The Theater: There Goes the Showboat

As the curtain mercifully fell on the hammed-up Hamlet, a voice from the balcony yelled: “Author, author!” A stir ran through the audience aboard Cap’n J. W. (Bill) Menke’s Goldenrod, last of the Mississippi’s showboats, and up to the footlights stepped one of William Shakespeare’s belated collaborators, Cap’n Billy Bryant, onetime showboat king of the Ohio. Hollered the voice: “Shoot him dead!”

Cap’n Bryant, 58, who gave up his own boat six years ago, could afford to beam at this stunt; today’s showboat skipper can usually count the house by counting the hoots. For eleven weeks, St. Louis playgoers had gone down to the Goldenrod’s mooring by the cobblestoned levee and paid 75¢ a head to sass the actors in his hokum-logged version of Hamlet. Last week, on his way home from a lecture tour, Bryant tarried in St. Louis for five days to give the classic a fillip: his own appearance in the double role of Polonius and the First Gravedigger.

In fine form, Bryant missed only one entrance cue: between scenes he went aft to inspect his catfish line, and found it snagged. After wading in to pull it clear, he returned to the stage muddied and breathless in time to ad-lib to King Claudius : “I just caught the damndest, biggest fish.” And so he had.

Landlubber. In the moldering, sway-backed Goldenrod, twice sunk and salvaged in her 40 years, it takes an eye as knowing as Cap’n Bryant’s to find wistful hints of glories past,* when she was the biggest, flossiest playhouse afloat. Those were the magnolia-scented days when the showboats moved as regularly as the spring floods and, according to legend, a Bayou mother could say of her child, “He’ll be foah, come next floatin’ showhouse.” Today, twelve years after the Goldenrod became a virtual landlubber at her St. Louis mooring, Cap’n Menke, 70, talks (as he does each year) of getting up steam again. “With her new hull,” he says stoutly, “we could take her anywhere.” But there are some obstacles: the hull actually rests on a barge which keeps the Goldenrod from sinking; the pilothouse teeters over the deck like a tilted crackerbox (“Haven’t been up there in ten years”), and the towboat Wenonah has been steam-less so long that rivermen doubt whether she has more than one good whistle left in her.

Latter-day showmanship has caught up with the Goldenrod. Gone is the calliope; today’s come-on music blares out of a phonograph loudspeaker. Past the grimy, scrimshawed deck railings, among the faded filigree inside, customers can find two Coke dispensers and a popcorn machine.

Catfish in Season. Perhaps the greatest change—and the hardest for Cap’n Menke to swallow—is in the customers, now mostly heckling wiseacres from the big city. “When the folks come in from the little towns where we used to play our shows straight, from Golconda and Shawneetown and Chester, they look at me with a sad expression,” he says. “Our shows’ve been spoiled, they say; the old days are dead.” Then, toughening up, he adds: “Of course, we don’t care what they come for, just as long as they lay their money down at the box office.”

Among the period pieces that Menke’s ten players have gagged up for the urban taste: The Drunkard, The Hat fields and the McCoys, Brother Against Brother, East Lynne, The Lure of the City. Recent audiences have been somewhat taken aback because 16-year-old Jack Fletcher, who performs as Hamlet, tries to play the role without gags. “Sometimes,” he says, “I have to cut some of the soliloquies short to save my neck.”

Menke, whose three brothers help him run the Goldenrod, regularly rejects such schemes as turning the old boat into a nightclub. When business slumps, he says, “you can always throw a line overboard and catch a mess of catfish . . . Some day, maybe, we’ll take her down the river again. Maybe next spring.”

*One is a frayed telegram on Menke’s cabin wall. Dated 1925, it was an urgent request from Novelist Edna Ferber for the Goldenrod’s schedule. Suspecting that she was a spy for a rival boat, Menke snubbed the message, leaving her to gather most of her local color for Show Boat on a competing vessel, the Cotton Blossom.