and supplied the audience with not only comedy and music. The Show Boat brought serious, powerful themes that appealed to the people of the 1920’s, as well as today’s society. We see in this production racism, alcoholism, interracial marriage, gambling addiction, and family abandonment. A community of showboat actors and laborers that work on the Cotton Blossom, a floating theater on the Mississippi River, brought these negative traits to the surface by their acting and singing. Upon the Cotton Blossom were white and black people living side by side. Their lifestyles were proved to be quite different in many ways, and we see how race decided their positions on the boat. We see in most of the scenes how the blacks would work in the background and the whites would play and socialize in the front. This is also symbolized by the lyrics to the songs. We see this in the opening scene, in which, the first song begins with a group of black men singing while t