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Oklahoma!
Richard Rodgers/Oscar Hammerstein

    Like The Wizard of Oz, The Catcher in the Rye, and Gone With the Wind, Oklahoma! is more than a work of immense popularity. It has become a benchmark of American culture both for Americans and others. It is always being performed somewhere in the world in spaces ranging from school auditoria to professional stages. In 1993 alone, for example, the rights were granted for 900 individual productions. It has never left Broadway for long; after its original multi-year run in the 1940's, the original staging was remounted at New York's City Center in the 1950's, Rodgers supervised a production at Lincoln Center in 1969, and it was revived with customary success a decade later in 1979. Add to this theatrical ubiquity a faithful 1955 film adaptation which disseminated its charms to non-theatergoers, and you have not a great American musical, but the great American musical.
    Is there anyone who doesn't know the tune to "Oh, What a Beautiful Morning"? And now it's once again back on Broadway, this time via England, which is not strange because, more than any of its successors, Oklahoma! created the British infatuation with the American musical. Its initial London visit in 1947 was the biggest hit in Drury Lane's 285-year history. For a long time, West End productions of American musicals tried (and still try) to emulate their American originals. But about a decade ago something else started happening: the directors of British subsidized theatres began to experiment with new, revisionary revivals of familiar American musicals such as Guys and Dolls, Carousel, and My Fair Lady, refusing to be phased by the musical's firm anchoring in the world of entertainment. Major repertory directors like Richard Eyre and Nicholas Hytner began to put the old wine into new bottles.
    Renovator-in-chief was ex-Royal Shakespeare Company head Trevor Nunn who, after all, had initiated a major turn in the evolution of the musical form decades ago when he transformed a small minor musical play based on light verse by T.S. Eliot into the environmentally spectacular Cats. In 1998 Nunn revived Oklahoma! at the Royal National Theatre in a production so successful it moved into a long commercial run in the West End after its repetory season. Nunn was determined to show America his vision of Americana, but American Actors Equity refused to permit a Broadway transfer. But Nunn persevered, and he finally succeeded in effecting a compromise in which two of the original principals joined a new American company. The rest of the artistic team remained and the result--the attractive and energetic revival currently playing on Broadway--by most reports is faithful to Nunn's original version, although among those who have seen it on both sides of the Atlantic a critical consensus has arisen that something ineffable from the London original is missing.
    What has Nunn brought to this new production? From our contemporary vantage point, nothing really radical. He has indeed extended and deepened Oklahoma's original premise which, in the context of its time, was genuinely revolutionary: the idea that the sum of the various components of a musical comedy should be greater than its parts; that book, lyrics, dance should not be discrete, separate entities, but rather partake in a common artistic journey.
    There were, of course, predecessors that worked toward this goal of interdependence (Show Boat, Pal Joey) but in no popular musical work before Oklahoma! did speech move so logically into song or song into dance. The most visible manifestation of this was the use of serious dance--ballet--to convey emotions unexpressable in popular dance, emotions which rise to a climax at the end of the first act in Laurey's dream ballet. Here erotic energies, at first liberating, turn into a nightmare both feared and desired. This dark element has always existed in Oklahoma!, a legacy from its source, Lynn Riggs' play Green Grow the Lilacs. In Nunn's new version it is underlined.
    The sequence is now more powerful because Josefina Gabrielle as Laurey, a hold-over from the British production, is capable of doing her own dancing. So we do not have to watch a dancer surrogate come face to face with the implacable Jud, the menacing hired hand, as has been the case in the past. The original choreography by Agnes DeMille created a much imitated style invariably reproduced by subsequent choreographers. But not now--the choreography by the enormously talented Susan Strohman is new. Strohman, fresh from The Producers, has recently gone from triumph to triumph, and now has earned membership in the rarified hyphenate realm of director/choreographer reserved for such as Jerome Robbins and Bob Fosse.
    Strohman's work here is superlative. More populist, less formally balletic than DeMille's, it has enormous energy. It is infectious in its ho-downs and promenading, yet emotionally personal when necessary, which is part of Nunn's esthetic: he aims to find the core of realism in the work's formal components which makes them part of a truthful whole. Paradoxically, this search for realism can result in images that are at times theatrically fanciful. In a film the big sky can be revealed by panoramic long shots, but not on stage. And so Nunn (with designer Anthony Ward) uses miniature houses, windmills, water tank, and trains to let us know that this turn-of-the-twentieth-century settlement in unincorporated Indian territory, not yet a state, is in the middle of nowhere. Point made, fancifully.
    Nunn also does all he can to stress the social conflict between farmers and cowboys that underlies the region's growing pains and is the subject of the opening song in Act 2 "The Farmer and the Cowman." But Hammerstein hasn't given him much besides this song to work with. Ever the cock-eyed optimist, Hammerstein the liberal admitted social evils like discrimination and economic aggrandizement into the previously socially virginal world of musical comedy, usually to triumph over them. So the book of Oklahoma! skirts the issue of class conflict and basically circles around the two love triangles involving Laurey and Annie respectively. Still, despite these plot limitations, Nunn searches out a core of realism. The nefarious Jud, who lusts after Laurey, is decidedly less creepy than usual. Shuler Hensley acts and sings a complex and isolated character more to be pitied than scorned. He is also good-looking enough so that we can consider him a possible "bad boy" alternative to the irrepressibly optimistic Curley.
    Finally, of course, Oklahoma!'s endurance rests on its indelible music. This year is the centennial of Richard Rodgers birth, and some music historians estimate that he is the most performed composer who ever lived. Surely he remained throughout a long career an endless fount of melodic inventiveness. Whether working with the acerbic Lorenz Hart--who died the year Oklahoma! debuted--or the optimistic Oscar Hammerstein, Rodgers had the ability to write tunes that seem simple and obvious but which insistently enter musical memory and refuse to leave. So the folk play quality of Green Grow the Lilacs played directly to Rodgers' strength, and Oklahoma! initiated the most successful collaboration in American musical history. The current production celebrates its jewel of a score--who can ask for anything more?: In addition to the performers already mentioned, Patrick Wilson, late of The Full Monty, as a fine-voiced Curley, Jessica Boevers as Ado Annie who "cain't say no," and Andrea Martin as Aunt Ellie head a vibrant company which catches the pulse of a new beginning--of a state and of a genre.

    New York, April 5, 2002                                                      - Gerald Rabkin