By the end everyone onstage is dancing. The shuffle has rep-
etitions of its own, the body in motion with or without the
words. Repetition abounds. The repeated stanzas of the song
contain the repeated rhymes of the lyric and the repeated mo-
tifs of harmony and rhythm in the music. This is the musical at
its fullest, and the elation that is felt in the performing group
and in the audience comes from the simultaneous occurrence
of these repetitions within the suspension that is occurring
within book time. This is a number having its effect. “Elation”
is the right word for this effect, for reasons we will come to.
Later in Show BoatMagnolia sings “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat
Man” for an audition at a Chicago nightclub, and Julie turns
up by sheer coincidence just in time to recognize her friend
from the showboat days. The number is diegetic again. Julie
hears Magnolia’s rendition of her song and makes the noble
gesture of giving up her gig.^4 The nightclub manager hears the
song too, and doesn’t like it. The onstage accompanist suggests
“ragging” the tune, so Magnolia has to sing an up-tempo
version to land the job. Eventually she goes on to become a
star, and by the final scene, set in 1927 (the year the musical
opened), she is heard singing “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man”
over the radio, while her father and former husband listen—
diegetic again. Never has so much been done in the interests of
integrating a number with a book in a musical, but the song is
still an insert, a number with time of its own, and utterly de-
tachable. It can go from the Mississippi River in the late 1880s
to a Chicago nightclub in 1904 by virtue of being diegetic
within the book, then it can go to a radio broadcast of 1927
which people on the showboat listen to—and then it can be
broadcast and recorded by Helen Morgan, Ella Fitzgerald,
108 CHAPTER FIVE
(^4) This section of Edna Ferber’s Show Boat, the novel on which the musical is
based, does not bring Julie into the audition scene, but the novel’s audition
does show where Hammerstein took the hint for the diegetic “Can’t Help
Lovin’ Dat Man.” In the novel, Magnolia auditions with spirituals like “All
God’s Chillun Got Wings” and “Go Down, Moses,” which she learned from
the black people on the kitchen staff of the show boat. Hammerstein took this
idea and carried it back to the kitchen pantry scene by having Julie sing the
black folk’s song Kern had written for the occasion.