In today’s Wall Street Journal I review a Connecticut revival of Oklahoma!. Here’s an excerpt.
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Once upon a time, “Oklahoma!” was the most popular and beloved of Broadway musicals. Now it’s widely regarded as a corny back number, your grandmother’s favorite show. It was last seen on Broadway 14 long years ago, and Goodspeed Musicals’ new revival, directed by Jenn Thompson, is only the third production anywhere that I’ve had occasion to review in the past decade and a half. Nor is Ms. Thompson’s staging a trendy deconstruction intended to freshen a stale show, an “Oklahoma!” set on the Jersey Shore in which Laurey is a goth chick with tats. Instead, it’s conventionally designed and straightforwardly warm-hearted—but in a way that gives full weight to the emotional complexity of a show that isn’t nearly as simple as it looks. The result is the best “Oklahoma!” I’ve ever seen…
Three-quarters of a century after it opened on Broadway and ran for a then-unprecedented 2,212 performances, it’s easy to forget that “Oklahoma!” was one of the most innovative and influential of all Broadway musicals, not merely for Agnes de Mille’s oft-imitated dream-ballet sequence but also for the way in which Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II integrated their songs into the dramatic flow of Hammerstein’s book. Even more important, Hammerstein built darkness and conflict into what could have been a lightweight show by portraying Jud Fry (Matt Faucher) as a tortured soul who is obsessed with the sexually innocent Laurey (Samantha Bruce). That wasn’t the way musicals worked in 1943—most of them were as fluffy as lemon meringue—but Rodgers and Hammerstein believed that the Broadway musical would never ripen into a serious form of popular art unless it was driven by strong dramatic conflict….
Ms. Thompson, who has previously directed such anguish-ridden plays as William Inge’s “Natural Affection,” has staged Jud’s confrontation scene with Curly (Rhett Ghuter), Laurey’s boyfriend, in a snarlingly intense manner that put me in mind of Iago’s pitch-black anti-credo (“I believe in a cruel God”) in Verdi’s operatic version of Shakespeare’s “Othello.” Working in tandem with Katie Spelman, who has rechoreographed the show, she has also given us an updated dream ballet, one which signals to the viewer that Laurey is in the process of undergoing a sexual awakening that will turn her into a mature woman…
All this is sited inside the picture frame of a traditional-looking “Oklahoma!” set in a small-town world of box socials and shivarees. Wilson Chin’s neat, compact ranch-house sets and Tracy Christensen’s gingham dresses and weather-whacked cowboy duds are just what you expect to see on Goodspeed’s tiny stage, and Mr. Chin has festooned the century-old 398-seat auditorium with enough red, white and blue bunting to fly flags over every elementary school in Connecticut. But instead of contradicting the roiling emotions of Ms. Thompson’s staging, the décor actually heightens them…
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Read the whole thing here.
A video montage from Goodspeed Musicals’ Oklahoma! revival: