New York Philharmonic to Offer 100 Free Tickets to Starry SHOW BOAT this Friday

100 free tickets for 13 to 26-year-olds are now available for the Philharmonic's production of Show Boat on Friday, November 7 at 8:00 p.m.

Tickets can be reserved through nyphil.org/freefridays (first-come, first-served) and picked up with a valid ID at the Avery Fisher Hall Box Office on November 7 after 5:30 p.m.

Philharmonic Free Fridays offers 100 free tickets to 13-26-year-olds to each of the 2014-15 season's 18 Friday evening subscription concerts; it is part of Share the Music!, a new initiative to support expanded access to the New York Philharmonic.

The production will be telecast nationally on Live From Lincoln Center on PBS stations.

SHOW BOAT is Broadway's most revived and revised work; productions vary widely, with scenes and songs added or eliminated to serve each production's vision. The Philharmonic's presentation will take the original 1927 score as a basis and emphasize the music in its original orchestration by Robert Russell Bennett. It will include several rarely heard songs, including "Let's Start the New Year" and "Mis'ry's Comin' Round," which are operatic in scope and spotlight the chorus and orchestra; "It's Getting Hotter in the North," a bluesy number cut during the original tryouts; and "Ah Still Suits Me," written especially for Hattie McDaniel and Paul Robeson for the 1936 film. The scenes selected for this production will primarily be those that include music behind the dialogue; scenes without underscoring will be included only as needed to tell the story.

Based on a bestselling novel by Edna Ferber, Show Boat tells the 40-year story of the lives of performers, stagehands, and dock workers who are the denizens of the Cotton Blossom, a Mississippi River show boat. The New Yorker noted that the show "was a radical departure in musical storytelling, marrying spectacle with seriousness," moving beyond the light and airy plots of previous operettas and musical comedies with its serious subjects of racial prejudice and tragic love. Highlights include "Ol' Man River," "Make Believe," and "Can't Help Lovin' DatMan." Broadway's most revived and revised work, Show Boat was the first musical ever performed by an opera company - by New York City Opera in 1954. Recent productions have garnered the Tony Award for Best Revival of a Musical (1995) and the Laurence Olivier Award for Best Musical Revival (1991).