Gaylord Ravenal

Gaylord Ravenal is the leading male character in both Edna Ferber's novel "Show Boat" and in the famous Jerome Kern-Oscar Hammerstein II musical play of the same name, based on the novel. He is a riverboat gambler, and he becomes leading man of the show boat Cotton Blossom at the same time that Magnolia Hawks, the captain's daughter, becomes the leading lady. In the novel, this happens after the acting company has lost several of their leading men and ladies in succession, including the illegally married mulatto Julie Dozier (to whom Magnolia was especially close) and her white husband Steve Baker. In the musical, this happens immediately after Julie and Steve are forced to leave the show, and not years later.

Character history

Magnolia and Gaylord fall in love and marry after a whirlwind courtship, and here the novel and the musical differ. In the novel, they stay on the boat until the accidental drowning of Cap'n Andy during a storm. Because of the incessant nagging of Magnolia's mother, Parthy, they leave the boat with their baby daughter and move to Chicago, where they live off Gaylord's gambling earnings. They are alternately rich and poor, and Gaylord is occasionally unfaithful to his wife and belittles her. Years later, upon hearing that Parthy is coming to visit, and finding himself broke, he borrows money from the local whorehouse madam and returns to the boarding house at which they are living, completely drunk. As he sleeps, Magnolia goes to the whorehouse, is horrified and saddened to discover that Julie is working as a secretary there, and returns to the boarding house to discover that Ravenal has left her. He never returns, and Magnolia brings up her daughter alone. Ravenal eventually dies under unexplained circumstances, in San Francisco. Years later, after Parthy dies, Magnolia returns to Mississippi, to manage the show boat, and gives her daughter all of Parthy's inheritance money.

In the musical, Gaylord Ravenal is a much more sympathetic character. None of the characters in the story die in the musical, and Gaylord remains faithful to Magnolia. The pair move to Chicago with their daughter, as in the novel, but not because of Parthy's nagging - rather, Gaylord wants to show Magnolia the big city. He deserts her after ten years, not because he fears the wrath of Parthy, but because he feels guilty over his gambling losses and his inability to support Magnolia. She gets a job as a nightclub singer (this is made possible by Julie, who, now an alcoholic, secretly quits her job so that Magnolia can have it). She then goes on to become a Broadway star, with the encouragement of her father, Cap'n Andy, all the while raising her daughter alone. Twenty-three years later, when Magnolia retires and she and her now adult daughter (now a Broadway star herself) return to the boat for a family reunion, Gaylord is there waiting. He and Magnolia reconcile, and all is well.

Portrayals

Gaylord Ravenal was portrayed by Howard Marsh in the original 1927 stage production of "Show Boat". However, when producer Florenz Ziegfeld brought most of the original cast back in his 1932 revival of the show, Marsh was replaced by noted actor-singer Dennis King. In 1929, Joseph Schildkraut, complete with Viennese accent, was rather incongruously cast as a non-singing Ravenal in the first, part-talkie film version of "Show Boat". In James Whale's 1936 film version, which many consider to be a movie musical classic, Allan Jones played the role. In the 1946 stage revival, a version revised to accommodate a shorter running time (because of more modern stagecraft) by Kern and Hammerstein themselves, Charles Fredericks, a featured actor in B-Westerns, took on the role. In MGM's 1951 highly popular Technicolor remake of the musical, Howard Keel portrayed Ravenal.