Oklahoma Was Never Really O.K.

'A new production exposes the darkness that’s always been at the heart of the musical — and the American experiment.

By Frank Rich

When those who want to make America great again wax nostalgic about the Great America they claim has vanished, what America are they picturing? 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 Richard Rodgers–Oscar Hammerstein II musical that has been synonymous with sunny American nationalism for more than three-quarters of a century. The coruscating revival that debuts on Broadway this month, the fifth since the original production opened on March 31, 1943, is just one of the more than 300 new productions staged across the country in a typical year. Oklahoma! remains such an evergreen in the nation’s collective consciousness that even at its advanced age it can serve as both a springboard for parody in The Simpsons and a somber leitmotif in the premiere episode of Damon Lindelof’s HBO adaptation of the DC comic Watchmen, due later this year.

America sure does seem great in Oklahoma!, even though it’s set in a parcel of the country — turn-of-the-last-century Indian Territory — that hadn’t yet officially joined the Union. When the show’s cowboy hero, Curly, first enters, singing of the “bright, golden haze on the meadow” in “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’,” he brags that “ev’rythin’s goin’ my way,” as if good fortune were his birthright. No less swaggering is the title song, which conveys Oklahoma’s looming status as a “brand-new state” (the 46th, in 1907) with the rising tempo and decibels of an orgasm: “We know we belong to the land, and the land we belong to is grand!” A theater company need never fear that the musical’s patriotic reaffirmation of America’s manifest destiny might rattle the subscribers. In Oklahoma!, the corn is always as high as an elephant’s eye and the skies are not cloudy all day.

At its birth, the show was to its America what Hamilton has been to ours: both an unexpected record-smashing box-office phenomenon and a reassuring portrait of our past that lifted up theatergoers at a time of great anxiety about the country’s future. 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! was deemed artistically revolutionary for its time. A self-styled “musical drama” rather than a musical comedy, it dispensed with the usual leggy chorus line and leveraged its songs to advance character and plot. Not that there was much plot: The Oklahoma farm girl Laurey can’t decide between the two suitors vying to take her to a box social, Curly and her farm’s hired hand, Jud. What upped the dramatic ante was the creation of a Freudian “dream ballet” by the modern-dance choreographer Agnes de Mille to resolve Laurey’s quandary and the onstage killing of the defeated beau, Jud, when he shows up drunk on her and Curly’s wedding day.'>>>

https://www.vulture.com/2019/04/frank-rich-oklahoma.html?