The 'cosy' US classic that's really about sex and death
Time can have a dulling quality. Such has been the effect on Rodgers and Hammerstein's Oklahoma!, which in the 1940s revolutionised the Broadway musical as a form – it is often described as being as much of a game-changer in its day as Lin-Manuel Miranda's Hamilton. But the passing years have rendered it, in many people's eyes, familiar, folksy and cosy.
However just recently, a radical new version of the show has helped to change that perception. US director Daniel Fish's stripped-back staging, with its bluegrass reorchestrations, interval chilli, sudden plunges into pitch-black and undercurrents of violence, made US audiences look afresh at the material when it opened on Broadway in 2019, winning the Tony Award for best revival. It brought out the darkness in the central love triangle between farm girl Laurey and her two suitors, cowboy Curly McLain and farmhand Jud Fry, and other things too; audiences started referring to it as "sexy Oklahoma!". Now the New York hit has crossed the Atlantic to London's Young Vic, with a cast including Doctor Who's Arthur Darvill and Marisha Wallace, star of Dreamgirls and Waitress in the West End.
Oklahoma! was Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein's first musical as writing partners, though the pair would go on to write seminal Great American Musicals like South Pacific, Carousel and The Sound of Music. Based on Lynn Rigg's 1930 play Green Grow the Lilacs, it opened in 1943 and was a phenomenal success. It ran for an unprecedented 2,122 performances – far ahead of the previous Broadway record holder – and won a special honorary Pulitzer. Set in 1906 in the region then known as Oklahoma Territory, Oklahoma! chronicles the characters' rival courtships but it's also about life in a young country and, for a wartime audience, it symbolised the things people were fighting for – hope, home and possibility.
Oklahoma! Is very deeply embedded in US culture. The title song is now the state song of Oklahoma and references to Oklahoma! have rippled through other artworks like HBO's recent Watchmen miniseries, based on the Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' comic books, and the Charlie Kaufman film I'm Thinking of Ending Things. But as Patrick Vaill, who has played Jud Fry in all the iterations of Fish's production since it started life at New York's Bard College in 2007, explains, Fish wanted to "stage it as if people in the future had discovered the script in a time capsule and were looking at it as if for the first time."
https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20220504-the-cosy-us-classic-thats-really-about-sex-and-death
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Fascinating article. I was in "Oklahoma!" in high school and have been thinking about it recently as musicals figure in something I'm writing.
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