Acclaimed as the last and greatest production of the master showman, Florenz Ziegfield, "Show Boat," which moved in at the Shubert Theatre last night, certainly did not disappoint the hopes of the most expectant. There is humor, there is a well-defined plot, there is love, hate, and pathos, all woven into one harmonious background of Jerome Kern's Music.

Helen-Morgan in the full flush of her personality is there to sing "Bill," and "Can't Help Lovin' That Man." There is Norma Terriss as Magnolia. There is the unforgettable undertone of "Ol' Man River."

Almost everyone has been either the original play which started its run in 1928, or the movie, or read Eden Ferber's book, but seldom has a revival proved as popular as this. Elaborate almost to the point of excess the scenes, the consumes and the choruses are all blended to give the impression of a great spectacle. To call "Show Boat" a musical comedy would be far from conveying a definition, as to call "Green Pasture" a play. It is not puny, like many plays of its type. It combines all the sentiment and carefully unwinding plots of "The Cat and the Fiddle," but it is not fastidious nor in it a madcap like "The Laugh Parade."

The story is fundamentally serious. The daughter of the owner of the Show Heat falls in love with a river gambler the dashing Gaylord Reveual playing opposite him in one of the Show Boat's melodramas, the role she would like in real life. Their marriage the alternate prosperity and poverty of a gambler's life, the disillusionment and the separation follow quickly. Still in love they meet on the old "Show Boat" many years after, as it lies against an old Mississippi wharf in the moonlight.

All romantic operettas are compounded of essentially the same ingredients, but it requires the touch of the master to mix them, and flavor to the right taste. That such a long piece as "show Boat" does not wear on the spectator is ample proof that Ziegfield knew how to alternate his music, his choruses, and his skits, and above all he knew the settings to render each most effective. The scenes before the tent of the shimmy dances, in the 1892 World's Fair in Chicago, the aberations of Captain Andy Hawks, and the hawklike watchfulness of his termagant wife, the antics of two mountaineers at the performance of "The Parson's Bride" aboard the show boat, are all staggered to relieve the tedium of plot.

The play is too much of a unit to be able to attribute its success to any individual members of the cast. Of Course, there could never be anyone but Helen Morgan to take the part of Julie. No one from the vantage point of a piano top could carry the magnetic thrill of her personality to every member of the audience, as she sings that oddly sentimental song, "Bill," for which incidentally, P. G. Wodehouse, wrote the lyric.

Whether this operetta is revived perennially like "The Mikado," "Blossom Time," and "The student Prince," or whether like many of Victor Herbert's and Friml's creations, the properties of "show Boat" lauguish in some downtown warehouse, its music will survive long in the repertoire of remembered favorites.