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Oh Kay! Oh, No!
Oklahoma! revisited
By Steven Leigh Morris
RECOMMENDED
Sasha Hutchings and Sean Grandillo (Photo by Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman for MurphyMade)
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This was being sung on Broadway at the very moment the United States and its allies had prevailed in a war against Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.
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Composer-lyricists Rodgers and Hammerstein were the grandsons of Jewish immigrants and understood very well both the American pressures of assimilation and the spurning of outsiders that culminates in the sacrifice of those who don’t belong. (The stream of victims is endless and ever-changing.) Their musical Oklahoma! opened on Broadway in 1943; central to it is the sacrifice, under dubious circumstances, of an outsider to the local community named Jud (Christopher Bannow) — a tragic thread in a musical that otherwise traffics in optimism. (“Oh, what a beautiful morning; oh, what a beautiful day. I’ve got a beautiful feeling, everything’s going my way.”) This was being sung on Broadway at the very moment the United States and its allies had prevailed in a war against Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.
That swaths of the American population opposed U.S. involvement in World War II — and actually endorsed Hitler’s actions — is an aspect of our society that also seeps into the underbelly of Oklahoma! in the character of Andrew Carnes (Mitch Tebo), a patriarch whose policy for defending his daughter’s honor is enforced without negotiation through the barrel of a rifle. One man’s autocracy, and all that it represents, doesn’t mitigate the prevailing romanticism of Oklahoma!, nor that cherished historical moment in which it first appeared.
Director Daniel Fish’s re-imagining/deconstruction of this traditional classic has arrived in a Broadway touring production at the Ahmanson Theatre. It opens with lead character Curly (Sean Grandillo, with guitar in hand and wearing chaps and boots) crooning “Oh, What a Beautiful Morning” — but there’s a twist of mockery to his electrifying rendition. When Sasha Hutchings’s Laurey joins him for a later verse, the effect is beyond mesmerizing. She glares, she knocks over chairs, she tosses back her mane of hair. She throws aside husks of corn, uncaring. She could be Medusa, smiling with a kind of feline seductiveness before plucking out your heart. This is not my grandmother’s Oklahoma!
The entire ensemble is as grand and as intoxicating as the musical accompaniment and John Heginbotham’s surging choreography. Jordan Wynn opens Act 2 in a white shirt emblazoned with “Dream, Baby Dream!” as she contorts skillfully through the balletic dream sequence that traditionally closes Act 1.
Among many questions provoked by Fish’s much heralded staging of this musical: Why didn’t they just do Sweeney Todd instead – that is, why not stage an overt revenge melodrama about jealousy and a miscarriage of justice? Why rather impose that redo on Rodgers and Hammerstein’s valentine to American optimism?
Redo what, exactly?
First, music director Andy Collopy has opted for a country R&B band, including pedal steel, electric and acoustic guitar, ukulele, banjo, mandolin and violin — all of which turn the sound seductively regional. Then, Act 2’s opening reprise features an electric guitar solo, recalling Jimi Hendrix. Later, one of the songs is performed (beautifully by Hutchings) acapella.
Complement this shift in musicality with Scott Zielinski’s lighting design, which features multiple scenes in shadow, in complete darkness — one with a row of orange beams brazenly zapped into the faces of audience (as though we’re watching Chicago) and a couple of others, also on a dark stage, but with a videographer following the actors so that the scene homes in on the details of their nostrils and eyebrows. Their heads are broadcast onto the upstage wall. Very ‘90s performance art with a sinister luster.
Finally, casting the romantic lead with a Black woman (Hutchings, a powerhouse) and the subplot’s romantic femme with a hefty, Black trans actor (Sis) makes for an inspired upgrade, particularly when Sis croons “I’m just a girl who can’t say no” before leading the self-important yet feeble men in her sights around on a proverbial rope — with an assist from her father’s shotgun. With that casting move, Oklahoma! slides comfortably into the 21st century — authoritarianism and all.
These are stock-in-trade directorial conceits that largely pay off handsomely. The tectonic shift, however, comes with a major plot change: The story’s outcast, Jud Fry, is murdered in cold blood. Okay, maybe hot blood, since Jud hands a pistol to his romantic rival, Curly — in the aftermath of Curly’s wedding, no less — as though to say, go ahead, shoot me! And Curly does just that. He doesn’t actually need to, but he does it anyway, for which he is tried (in the same parlor) and acquitted by the local judge (Tebo) who happens to be in attendance.
Self-defense? This is straight out of the original text. What isn’t out of the original text is Curly’s aiding and abetting a suicide by firing a shot at the despondent, unarmed victim. The “not guilty” verdict is a reductive swipe at the Oklahoma justice system, particularly with Jud’s blood spewed across the faces and white bridal attire of killer Curly and his new bride. Remember: In the original stage play, Curly and Jud brawl with knives, and Jud falls on his own blade. In that comparatively ambiguous situation, the judge’s determination of self-defense, supplemented by his own urgings to Curly to keep his mouth shut, at least holds some water. In this version, it’s a farce — and that is the point.
An American myth of justice, or even the appearance of justice, gets husked like a cob of corn. The kernels it reveals have been stripped by locusts. There are many arguments to be made for the validity of this cultural viewpoint — for cynicism as the octane of our popular entertainments. Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd is the embodiment of that argument. (“There’s a hole in the world like a big black pit, and it’s filled with people who are filled with shit.”)
Does all of this present the case that directors should leave the classics alone? Not at all: By meddling, directors can help keep classics relevant. Otherwise, they merely celebrate the dust that gathers on them over time.
So — this is really about the quality of that meddling, which is really about the quality of mercy. If I were from Oklahoma watching this theatrically thrilling performance, I can nonetheless imagine feeling patronized by it. And pissed off.
Hennessy Winkler and Sis (Photo by Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman for MurphyMade)
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Does anyone still care about the rivalry between the cowhands and the farmers? Well, there’s more to this backdrop than meets the eye.
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Much of this has to do with appropriation. It’s unclear whether Rodgers and Hammerstein ever set foot in Oklahoma. They didn’t need to, because its libretto was “borrowed” from a 1931 play (Green Grow the Lilacs) penned by Oklahoma native, Lynn Riggs.
Let’s go back further. Riggs concocted his play from a pro-Union Civil War song of the same name, spun from an Irish folk song and referencing a moment in history when the territory of Oklahoma faced the imminent prospect of statehood – an issue that finds its way into Oklahoma!
In fact, the biggest psychological and job-change transformation alluded to by Rodgers and Hammerstein is Curly’s realization that he must change his ways and transition from cowhand to farmer when Oklahoma becomes a state. The cowboy is a relic; farming is the future. The larger question raised by reviving Oklahoma! in the 21st century is: Does anyone still care about the rivalry between the cowhands and the farmers?
Well, there’s more to this backdrop than meets the eye.
In American mythology, the cowhand is a symbol of rugged individualism, up against the machinery of society and its soul-crushing pressures to conform. The life of the farmer represents the anti-romantic slog of tilling fields, callouses, and dirt under the fingernails, a brand of misery subject to the capriciousness of the wind and the insects. This is Curly’s future.
Seething Jud either doesn’t want or has no capacity for such a life. Though a hired, lovestruck farm hand, he’d still rather live his life in a hole, preferably with the one woman he loves. He tracks to our current politics of resentment against “the government”: the railing against mandatory vaccines and mask-wearing for public health. Laura Jellinek’s set comes with multiple gun racks hanging on the walls. The gun, and the right to own it, has become the emblem of the rugged individualism/isolation embodied by Jud, beautifully played by Bannow as a kind of young incel deviant with a penchant for porn. (All of this resides in both Riggs’s play, and Rodgers and Hammerstein’s musical.)
The musical’s creators also express the paradigm of individualism versus conformity within the question of marriage, portrayed both as the intoxicating, potential fulfillment of passion and as an instrument of slavery. This paradox saturated 20th century literature and can also be found in plays by seminal writers who preceded Oklahoma! (Eugene O’Neill), and in those who followed it, from William Inge to Tennessee Williams to August Wilson.
Christopher Bannow, Sean Grandillo, Sasha Hutchings and the company. (Photo by Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman for MurphyMade)
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He gets in a knife fight with his rival, Curly, and falls on his own sword, so to speak. It may be murder in self-defense by Curly, it may be suicide by Jud, it may be both; that plot point survives in Oklahoma! intact.
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But let’s take it back to that Civil War song, “Green Grow the Lilacs” which forms the embryonic heartbeat of Oklahoma!
“I used to have a sweetheart but now I’ve got none
Since she’s gone and left me I care not for one
Since she’s gone and left me contended I’ll be
For she loves another one better than me
“Green grow the lilacs all sparkling with dew
I’m lonely my darling since partin’ with you
And by the next meeting I hope to prove true
And change the green lilacs to the red white and blue.”
The song puts Oklahoma!’s Jud Fry, a quasi-tragic figure, at the center of a patriotic story.
The Irish, from whom the song was adapted, were big on characters spurned by lovers or by society, then taking to the sea (“Shiver Me Timbers”). Going to sea was also an allusion to dying.
Rodgers and Hammerstein changed Jud’s name from Riggs’s “Jeeter” — an outcast spurned by the love of his life. He gets in a knife fight with his rival, Curly, and falls on his own sword, so to speak. It may be murder in self-defense by Curly, it may be suicide by Jud, it may be both; that plot point survives in Oklahoma! intact.
It could be argued that, on the Ahmanson stage, Jud’s handing of a gun to his rival is the equivalent of falling on his sword. What can’t be argued is that Curly’s hasty vindication for shooting and killing an unarmed victim is similarly equivalent. In Rodgers and Hammerstein, the legitimacy of Curly’s verdict is a line-call. In Fish’s re-staging, it’s a travesty. It’s unlikely that this would play well in Tulsa, since it’s the kind of condescension by progressive-creatives that fuels regional divides, further ripping apart already frayed threads of national unity.
The magistrate is (almost) directly out of Sweeney Todd. For his gob-smacking indifference to legal proprieties, they could rename him Judge Turpin, and hardly a soul would notice.Is this production’s contorted outrage over whitewashed justice anything new? It’s new to Oklahoma! but not to the theater. It’s among Hamlet’s reasons for considering suicide (“. . . The pangs of dispriz’d love, the law’s delay, The insolence of office.”) So, no it can’t be justified as saying anything that hasn’t also been said in, say, Hamlet, Sweeney Todd and Chicago.
So, the question remains. Why do this to Oklahoma! – a work of optimism sewn together with darker threads, and born in a rare, historic moment of national triumph? It’s a glorious production in so many ways. But for me, that question lingers.
OKLAHOMA! | By Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammersterin | Directed by Daniel Fish | Ahmanson Theatre, 135 N. Grand Avenue, Downtwn | Tues.-Fri., 8 pm; Sat., 2 & 8 pm; Sun., 1 pm & 6:30 pm; thru Oct. 16 https://centertheatregroup.org Running time: 2 hours and 45 minutes with one intermission.
