If they grew up in the second half of the American Century and are white, that nostalgic cultural snapshot might be a Norman Rockwell Saturday Evening Post portrait of rosy-cheeked middle-class familial bliss, or Sheriff Andy and little Opie sauntering to the fishing hole in mythical Mayberry.
But no pop-culture staple may more immediately conjure the bygone Great America than Oklahoma! The coruscating revival that debuts on Broadway this month , the fifth since the original production opened on March 31, , is just one of the more than new productions staged across the country in a typical year. America sure does seem great in Oklahoma! In Oklahoma! Its Broadway opening took place less than 16 months after the attack on Pearl Harbor, when America was shipping its sons off to war and still digging out of the Great Depression.
Like Hamilton , too, Oklahoma! Many generations later, Oklahoma! Over the years, Oklahoma! Or such was my lifelong impression of Oklahoma! The production shocked me, moved me, and puzzled me. Unexpectedly, I found myself sympathizing with all three principal characters — most of all Jud, the nominal villain of the piece, who is usually played as a lunkish foil to the endearing Curly.
That shift in emotional gravity created the puzzle: This Oklahoma! I left the theater wondering: Had these two contrasting Americas always resided within Oklahoma! I pulled out my old Modern Library edition of Rodgers and Hammerstein and found that no lines had been rewritten. When the new Oklahoma! Which in turn prompts a cultural riddle: If the darker show he illuminates was present in Oklahoma! The production is not a slab of agitprop in the current fashion. Fish first conceived his version in pre-Trump There is no Trumpian villain — or villains at all, actually — only the earnest, flawed Americans of the original.
A great America has always been a work-in-progress. The Great America of nostalgic, reactionary fantasy, beatific and white and welcoming to all, never existed in the first place — not even, it turns out, in the bright, golden meadows of Oklahoma!
W hich is not to say that Oklahoma! The farmers and cowmen of the show may sometimes be at odds, but their collisions are mild compared with the cataclysmic conflict left offstage — the foundational story of the Indian Territory where the show takes place. Some 4, of the 16, Cherokees who were forced to migrate to Oklahoma from Georgia along the notorious 1,mile-long Trail of Tears in —39 died along the way.
Yet paradoxically enough, the moral legacy of this history of criminal injustice, though stripped of its racial specifics, is embedded in the show through Jud. The character was the creation of the poet and playwright Lynn Riggs, whose folk drama Green Grow the Lilacs, a modest Broadway success of , was Oklahoma!
The expansion built minor figures in the original, Ado Annie and Will Parker, into conventional musical-comedy second bananas. Hammerstein always acknowledged his debt to Lilacs. Riggs, born in , had grown up there as well, in Claremore, and had a Cherokee mother. Her book is aptly titled Haunted by Home ; Riggs was haunted by home while spending much of his adult life in exile.
The author of 21 full-length plays — including the Cherokee Night, considered the first American Indian drama — he is remembered, if at all, as a footnote to Oklahoma! He deserves better. Riggs had a tough and peripatetic artistic life that could not be more American in its successes, disappointments, and sadnesses, and in its mongrel amalgam of cultural influences. He was closeted, of course, but his sexuality and lovers were not a secret to his circle in the enclaves that he bounced between, far from Oklahoma: Cape Cod, Hollywood, Paris, New York, and Cagnes-sur-Mer on the Riviera, where he worked on the play that would become Lilacs while on a Guggenheim Fellowship.
He was an avid participant in the counterculture of his time. He made a second, more successful effort to break into screenwriting, earning credits on such s studio fare as The Plainsman and The Garden of Allah. By the time Oklahoma! His contact with the production was mainly by correspondence, though he did get sprung from duty to attend the Broadway premiere.
Originally titled Away We Go! The opening-night performance was not sold out, and stray servicemen were dragged in from Times Square to fill empty seats. Seventy-five years ago, we were at war with foreign powers; now the enemy is within. A riot of colorful metallic fringe hangs from the ceiling.
On one wall is a grayish mural of a distant farm, on another a near-arsenal of rifles. As the show begins, the actors sit at long tables, like locals at a community-center potluck, beside piles of corn and pots of chili. Immersive theatre, sometimes involving food, has become relatively commonplace.
This chili is served, with corn bread, at intermission. But, in an iconic work like this one, the immersion can be powerful, altering our instinctive reactions to what we see and hear.
Jones has a gorgeous singing voice, and her Laurey is arresting, determined, and smart. The lighting turns green, the music quiets to a hush, and we can begin to imagine that these two truly like each other. Some of these involve the young men at the center of the show. They were both famous for insisting that their shows be performed with a frozen-in-amber fidelity to the original productions—even if those originals had been cobbled together with blood, sweat, and caffeine in out-of-town tryouts in New Haven, Connecticut, and in Boston.
Making changes can so easily become an accumulative pastime, not only on the part of one who makes them, but—and this is the main danger—those who follow are likely to be encouraged too much to make further changes.
But for all his deserved reputation as an earnest sentimentalist, Hammerstein was also a thorough cosmopolitan, and a consummate man of the theater. That this warhorse of a play can speak to 21st-century audiences with topical relevance should come as no surprise, because that is precisely what the first production did. The original Oklahoma! Our own global political moment is fraught in different ways, of course, but it is fraught all the same. So how is Oklahoma! The answer seems obvious, inescapable: just fine.
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