Oklahoma - Circle in the Square Theatre

[Doe Be Doe]

I saw Oklahoma at Circle in the Square last Thursday. I enjoyed it very much. I had never seen the play or the film before so the plot was brand new to me. I was surprised by the story line.

 

I had a great time but I have to say that the two leading actors, Damon Daunno (Curly) and Rebecca Naomi Jones (Laurey), while very good, were not great. They didn't seem able to take their singing to the level the play deserved.

 

Still it was a very good time.

[+ azdr0710]

an American classic......first musical collaboration of Rodgers and Hammerstein........subject of many revivals and high school musicals everywhere!.......

 

three variations on the song which New York Times theater critic Brooks Atkinson said changed the history of musical theater: "After a verse like that, sung to a buoyant melody, the banalities of the old musical stage became intolerable."......

 

 

 

Edited March 31, 2019 by azdr0710

[Cooper]

I’ve seen the original productions of Oklahoma several times, so, when I heard about this contemporary version of the play, I was interested.

 

It’s advertised as: “

this is

OKLAHOMA!

as you’ve never seen or heard it before – reimagined for the 21st century.”

 

Well, it didn’t work for me. This low budget production with no scenery and a cast of unknowns didn’t keep me interested.

 

For some of the audience the highlight seemed to be picking up a free slice of cornbread during intermission.

 

The Circle in the Square’s stage led to many distractions as the house lights are on during most of the show leaving you looking at the audience across from you. Also, the actors stand & sing on both ends of the stage making it feel like you’re watching a tennis match going back & forth.

 

The 5 piece orchestra was very good. And the cast was very PC. Even had a woman in a wheelchair. I agree the lead singers weren’t up to par with what one has come to expect from a Broadway musical.

 

I realize it’s still in previews but I don’t think any adjustments can help. There’s a very awkward & long ballet number at the start of Act 2. I was told this had to do with the original production. It didn’t work for me.

 

Had I not seen the original production of Oklahoma, I might have enjoyed it more.

 

Let’s see what the critics have to say when it officially opens.

[Cooper]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DTnnLaIvtk8

[mike carey]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DTnnLaIvtk8

That was pretty damn good.

[+ BenjaminNicholas]

This whole revival is a case of The Emperor's New Clothes.

 

This should have stayed off-Broadway. At these new prices, it's a damned farce that audiences are showing up to this.

[edjames]

Michael Reidel I today's NYPost writes that this production has Broadway audiences divided into "Hate It" and Love It camps.

 

Ben, I found good reasonable priced tickets but I am hesitating....we'll see.

Some performances have been available on TDF, but tickets go really fast.

 

Is Broadway’s edgy ‘Oklahoma!’ revival brilliant or just bizarre?

 

Who’d have thought the most controversial show this spring would be . . . Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Oklahoma!”?

A revival of the 1943 musical opening Sunday is dividing audiences and Tony voters. Partisans think it’s a brilliant updating of a chestnut. Detractors say it’s an abomination against a beloved classic.

Directed by Daniel Fish, this “Oklahoma!” is tuneful and funny, brutal and dark, but still bright: The house lights stay on throughout most of the show. Curly is no longer a sunny hero, but an arrogant force for all that the white man will do to Native Americans while settling the West. Jud Fry is no longer an ugly weirdo, but a sensitive, sexy and troubled farm hand, evoking at turns sympathy and terror.

Guns line the walls of the theater. An actress in a wheelchair — Ali Stroker, getting raves — plays Ado Annie. And the show ends with Laurey and Curly drenched in blood on their wedding day.

When the production played Brooklyn’s St. Ann’s Warehouse, the Times critics loved it. They can’t be seen as aging white guys out of touch with theater for hipsters. (The Times is so “woke” these days, I’m dying to drop an Ambien in its martini.) But the Hollywood Reporter, whose critic is another aging white guy, was skeptical: “It’s when the director most imposes himself on the material that you want to run screaming for the exits.”

Tony voters are equally divided. A few told me they hated every minute of it. Others thought it was thrilling and original. But most agree that the dream ballet is way too long. Even some people on the show wish the director would cut it.

Behind the scenes, the producers are trying to figure out how to sell it. They’ve divided potential audiences into “Oakies” and “Nokies.”

“Oakies” are traditional theatergoers who love the “Oklahoma!” of Gordon MacRae and Shirley Jones. Give them a revival that says America is racist and gun-mad, and they’ll opt for “Kiss Me, Kate.”

“Nokies” are younger theatergoers for whom “Oklahoma!” is something their grandmothers still play on a turntable. Reared on “Rent,” they have little use for butter churning and song titles that end in exclamation points. This experimental, edgy version is something they’d probably enjoy.

A marketing campaign has been tailored to each, with the idea that the “Oakies” and the “Nokies” should be friends.

Wherever you come down, “Oklahoma!” is sure to be in the mix for the Tony Awards. It will square off against the Roundabout’s dandy but more conventional revival of “Kiss Me, Kate.” (If the Yiddish revival of “Fiddler on the Roof” had gone to Broadway instead of Stage 42, it would be the revival to beat.)

If this “Oklahoma!” succeeds at the box office, expect even more radical revisions of the classics: an “Annie Get Your Gun” that overturns the Second Amendment; an “On the Town” where the sailors end up in Julius in the Village, and an “Oh! Calcutta!” in black tie.

[edjames]

NYPost HATED it!

 

‘Oklahoma!’ review: Anti-gun revival of classic shot to hell

The corn is as high as an elephant’s eye, and so is my blood pressure, thanks to the revival of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Oklahoma!”

In director Daniel Fish’s pretentious production — which opened Sunday on Broadway, fresh from Brooklyn’s St. Ann’s Warehouse — everything you cherish about this classic has been taken out behind the barn and shot, replaced by an auteur’s bag of tricks and a thesis on gun control and westward expansion. Here, the West was won by a culture of violence and toxic masculinity — what fun!

The audience at the Circle in the Square Theatre sits on three sides of the stage, the plywood-covered walls plastered with rifles. The pit orchestra’s more like a seven-person bluegrass band, decked out in plaid, and the house lights are cranked all the way up. This looks like a hootenanny, you think.

Well, hold your horses. The lights stay on in the house for most of the show, maybe to create intimacy. But the almost constant brightness, which changes only a handful of times to neon green or red and at one point goes dark entirely, muddies the storytelling. No scene seems any different from the next, and the whole thing is a mostly joyless chore.

The story remains the same. Two potential suitors, cowboy Curly (Damon Daunno) and farm hand Jud (Patrick Vaill), both dream of accompanying Laurey (played with a furrowed brow by Rebecca Naomi Jones) to the box social and beyond.

You may recall Curly as a heroic Hugh Jackman type, who grins through “Oh, What A Beautiful Mornin,’ ” and Jud as an Andre the Giant type. No longer. Now, both of them are stick-thin creeps with greasy hair. Lucky for us, they have awful purty singing voices.

So does Ali Stroker, who plays Ado Annie, the gal who can’t say no, opposite James Davis’ doofy Will Parker. The funny, sexier-than-usual pair tries their best to keep things light in this giant frown of a staging, as does Will Brill as their third wheel, oily peddler Ali Hakim.

In fact, they and Mary Testa’s pushy Aunt Eller would be a fine addition to any other production of “Oklahoma!” But their instruction here would seem to be “have a lousy time.” The actors lounge around on benches, speaking quietly with no particular investment in the scene. When we arrive at the should-be showstoppers — the title song, “The Farmer and the Cowman” — choreographer John Heginbotham has the cast lazily amble around as if drunk.

Agnes De Mille’s famous Dream Ballet has been ditched for an overlong, gymnastics floor exercise danced, with admirable muscularity, by Gabrielle Hamilton in little more than a sparkly T-shirt reading “Dream Baby Dream.” Lovely.

Some of Fish’s ideas are fun. The chili and cornbread doled out to the audience at intermission is tasty, and the women snapping ears of corn during “Many A New Day” gives the scene rebellious energy. But in putting his actors in modern dress, making guns his wallpaper and forcing every moment that a gun is brandished or even mentioned to have bombastic significance, Fish clearly is saying he’s not a great fan of the culture of the Great Plains — of yesteryear or yesterday. In a preposterously heavy-handed sequence, he even has Jud present Curly with a pistol, rather than the usual knife, which leads to a shocking but inane conclusion. All this, in a hokey old show that includes the lyric, “Gonna give ya barley, carrots and potaters.” Listening to the New York audience applauding their own virtuosity makes a guy want to put this “Oklahoma!” out to pasture.

[edjames]

On the other hand, NYTimes Ben Brantley raves...He called it "astonishing!"

 

Review: A Smashing ‘Oklahoma!’ Is Reborn in the Land of Id

How is it that the coolest new show on Broadway in 2019 is a 1943 musical usually regarded as a very square slice of American pie? The answer arrives before the first song is over in Daniel Fish’s wide-awake, jolting and altogether wonderful production of “Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma!,” which opened on Sunday night at the Circle in the Square Theater.

“Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’” is the title and the opening line of this familiar number, a paean to a land of promisingly blue skies and open spaces. But Curly, the cowboy who sings it, isn’t cushioned by the expected lush orchestrations. Nor is the actor playing him your usual solid slab of beefcake with a strapping tenor.

As embodied by the excellent Damon Daunno, this lad of the prairies is wiry and wired, so full of unchanneled sexual energy you expect him to implode. There’s the hint of a wobble in his cocky strut and voice.

Doing his best to project a confidence he doesn’t entirely feel, to the accompaniment of a down-home guitar, he seems so palpably young. As is often true of big boys with unsettled hormones, he also reads as just a little dangerous.

He’s a lot like the feisty, ever-evolving nation he’s so proud to belong to. That would be the United States of America, then and now.

Making his Broadway debut as a director, Mr. Fish has reconceived a work often seen as a byword for can-do optimism as a mirror for our age of doubt and anxiety. This is “Oklahoma!” for an era in which longstanding American legacies are being examined with newly skeptical eyes.

Such a metamorphosis has been realized with scarcely a changed word of Oscar Hammerstein II’s original book and lyrics. This isn’t an act of plunder, but of reclamation. And a cozy old friend starts to seem like a figure of disturbing — and exciting — depth and complexity.

Mr. Fish’s version isn’t the first “Oklahoma!” to elicit the shadows from within the play’s sunshine. Trevor Nunn and Susan Stroman’s interpretation for London’s National Theater of nearly two decades ago, while more traditionally staged, also scaled up the disquieting erotic elements.

But this latest incarnation goes much further in digging to a core of fraught ambivalence. To do so, it strips “Oklahoma!” down to its skivvies, discarding the picturesque costumes and swirling orchestrations, and revealing a very human body that belongs to our conflicted present as much as it did to 1943 or to 1906, the year in which the show (based on Lynn Riggs’s “Green Grow the Lilacs”)takes place.

Laura Jellinek’s set suggests a small-town community center that might double as a polling station, decorated with festive banners, colored lights — and a full arsenal of guns on the walls. It’s made clear that we the audience are part of this community. The house lights stay on for much of the show, in a homogenizing brightness, that is occasionally and abruptly changed for pitch darkness. (Scott Zielinski is the first-rate lighting designer.)

There’s chili cooking on the refectory tables onstage, for the audience’s consumption at intermission. A seven-member hootenanny-style band sits in plain view. The well-known melodies they play have been reimagined — by the brilliant orchestrator and arranger Daniel Kluger — with the vernacular throb and straightforwardness of country and western ballads.

The cast members — wearing a lot of good old, form-fitting denim (Terese Wadden did the costumes) — are just plain folks. Singing with conversational ease, they occasionally flirt and joke with the audience seated on either side of the stage. We are all, it would appear, in this together.

Though the cast has been whittled down to 11 speaking parts (and one dancer), the key characters are very much present. They include our scrapping leading lovers, Curly McLain and Laurey Williams (Rebecca Naomi Jones); their comic counterparts, Will Parker (James Davis) and Ado Annie (Ali Stroker); that bastion of homespun wisdom and stoicism, Aunt Eller (Mary Testa) and the womanizing peddler Ali Hakim (Will Brill).

Oh, I almost forgot poor old Jud Fry (Patrick Vaill), the slightly, well, weird handyman who’s sweet, in a sour way, on Laurey. Everybody forgets Jud, or tries to. Not that this is possible, with Mr. Vaill lending a charismatic, hungry loneliness to the part that’s guaranteed to haunt your nightmares.

These people — in some cases nontraditionally yet always perfectly cast — intersect much as they usually do in “Oklahoma!” They court and spark, fight and reunite. They also show off by picking up guitars and microphones and dancing like prairie bacchantes. (John Heginbotham did the spontaneous-feeling choreography.) They use household chores, like shucking corn, to memorably annotative effect.

Ms. Stroker’s boy-crazy, country siren-voiced Ado Annie, who rides a wheelchair as if it were a prize bronco, and Mr. Davis’s deliciously dumb Will emanate a blissful endorphin haze. Mr. Brill is a refreshingly unmannered Ali Hakim, and Ms. Testa is a splendid, wryly authoritative Aunt Eller.

But there’s an abiding tension. This is especially evident in Ms. Jones’s affectingly wary Laurey, who regards her very different suitors, Curly and Jud, with a confused combination of desire and terror.

That her fears are not misplaced becomes clear in an encounter in Jud’s dank hovel of a home. Curly sings “Pore Jud,” in which he teasingly imagines his rival’s funeral with an ominous breathiness.

The scene occurs in darkness, with a simulcast video in black and white of the two men face to face. And the lines between sex and violence, already blurred in this gun-toting universe, melt altogether.

I first saw Mr. Fish’s “Oklahoma!” at Bard College in 2015, and again at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn last year. It was an exciting work from the get-go, but it just keeps getting better. The performances are looser and bigger; they’re Broadway-size now, with all the infectious exuberance you expect from a great musical.

At the same time, though, this production reminds us that such raw energy can be harnessed to different ends, for ill as well as for good. In the earlier versions, I had problems with its truly shocking conclusion — the scene that takes the most liberties with the original. In its carefully retooled rendering, it’s disturbing for all the right reasons.

The other significant change here involves the dream ballet, which in this version begins the second act and has been newly varied and paced. It is performed by one dancer (the exquisite Gabrielle Hamilton) with a shaved head and a glittering T-shirt that reads “Dream Baby Dream.”

What she does is a far cry from the same sequence as immortalized by Agnes de Mille, the show’s legendary original choreographer. But on its own, radically reconceptualized terms, it achieves the same effect.

As she gallops, slithers and crawls the length of the stage, casting wondering and seductive glances at the front row, Ms. Hamilton comes to seem like undiluted id incarnate, a force that has always been rippling beneath the surface here.

She’s as stimulating and frightening — and as fresh — as last night’s fever dream. So is this astonishing show.

[edjames]

The remaining reviews seem to be mixed:

 

https://www.broadwayworld.com/article/Review-Roundup-OKLAHOMA-on-Broadway-Did-the-Critics-Have-a-Beautiful-Day-at-the-Circle-in-the-Square-20190407

[foxy]

For some reason I keep thinking of “Springtime for Hitler” from The Producers.

[+ azdr0710]

adding this clip of Damon Daunno's version of "Oh, What A Beautiful Mornin'" to my three versions upthread......obviously not a show performance, but I wonder if this is the same style as the stage performance.......

 

[Cooper]

@azdr0710. Yes, that’s the way he sings it in the show.

 

[bostonman]

One thing is for sure, relevant or not - Rodgers himself would have hated this. He didn't like when people "improved on" his music - he didn't even like when his orchestrators got too clever and seemed to overshadow Rodgers' tunes.

 

Not that he has any say in the matter now, of course.

[Doe Be Doe]

Would Rodger's estate have had to approve this production?

[bostonman]

Would Rodger's estate have had to approve this production?

 

Rodgers' estate (i.e. the Rodgers and Hammerstein Organization) would have had to approve it, yes. But that doesn't mean they have to live by Rodgers' aesthetic myopia lol. In fact, they have also approved some new "music videos" that have been made of some of the classic R&H songs with new, more contemporary takes.

[DruJac]

This whole revival is a case of The Emperor's New Clothes.

 

This should have stayed off-Broadway. At these new prices, it's a damned farce that audiences are showing up to this.

Lol I’ll be honest. I saw it at St Ann’s Wharehouse when the buzz started and got a “deal” for $90 tickets. I had not been so disappointed in the price of a show in a while. My friend and I dubbed it ‘Hipster Oklahoma’ and we were both shocked to find out it was making it the broadway stage. The leads seem weak even though they are talented veterans.

 

Thankfully, Damon Daunno looked adorable in his dungarees and his voice made the show worth it.

[+ WilliamM]

Rodgers continued working long after Hammerstein died in late summer 1960. His only near hit musical was "No Strings," which has a decent Original cast recording. In terms of reference, Hammerstein died when "The Sound of Music" was in it's first year on Broadway. Rodgers wrote the lyrics and music to "No Strings."

 

I saw "The Sound of Music" in August 1960. The were many people in front of theater at the end, but I do not know why -- probably had little relevance to O. H.

Edited April 11, 2019 by WilliamM

[+ BenjaminNicholas]

Lol I’ll be honest. I saw it at St Ann’s Wharehouse when the buzz started and got a “deal” for $90 tickets. I had not been so disappointed in the price of a show in a while. My friend and I dubbed it ‘Hipster Oklahoma’ and we were both shocked to find out it was making it the broadway stage. The leads seem weak even though they are talented veterans.

 

Thankfully, Damon Daunno looked adorable in his dungarees and his voice made the show worth it.

 

If you thought this version of OK was bad, just wait until you watch British producers try to make Six The Musical the next Hamilton. It's making a US premier in Chicago this summer.

 

It looks like a total fucking shlockfest, but that in itself could be entertaining (as long as the prices aren't too insane).

 

The previews of this show make Showgirls look like Chaucer:

 

[bostonman]

Rodgers continued working long after Hammerstein died in late summer 1960. His only near hit musical was "No Strings," which has a decent Original cast recording. In terms of reference, Hammerstein died when "The Sound of Music" was in it's first year on Broadway. Rodgers wrote the lyrics and music to "No Strings."

 

I saw "The Sound of Music" in August 1960. The were many people in front of theater at the end, but I do not know why -- probably had little relevance to O. H.

 

Rodgers was lucky to have 2 amazing long-term partnerships with insanely talented lyricists. But he was unable to find that spark a 3rd time with any of the collaborators he tried after that. And they were an impressive group, actually - Sondheim, Harnick, Charnin, Peter Stone, Laurents, ...but none of those collaborations worked very well.

 

I don't have much love for the 2 songs he wrote himself for the film of The Sound Of Music (to be honest, I despise "Something Good"), but they have become classics because of the iconic nature of the film. "The Sweetest Sounds" and "Stay" are two melodies I admire a great deal from this period of his writing, but he really never had another hit song in this time. Sad, somehow, for the man that Noel Coward once quipped could "pee melody."

[edjames]

This is definitely a "love it" or "hate it" show.

I got a great seat through TDF, so no problems there. The seat next to me was vacant, so plenty of room to man spread. Even better, the old guy next to me disappeared at intermission, so Act 2 was very comfortable!

I'm calling this "Oklahoma...Unplugged". This is not the classic musical grandma saw.

I've saw the 1979and 2002 revivals. Of course the score is a mainstay at most gay piano bars.

This score has been orchestrated in a C&W style. The orchestra is 7 musicians, and the cast is small, too.

Gone is the Agnes DeMille choreography. What remains is clunky. The second act opening number, a solo dance, is like something out of an MTV video. The dancer wears sequined tee shirt, and when you have to add vast amounts of smoke, you know its in trouble. It definitely could have been cut.

But the rest of the show is very intriguing and enjoyable.

In short, I liked it very much, but at 2 hours and 45 minutes, it was just a bit too long.

[+ BenjaminNicholas]

This is definitely a "love it" or "hate it" show.

I got a great seat through TDF, so no problems there. The seat next to me was vacant, so plenty of room to man spread. Even better, the old guy next to me disappeared at intermission, so Act 2 was very comfortable!

I'm calling this "Oklahoma...Unplugged". This is not the classic musical grandma saw.

I've saw the 1979and 2002 revivals. Of course the score is a mainstay at most gay piano bars.

This score has been orchestrated in a C&W style. The orchestra is 7 musicians, and the cast is small, too.

Gone is the Agnes DeMille choreography. What remains is clunky. The second act opening number, a solo dance, is like something out of an MTV video. The dancer wears sequined tee shirt, and when you have to add vast amounts of smoke, you know its in trouble. It definitely could have been cut.

But the rest of the show is very intriguing and enjoyable.

In short, I liked it very much, but at 2 hours and 45 minutes, it was just a bit too long.

 

You sir, have more pragmatism than I. I'm glad you found things to enjoy.

 

While I didn't leave at intermission, I wanted to. Desperately.

[bostonman]

but at 2 hours and 45 minutes, it was just a bit too long.

 

Actually, that sounds right for a note/word-complete production of the original material. But you may be right that for a rethought production like this one, it seems longer than it might be.

 

I have yet to hear opinions from anyone who really loved the rethought "dream ballet." They probably should have just cut that.

[+ BenjaminNicholas]

In my mid-30s, I really don't want to come across as some stodgy old dude who can't accept new versions of things.

 

BUT...

 

This version of OK just felt like change for change's sake. One could argue that Bartlett Sher would have done a lot more with a revival of this, changing just enough to make it feel fresh, without feeling the need to pander or make it completely 'of the moment.'

[RyanDean]

Before last year, I don't think I'd ever seen a full production of Oklahoma! live. But then I happened to see the Daniel Fish OK at StAnn's just a few months after seeing Bill Rauch's production at Oregon Shakespeare Festival (the one that recast the romantic pairings as same-sex couples and featured a transfeminine actor as Aunt Eller, all amidst an emphatically multi-ethnic ensemble). While I found some things to admire in the Daniel Fish production (I quite like the honkytonk orchestrations), it struck me that -- where Rauch appeared to approach the material with huge, open-hearted but thoughtful affection -- Fish seemed to have approached it with cynicism (even contempt). Which made the DanielFish production feel very thin by comparison...