The University of Minnesota Centennial Showboat shuddered only slightly during last Wednesday night's storm. The actors and full-house audience inside pretended not to hear the thunder outside. This is the final season for melodrama and music aboard the storied vessel, and no storm would be permitted to spoil one of the last month's precious performances.
An expired lease at St. Paul's Harriet Island and a desire for change at the university's Theater Department will bring down the vessel's theatrical curtain for a final time on Aug. 27. Changes in artistic tastes and priorities are to be expected, we suppose. But we lament the disappearance of an entertainment option that has rich connection to Minnesota history and that has been a valued summertime tradition for many Minnesotans.
The showboat bears the name Centennial because it is among the legacies of Minnesota's observance of 100 years of statehood in 1958. Legendary university theater Prof. "Doc" Frank Whiting planted with centennial commission executive director Tom Swain the idea that a venerable 19th-century entertainment tradition could be preserved and that budding thespians could be trained and employed, if a showboat could be acquired and moored on the Mississippi River near the campus.
Swain found an 1899 packetboat with a paddle wheel, the General John Newton, that could be restored as a showboat. It was acquired with a little help from Minnesota's U.S. senators, who ran interference with the Army Corps of Engineers when Louisiana senators tried to keep the boat in New Orleans, and from this newspaper, which paid to tow the John Newton upstream. The Theater Department and the centennial commission each contributed $25,000 to its restoration; local corporations also made major gifts.
Swain helped raise money again when the Newton was destroyed by fire in 2000 and its successor — the Frank Whiting — was launched in 2002 under the management of the Padelford Packet Riverboat Co. It's been a money loser in recent years. But it has continued to offer today's audiences a taste of the itinerant entertainment that thrilled their great-grandparents. And it has offered a rich experience for students, adding to the roster of distinguished showboat alumni that include Bain Boehlke, Loni Anderson, Linda Kelsey and Jon Cranney.
The current production, "Under the Gaslight," is the same show with which the showboat made its 1958 debut. But this version includes a poignant finale — the 1978 disco anthem "I Will Survive." Our sense Wednesday was that the audience left wishing those words could be made to apply to the showboat itself.
