When Show Boat opened on December 27, 1927, Broadway musicals were frothy, structurally ramshackle affairs—basically, excuses for a little song-and-dance, with forgettable, at times goofy and improbable, plots. Even musicals by Show Boat’s creative team—composer Jerome Kern and librettist and lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II—adhered to prevailing musical-comedy norms.

With Show Boat, Broadway became a popular art form, one that could successfully tackle serious themes. Based on Edna Ferber’s best-selling 1926 novel, Show Boat tells an epic tale while dealing with tectonic shifts in American life. And has there ever been a better, richer theater score? A huge box-office hit, Show Boat made a whole litany of American musicals dealing with serious dramatic themes—from Porgy and Bess to Sweeney Todd—possible.

The concert version of Show Boat at Carnegie Hall on June 10, which offers audiences the opportunity to experience the musical anew, is a kind of homecoming. Show Boat had its premiere at the Ziegfeld Theater on 55th Street and Sixth Avenue, just a block from the Hall, and Kern’s score embraces the expansive range of music that Carnegie has long presented.

Show Boat spans 40 years—1887 to 1927—as it tracks Magnolia Hawks from stage-struck kid who grows up on the Cotton Blossom to mature, experienced woman. Ferber’s show boat is no enchanted thing gliding down a river of dreams—it is a utilitarian craft engaged in the serious business of selling music and dance, laughs and sighs. The ship’s performers bring gaudy visions of excitement and adventure to audiences, but their offstage lives are gritty melodramas.

Kern and Hammerstein were interested in creating a different, more ambitious kind of show that wove words, music, plot, character, and design into a coherent unity. Kern was that rare bird, a composer admired by the cognoscenti and a regular on the hit parade; Hammerstein was the scion of a theatrical dynasty and at a relatively young age had already crafted the lyrics and scripts for a string of well-known shows.

Lacking a producer, Kern sent a copy of Ferber’s novel to impresario Florenz Ziegfeld, who recognized its theatrical potential for a musical, despite its thematic content—in 1926, interracial marriage was illegal (and would remain so until 1967). Similarly, the musical’s sympathetic treatment of its African American characters was progressive for the era, and Show Boat was the first musical to feature African Americans and whites singing onstage together.

So is Show Boat—controversy and all—the great American musical? Seventy-one years after the musical’s premiere, Carnegie Hall will let the words and music speak—and sing—for themselves.