REGENT THEATRE

Dominion, Volume 29, Issue 256, 25 July 1936, Page 13

REGENT THEATRE

“Show Boat” "With the development of screen technique, the amazing facility for stage elate oration and the rewriting of much ot Jerome Kern’s musical score, the new version of “Show Boat,” which continues to draw great crowds to the Regent Theatre, is an entertainment that embraces in lovely settings the romance, the excitement, the humour and the tragedy of life on the Mississippi. Once more old Captain Andy Hawkes brings his glittering show-boat alongside the banks of the river, to be greeted with shouts and capers of delight by the negroes; once more does his “famous company of worldrenowned artists” display themselves in the grand parade, and once more sweet Magnolia Hawkes falls in love with handsome, debonair Gaylord Ravenal, a river gambler of fascinating personality. These central characters provide the drama. Julie, leading lady of the company, is found to have been born of a coloured mother, and has to leave the show with Steve, her husband, the leading man. It is Magnolia who steps into the breach, despite Ma Hawkes’s objection, and Ravcnal is a born “leading man.” The inevitable happens. They fall in love and marry. Then, flush with money, the Ravenala break away from the show-boat to seek excitement in the false gaiety and glitter of city life. All goes we 1 for a few years, then when the gambler is cleaned out he deserts Magnolia and his child, but her old father finds her and puts her name in “electrics’ on Broadway. Magnolia's daughter Kim also wins stage fame and is the star at tue theatre where her father is the stage doorkeeper. Liberties have been taken at the end to bring the family together n happiness, but there is plenty of Edna Ferber left to enchain the attention. Beautiful Irene Dunne as Magno ia. sings “Make Believe,” “After the, Ball, and “Can’t Help Lovin that Man /idorably, while Allan Jones, gifted with a glorious tenor voice and extraordinarily handsome in person and polished in manned, makes an ideal Ravenal. To cap all there is Paul Robeson, whose bass voice w like a diapasonic stop on a grand organ, singing “Ole Man River” and Ah Still Suita Me,” as never heard before, besides playing the lazy role of Joe artistically. Helen Morgan is notably good •is Julie Parthy Hawkes, is inimitably played by Helen Weslley, and C ha^® s Winninger is ideally cast as' Capta {? dv Hawkes. The acting of an Md-time melodrama on the show-boat is> one. of the bis laughs of the picture. The support. in°- programme includes r scenes of the King inspecting the guards atVast month’s Trooping the and some extraordinary views of the k'ueen Mary at full speed on her maiden voyage and her arrival at New York.