THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
Like the wreck of an old galleon, Oklahoma! has over the decades become encrusted by the weight of tradition and audience expectation. This funny, sexy and provocative production began life as a 2015 workshop at Bard College before moving to St Ann's Warehouse in Brooklyn and then Circle in the Square on Broadway. The original creative team and two of the cast have made the crossing and the Young Vic has been clever to nab them. It won the Tony for Best Revival and deservedly so as it's one for the musical theater history books – a truly landmark production.
It's so fresh it's as if the directors Daniel Fish and Jordan Fein found a dusty script in a drawer and started with no prior knowledge. The mostly young company has a youthful, hipsterish vibe about them as they recount the familiar story of Laurey and which beau she'll pick to take her to the 'box social'.
This is no Broadway epic but rather an intimate, immersive, 'in-the round' production, perfect for the Young Vic. Laura Jellinek and Grace Laubacher's set is a rural community hall, all warm wood and with a vast mural of the Big Plains. Long tables provide space for the women to crack corn and prepare meals and the roof is draped in bunting. Rather menacingly however, rows of rifles decorate the surrounding walls.
Most strikingly the show takes place in the full glare of bright studio lights, which initially gives it all an improvisatory air but, there are clever exceptions. When Curly convinces Jud Fry to kill himself this is done in total blackout. It jolts us, as if we shouldn't even be eavesdropping on it and it brilliantly pulls the focus. Scott Zielinski's lighting again goes all expressionist and green-hued when Laurey has her wobbles and in the 'dream ballet,' which here is more of a nightmare.
Musically it breaks new ground too. MD Daniel Kluger has arranged it for a stonking 8 piece on-stage band. They are part honky-tonk band (think New Country does Hank Williams), part string quartet. The limpid strings underline the sheer eloquence of Rodgers' eternal tunes, and all the voices here are exquisite and perfectly matched to this the new idiom. Indeed, the whole show gives the appearance of hipster nonchalance, while it is all lovingly crafted.
The women in R&H's work throw up some problems for today's audiences. One suspects they probably reflected more the values of 1943, when it was written, than the wild west in 1906, where it was set. But here that starched propriety of ingenues in pretty dresses is swept away and instead Laurey (a commanding Anoushka Lucas) and Aunt Eller (the great Liza Sadovy) are presented as totally modern women with agency, wit, and intelligence.
Arthur Darvill lends Curly a devious ambiguity which is perfect for where the show goes, and Patrick Vaill is deeply poignant as Jud Fry. Vaill and James Davis, as the gloriously befuddled as Will, are from the New York production.
Voluptuous doesn't begin to describe Marisha Wallace's barnstorming turn as Ado Annie. Instead of the typical vampish good-time-gal, she makes Annie gloriously human and draws out the fact that she is young and so her wide-eyed openness is the bedrock for her, ahem, friendliness with the fellas. Blessed with a stunning soul voice she blows the roof off during 'I Cain't Say No'.
The most powerful tonal change though is with the character of the troubled Jud. Instead of the typical brooding bully he's presented sympathetically here as an introverted soul, whose death is not by accident but is deliberately intended and at the hands of Curly. Making Curly an anti-hero is daringly inspired and of course makes the sham 'trial' that follows far more shocking in that we see an insular community turn on a sad loner and find him guilty. It leaves a really bitter taste in the mouth and wonderfully undercuts the tired jingoism of the title song finale.
A fitting end to a production which is a total revelation.
