Oklahoma! review

This is – sort of – where it all started. We owe a debt of gratitude to Oklahoma!, the first collaboration between Rodgers and Hammerstein, because musical theatre wouldn’t exist as we know it without it. No West Side Story, no Cabaret, no Cats (well, gratitude only goes so far).

In their partnership, Rodgers and Hammerstein took ideas they had been toying with previously and matured them, creating a work in which songs allow characters to develop, book is integrated into score, and lightness and fluff are dispensed with in favour of meatier stuff.

Even so, Oklahoma! has long been associated with a kind of joyful ‘Americanness’, the lodestar of the golden age of musicals, with its romantic story of Curly the cowboy and his belle Laurey romancing on the great prairies of Oklahoma. There’s comedy from Ado Annie and villainy from Jud Fry, lush songs, box socials and square dances – could it be more wholesome?

In Daniel Fish’s production – mounted in 2019 to celebrate the show’s 75th anniversary – yes, it could. The show barely deserves its jaunty exclamation mark anymore. Everything is stripped to the barest elements and made to feel slightly awkward, slightly out of place. It’s Oklahoma! with a snarl, disassembled and put back together with deep suspicion and disquiet for a divided America.

We’re in a fiercely bright room, a village hall, everything panelled with light wood, trestles dotted around and racks of guns on the wall. In the beginning, everyone is on stage and Arthur Darvill’s Curly – not some soaring hero, but a nasty piece of work, not to mention way too quick to pull his guitar out and start singing – launches into a spare rendition of Oh What a Beautiful Morning.

With new orchestrations by Daniel Kluger that add plucked and pizzicato strings – from a banjo as well as acoustic and steel pedal guitar – to arco harmonies from violins and cellos, the music is made stark and sparse, even when the whole ensemble sings together.

Curly’s relationship with Laurey – a captivating, unsmiling Anoushka Lucas with a voice like gold – doesn’t come across as lush and romantic but slightly dark and dangerous. They’re certainly made for each other. As dislikeable as they are, they still swoon with romance in People Will Say We’re in Love.

They may be in love with each other, but we’re not in love with them. In fact, there is no one to root for here. Curly is a self-satisfied, negging arsehole. His scene with Jud – Poor Jud Is Daid – takes place in complete darkness, Darvill’s voice horribly over-amplified through a handheld mic, then a camera shoved right in Jud’s face, which is projected on to the back wall, his eyes glinting in a scared and terrifying way against the weak light. It’s difficult to see how this song was ever done comically, it’s so cruel.

Patrick Vaill reprises his Jud from the US production, and it feels no coincidence that these men look so similar, their faces up against each like reflections. But we can’t feel too sorry for Jud. He’s no lumbering idiot. Vaill’s is a fascinating performance that shifts and morphs – an image in a kaleidoscope. Just when he gets our sympathy for being so mercilessly disdained by the others, he says or does something horrible. We’re slightly in incel territory, but it’s cleverer than that.

The first time it feels remotely as if we can relax is when Marisha Wallace’s Ado Annie romps her way through I Cain’t Say No, a (literal) barnstormer and a riotous reclaiming of the song with Wallace wearing sexual empowerment on her sleeve.

There are a few other sublime moments that either shatter the tension or crank it right up – and that’s how Fish’s production excels. He foments a deeply uncomfortable feeling throughout. It’s not just the actors in the spotlight but us too, stuck in an oppressive light as bright as it can get, a golden haze to an extreme degree. It gives everything a washed-out feel. There’s nowhere to hide, no sense of intimacy, just carnality. Just as extreme are moments of pitch-black – it’s bare and brutal.

That’s even true of the romance in the show. It’s been dubbed ‘sexy Oklahoma!’, but it’s more like horny Oklahoma!. Everyone is randy all the time.

Every line and every act is held up and inspected, performed with a kind of grim deliberation, under Aunt Eller’s watchful eyes (an ever-glorious Liza Sadovy). Annie and Ali Hakim engage in long, sloppy kisses; there are loud boots stamping on the bare boards and terrifying gunshots. We don’t get subtle transitions in Scott Zielinski’s lighting; instead, it’s all or nothing: intense midsummer glare or pitch black.

It’s not quite that Fish holds the show at arm’s length, but he and the cast certainly refuse to engage with it on its original terms. It’s a fascinating act of taking every line and every song and seeing how, merely by gesture and expression, all meaning can be changed.

The final minutes are especially shattering, a breaking of the tension that has refused to dissipate in the bright light. But the production succeeds, really, in a number of stunning sequences and images rather than as a whole. 

This isn’t simply dusting off a classic or giving it a spit and polish, it’s a complete dismantling of the show. It’s hard not to long for the good cheer we’re all so used to – it makes us feel, still, but in a different way. Uncomfortable, mostly. 

When the final number comes – "Ooooooklahoma where the wind comes sweepin’ down the plain" – there’s no joy. It’s a deeply discomfiting moment, the climax of a production that starts with community and ends with complicity, twisting those two strands more and more tightly together until they can’t be undone.