Musical Mondays: Oklahoma!
Often when I write a review, I decide to avoid any spoilers to the underlying story. Do I think spoilers ruin a narrative? No. The best stories are those that you can watch and rewatch regardless of whether you know how it ends. Knowing that Darth Vader is Luke Skywalker's father doesn't make The Empire Strikes Back any less the greatest science fiction movie of all time. That being said—I have enough cultural acumen to appreciate that people really, really dislike spoilers. Now that I have chastised the majority of the pop culture consuming public, I will say please use this as a spoiler warning: both for the original plot of Oklahoma! and for changes put in for the recent staging of Oklahoma! performed Off-Broadway at St. Anne's theater in Brooklyn that just closed last night.
Most of the chatter I heard about this production of Oklahoma! would make it feel more present, more relevant. Earlier this year I reviewed Carousel, another Rodgers & Hammerstein piece, and most of my complaints were how incredibly dated it felt. Carousel debuted originally in 1945, but Rodgers & Hammerstein actually wrote Oklahoma! two years prior. I was really intrigued but only cautiously optimistic. After seeing the production, I will give credit to the creative team that they made a lot of very intentional decisions to update the story.
Often times this really, really worked. The orchestrations turned classic musical theater songs into more emotional, sometimes beautiful songs in a way I wouldn't have maybe expressed before. The orchestra was just seven pieces, and maybe it is the Southern blood in me but there can be a lot of power in a banjo and a fiddle. This is a cast album that, if recorded, will be regularly in rotation on my playlists. Similarly the simplicity of the staging—a pseudo theater in the round staging made almost entirely of unpainted plywood with only one faint painting of a barn and a pasture on the back wall and filled with simple tables and chairs turned the focus on the actors.
The change that worked the most from me was actually a pretty drastic change in the end. In the original Oklahoma! our hero, Curly, kills the drunken antagonist Jud who has come back to the wedding of Curly and Laurey to harass the bride and attack the groom. Sort of—Curly actually dodges a knife attack and Jud falls on his own knife. There is a makeshift trial, and Curly is declared not guilty of any wrong doing by reasons of self-defense and the happily married couple rides off in the sunset. In this production, a seemingly cleaned up Jud attends the wedding, kisses the bride, and gifts Curly a gun. Curly shoots Jud in a pretty graphic moment, but certainly not in self-defense. Thus, when the impromptu trial happens and Curly is acquitted for self-defense, it is not a story of a happy couple going on with their life but rather a dark story about small town justice and what it means to be an outsider. It makes for a much more powerful ending.
That isn't to say I agreed with all of the changes. In the original Oklahoma! Act 1 ends with a very long dance number that shows Laurey being torn between Jud and Curley. The dance was moved to the top of Act 2 in this production, and it was an interpretive dance with music that was more rock than anything else. The dance was gorgeous, but it was so incredibly far removed from everything that led up to it and everything that followed, that I just felt confused—really, really confused. Again, it was a good dance but it just didn't feel like it melded with the story in a way that could've been a really awesome part. I'm not sure if this was because of it coming immediately following intermission or if it was just how different it was, but this felt like a missed opportunity.
Similarly, there were two scenes where the lights went out entirely—when Curley and Jud spoke in the barn in Act 1 and when Laurey and Jud spoke outside of the dance in Act 2. When the lights went out, the actors began speaking into hand mics in more of a whisper. It felt like it was an effort to add some intimacy, closeness to these scenes. The lights stayed out for several minutes as they spoke. Did it work for me? Not really—the hand mics instead of adding intimacy just felt like they were amplifying mouth noises. The lights out and the mouth noises made the scenes feel like weird ASMR videos in the middle of an otherwise pretty enjoyable production.
Oklahoma! is now closed Off-Broadway, but there are rumblings of it coming to Broadway in the not too distant future. This production took a play from 1943 and added enough complicating layers to make it feel more pressing, more contemporary than many productions would have been. It wasn't perfect, and some directorial decisions felt forced or oddly juxtaposed, but it was an effort that should be commended.