Dictionary:

showboat

  (shō'bōt')

1. A river steamboat having a troupe of performers and a theater aboard for performances on the river.
2. One who seeks attention by ostentatious behavior; a showoff.

To show off.

Not that anything like the melodrama of Showboat, the musical based on Edna Ferber's bestselling 1926 novel, ever actually happened on the rivers of nineteenth-century America. Nobody ever sang "Old Man River" until Oscar Hammerstein II and Jerome Kern set Showboat to music on the Broadway stage in 1929. But for a century there really were floating theaters, what we now call showboats, on the great waterways of middle America. The rivers steamed with them, especially after the Civil War.

The first "Floating Theatre" was built in Pittsburgh in 1831 for the Chapman family of English actors. It was a narrow box on a narrow barge, 100 feet long and just 16 feet wide, but it was a real theatre, complete with a stage at one end, a pit in the middle, and a gallery at the other end. The Chapmans floated it down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, going from landing to landing during the fall and winter season. At the end of their journey, in New Orleans, they sold it for firewood and returned to Pittsburgh to build another for the next season. In 1836 they were able to afford a steamboat of their own to use as a permanent floating theatre.

Other boats followed, offering everything from serious drama to circuses. The most spectacular was Spaulding and Rogers's Floating Circus Palace, with 3400 seats, which was launched in Cincinnati in 1851. After interruption by the Civil War, such boats flourished as never before, and we find the word showboat used to describe them in 1869. These showboats continued to carry fancy names, including New Sensation (1878), Twentieth Century (1882), Dan Rice's Floating Opera (1886), Theatorium (1889), Robinson's Floating Palace (1893), and Cotton Blossom (1909). Showboat itself was too pedestrian ever to be the actual name of a boat.

Sometimes instead of showboat the word boat-show was used for these waterborne temples of the muses, but the musical Showboat has kept the former in our vocabulary long after the disappearance of the boats themselves. In recent years, to showboat has been used to mean "to show off," and a showboat is someone who tries to get noticed.

Showboats, also called floating theaters, floating operas, or boat-shows, were theaters on boats that brought entertainment primarily to small towns along the inland waterways of the midwestern and southern United States, chiefly along the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers. The showboat era lasted from 1831 to the 1940s, with a pause during the Civil War. Their heyday was the early twentieth century.

The original showboats were family owned and ventured to small, isolated river frontier locations. Family showboats were modest crafts of simple construction with seating for between one hundred and three hundred people. They did not carry passengers or transport goods, only culture and entertainment. Eventually, enormous floating theaters, with up to fourteen hundred seats, competed with the smaller family ventures.

The Chapman family from England launched the first showboat in 1831 in Pittsburgh. The Chapman boat floated with the current down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers, tying up for one-night performances at river landings where there might be a viable audience. The nine person

Chapman family served as the entire cast and crew. Admission to the show, although preferred in coins, was also accepted in the form of foodstuffs from the small river bottom farms.

Resembling a garage on a barge, the Chapman boat was one hundred feet wide and sixteen feet long. Performances included August von Kotzebue's The Stranger, William Shakespeare's Hamlet and The Taming of the Shrew, and the fairy tale "Cinderella." Popular songs were also frequent features. The Chapmans were successful in their venture and by 1836 were able to upgrade their operation to a small steamboat.

Other floating theaters soon followed the Chapman boat onto the waterways, as did circus boats featuring animal acts in addition to plays. The largest of these was the Floating Circus Palace of Gilbert R. Spaulding and Charles J. Rogers, built in 1851, which featured an impressive equestrian exhibition.

However, by the mid-nineteenth century the popularity of showboats had begun to diminish and with the Civil War they disappeared from the crowded waterways, which were disputed territories during the War. Showboats were revived beginning in 1878 with the building of the New Sensation and the use of steamer tows and the beckoning sound of calliopes increased their territory and audience.

Early in the showboat era, comedies, back-to-nature plays, circuses, freak shows, and vaudeville acts were popular. After the Civil War minstrel shows and maudlin, nostalgic songs prevailed. During the Gilded Age and Progressive Era the melodrama proved to be the most successful style of showboat entertainment.

In the early twentieth century better roads, automobiles, and motion pictures provided river towns with other forms of entertainment. To compete with land entertainment, and one another, the boats and shows became larger, more lavish, and heavily advertised. The big boats featured musical comedy and full-length dramas as well as extravagant costumes. The most famous boats of this era were the Grand Floating Palace, the Sunny South, and the Goldenrod. Known as the Big Three, they belonged to W. R. Markle of Ohio. In the 1930s showboats changed their programs to burlesque in order to attract a new and more sophisticated, less family oriented audience, but ultimately high operating costs, a disappearing river frontier, and changing audience tastes brought the

showboat era to an end by the early 1940s. The Goldenrod, the last known showboat to be on the water, was tied permanently at St. Louis in 1943. Jerome Kern's 1927 musical, Show Boat (made into film versions in 1929, 1936, and 1951), dramatized the type of entertainment that showboats provided and depicted the lives of the showboat families and entertainers.

Bibliography

Bryant, Betty. Here Comes the Showboat! Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1994

Graham, Philip. Showboats: The History of an American Institution. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1951.

The Music City Queen on the Cumberland River, Nashville.

For the Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II musical Show Boat, see Show Boat.

For films based on the musical, see Show Boat (film).

A showboat, or show boat, was a form of theatre that travelled along the waterways of the United States, especially along the Mississippi and Ohio rivers. A showboat was basically a barge that resembled a long, flat-roofed house, and in order to move down the river, it was pushed by a small tugboat (misleadingly labeled a towboat) which was attached to it. It would have been impossible to put a steam engine on it, since it would have had to have been placed right in the auditorium. However, since the box-office success of MGM's 1951 motion picture version of the musical Show Boat, in which the boat was inaccurately redesigned as a deluxe, self-propelled steamboat, the image of a showboat as a twin-stacked steamboat with a huge paddle wheel has taken hold in popular culture. (Earlier film versions of Show Boat, and most stage productions of it, feature a historically accurately designed vessel, rather than the kind built for the 1951 film. Modern-day showboats, however, with their more advanced technology, are designed as steamboats.)

British-born actor William Chapman created the first showboat, named the "Floating Theatre", in Pittsburgh in 1831. He and his family performed plays with added music and dance at stops along the waterways. After reaching New Orleans, they got rid of the boat and went back to Pittsburgh in a steam boat in order to perform the process once again the year after.

Showboats had declined by the Civil War, but began again in 1878 and focused on melodrama and vaudeville. Major boats of this period included the New Sensation, New Era, Water Queen, and the Princess. With the improvement of roads, the rise of the automobile, motion pictures, and the maturation of the river culture, showboats declined again. In order to combat this development, they grew in size and became more colorful and elaborately designed in 1900's. These boats included the Golden Rod, the Sunny South, the Cotton Blossom, and the New Showboat.

Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II's musical play Show Boat (1927) and its film versions (1929, 1936, 1951) showed this type of theater.

Showboating

Based on the gaudy look of showboats, the term "showboat" also came to mean someone who wants his or her ostentatious behavior to be seen at all costs. This term is particularly applied in sports, where a showboat (or sometimes "showboater") will do something flashy before actually achieving his or her goal. The word is also used as a verb. British television show Soccer AM has a section appropriately named Showboat, dedicated to flashy tricks from the past week's games.

Oft-cited examples of showboating include Leon Lett's grocery-bag-carrying of a recovered football (which he then had swatted out of his hand before the goal line) in Super Bowl XXVII; Bill Shoemaker's standing in the saddle before the finish line of the 1957 Kentucky Derby, costing him the win, and Lindsey Jacobellis's grab of her snowboard which caused her to crash right before the finish of the Snowboard Cross final at the 2006 Winter Olympics, costing her a first-place finish.

In boxing, showboating often takes the form of taunting, dropping one's gloves and daring an opponent to throw a punch, or engaging other risky behaviors while the match is ongoing.

See also

• Old Profanity Showboat

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Dansk (Danish)
n. - teaterbåd
v. intr. - vise sig

Nederlands (Dutch)
theaterboot

Français (French)
n. - bateau-théâtre, fanfaron
v. intr. - s'exhiber

Deutsch (German)
n. - als Theater verwendeter Raddampfer
v. - prahlen, bramarbasieren

Ελληνική (Greek)
n. - πλωτό θέατρο (σε ποταμόπλοιο)

Italiano (Italian)
showboat

Português (Portuguese)
n. - barco (m) com entretenimento, pessoa que quer chamar a atenção

Русский (Russian)
самореклама, плавучий театр, важничать

Español (Spanish)
n. - barco donde se dan representaciones teatrales
v. intr. - actuar o comportarse de un modo espectacular

Svenska (Swedish)
n. - teaterbåt

中文（简体） (Chinese (Simplified))
演艺船, 爱卖弄的人, 卖弄, 炫耀

中文（繁體） (Chinese (Traditional))
n. - 演藝船, 愛賣弄的人
v. intr. - 賣弄, 炫耀

한국어 (Korean)
n. - 연예선, 두드러진 행동으로 사람들의 주의를 끌려는 사람, 쇼보트
v. intr. - 과시하다

日本語 (Japanese)
n. - ショーボート, 演芸船

العربيه (Arabic)
‏(الاسم) ألمسرح ألعائم أو سفينه ألتمثيل‏

עברית (Hebrew)
n. - ‮ספינת-תיאטרון, שחקן או ספורטאי המתנהג בראוותנות‬
v. intr. - ‮הציג או התנהג באופן ראוותני ומרגיז‬

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