Oklahoma!
Music by Richard Rodgers
Book and lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II
Based on the play Green GrowThe Lilacs by Lynn Riggs
Directed by Jeremy Sams
Designed by Robert Jones
Matt Cole- choreographer
Nigel Lilley- MD & dance arrangements
Chichester Festival Theatre
Saturday 31st August 2019, 14.30
CAST:
Josie Lawrence – Aunt Eller
Hyoie O’Grady – Curly
Amara Okereke – Laurey
Scott Karim – Ali Hakim, a peddler
Emmanuel Kojo – Jud Fry, a hired hand
Issac Gryn – Will Parker
Bronté Barbé – Ado Annie Carnes
Nicholas Colicos- Andrew Carnes, Annie’s Dad and judge
Emily Langham – Gertie Cummings
Christopher Dickens – Cord Elam
ensemble:
Michelle Andrews – ensemble / Dorothy
Georgie Ashford – ensemble / Ellen
Lindsay Atherton – ensemble/ Virginia
Imogen Bailey – ensemble / Kate
Paige Fenton -ensemble / Armenia
Bethany Huckle -ensemble / Vivian
Anna Woodside -ensemble / Sylvie
Jeremy Batt – ensemble / Slim
Alex Christian – Dance captain / ensemble / Sam
Alyn Hawke -ensemble / Ike
Michael Lin – ensemble/ Joe
Rory Shafford -ensemble / Mike
Jak Skelly – ensemble / Fred
Rhys West -ensemble / Tom
Nigel Lilley conducts a 14 piece orchestra.
Then … the 1943 original production
Oh, how my mum loved Oklahoma!. She saw the film many times and sang the main songs in the kitchen. Not as much as Seven Brides For Seven Brothers maybe, but close. I don’t think I ever saw a production of the stage musical (originally 1943) and the film is hazy (1955), though it was filmed in ultra-wide Todd-AO and a niggling memory of a huge screen comes back. Chichester Festival Theatre must be the best stage in the country for big musicals and they use it all right to the back which is what made me think of Todd-AO widescreen. The set as ever at Chichester is fabulous … we loved the corn surrounding the stage, though as we were in the front row, it was fortunately not as tall as an elephant’s eye.
Four of the songs: Oh, What A Beautiful Morning, The Surrey With The Fringe On Top, People Will Say We’re In Love and Oklahoma! are in the 1950s collective memory. The title track was later chosen as the state song of Oklahoma too. Musical soundtracks dominated both the LP charts (the film soundtrack was #1 in the USA and in the UK) , and the leading songs dominated the BBC Light Programme (in cover versions).
The Surrey With The Fringe On Top: Hyoie O’Grady as Curly, Josie Lawrence as Aunt Eller
Usually musical songs divide into very story specific and more general, with the more general lyrics getting into the public consciousness, but Surrey With The Fringe On Top is an exception. It’s a highly specific and odd lyric but the melody is so strong and it was the image on the film posters and records. The fourth of Capitol’s original soundtrack UK EPs led with Many A New Day which doesn’t leap out in my memory.
The plot: Curly (Hyoie O’Grady) and Laurey (Amara Okereke) have the standard love relationship where both deny it for most of the story. Their relationship is tenderly overseen by Aunt Eller (Josie Lawrence). Jud Fry, the dodgy hired hand has long fancied Laurey. Gertie (Emily Langham) holds a torch for Curly and has a terrible irritating laugh.
Gertie (Annie Langham) leads a dance
The parallel story has Ado Annie (Bronté Barbé), the girl who can’t say no, pursued by the rodeo rope champion, Will Parker (Isaac Gryn). He can only be married to her if he produces $50 to her dad, a farmer and Judge, Andrew (Nicholas Colicos).
Isaac Grynn as Will Parker, Bronté Barbé as Ado Annie
Annie wants to marry whoever the last male was who kissed her and is after the Persian peddlar, Ali Hakim (Scott Karim). Dad has a shotgun ever at the ready and Ali is terrified of being forced to marry her – he’s only after a quickie. Rodgers and Hammerstein had some clout – the Hays Office Motion Picture Code specifically forbad comedy references to farmers’ daughters and travelling salesmen, and that is Annie and Ali Hakim. The Hays Office never extended to the stage and by the time they came to make the movie, the story was a popular well-established fait accompli.
It all culminates in an auction at the box social, an annual beanfeast where Jud and Curly compete to buy Laurey’s food hamper, and hopefully with it, her affection. Josie Lawrence comes to the fore as the auctioneer. A marvellous comic performance.
Josie Lawrence as Aunt Eller the auctioneer
So what is a box social?
BOX SOCIAL (WIKIPEDIA):
Women decorate a cardboard box and fill it with a lunch or dinner for two. The men bid on the women’s boxes anticipating a meal with the woman whose box it is. Generally the boxes are anonymous, so the men don’t know which woman belongs to which box, nor what the box contains, the mystery and sometimes humorous results adding to the fun. However, it is not unknown for a young woman to surreptitiously drop hints to a favored man indicating which box is hers, as a way of “rigging” the results (and avoiding potentially less desirable company).
Just the three: Hyoie O’Grady as Curly, Amara Okereke as Laurey, Josie Lawrence as Aunt Eller
The musical has unusual aspects. First it starts out without a big production number, just the three; Curly (who starts singing Oh, What A Beautiful Morning off stage), Aunt Eller and Laurey. The expected musical chorus is something we have to wait a while for – then it’s only the men initially.
That’s how big Chichester’s stage is: Josie Lawrence as Aunt Eller centre with gun
Then it has a dark side. Curly is jealous that Jud will be driving Laurey to the fair. Laurey is scared of Jud who tends to linger under her window looking up. Curly goes to Jud’s shack, and points out a rope and suggests that if Jud hanged himself then people would be nice about him at the funeral. They sing Pore Jud Is Daid. We should get a touch of sympathy with Jud when he then sings Lonely Room.
Laurey’s fear of Jud comes out when she fires him after the box social, and tells him to get off the farm.
The scene at the shack: Emmanuel Kojo as Jud, Hyoie O’Grady as Curly
The plot is surprisingly lighter on songs after the interval, so more play-like. The ending is definitely non-standard musical. Curly and Laurey get married but a drunken Jud turns up at the wedding … shades of Lorna Doone, though it’s Curly he’s after. He goes for Curly with a knife and in the fight falls onto it himself and is carried off to die. A hastily-convened court (what with Annie’s dad being a judge) finds Curly not guilty of murder and off they go. Hardly the usual fun. The play Rodgers and Hammerstein based the musical on, Green GrowThe Lilacs, didn’t even cement that happy ending. (Nor does the play have the Will / Ado Annie subplot).
The wedding: Nicholas Colicos as Judge Andrew, Josie Lawrence as Aunt Eller, Amara Okereke as Laurey, Hyoie O’Grady as Curly,
Jud Fry is the hired hand, tough, addicted to mild porn pictures (feelthy pictures bought from Ali), and both sexually aggressive and literally murderous. He has the two songs and Emmanuel Kojo sang them in a fine baritone. He was well-muscled and ideal physically- Rod Steiger played the part in the film. He looks tough and threatening … Kojo was the boxer in Girl From The North Country, though he was understudied the night we saw it.
The trouble for me was that he was the only black male in the entire cast. Amara Okereke as Laurey is Afro-Caribbean, which is neither here nor there in the context. Scott Karim is Middle-Eastern ethnically, but he’s quite apart in a sympathetic clown role. The rest of the cast are white.
So Jud was played by a black actor and the character was sexually aggressive and violent. That would have gone down well with D.W. Griffith and the Ku Klux Klan in the film Birth of A Nation and probably still in the Deep South in 1943 or 1955. For me, seeing him as the only black face, surrounded by disapproving male white faces, playing the evil predator role, it was an “Ouch!” My test is ‘would I be embarrassed if I was watching with a black friend’ and the answer is yes.
Emmanuel Kojo as Jud Fry
OK, you can also say that it was truly “colour blind” ignoring any possibility of a racist interpretation, and Emmanuel Kojo is perfect for the role, but if I had cast it, I would have wanted to offset any impression of one black guy surrounded by opposing white guys, by having at least two or three black dancers in the cowboy ensemble. Chichester tends to very white in cast and audience. I suppose it’s a contrast to London where white actors are becoming an endangered species.
Scott Karim as Ali Hakim and Bronté Barbé as Ado Annie
Scott Karim is Ali Hakim the itinerant peddler, and gives us, as scripted, an accurate Persian (i.e. Farsi) accent, not an Arabic or Indian one which most actors would try to get away with. In musicals, the cast are specialists and usually new too me, while in drama, I’ve seen most on stage before. Scott Karim is mainstream drama, and the peddler is the major comic role. Bronté Barbé as Ado Annie plays the comedy beautifully with him.
Reading the programme we were amazed to find that this is Isaac Gryn’s first major role. Chichester does find the new young stars. Isaac Gryn excels as a dancer, rope twirler, acrobat, and as an actor and singer. Hyoie O’Grady as Curly hasn’t done much before either. Amara Okereke is a wonderful Laurey, bringing out the confused but feisty young girl, afraid of Jud, keen on Curly. So that’s three young, comparatively new actors in leading roles. Jeremy Sams as a director excels in finding new talent and giving them the chance to play leads as in Half A Sixpence .
The voice and dialect coach, Helen Ashton, deserves acclaim – they all do excellent Shitkicker Oklahoma.
The choreography is powerful …
The choreography is powerful. They credit the original choreography by Agnes de Mille as well as Matt Cole. The dancing is so muscular – Isaac Gryn enters with a somersault, there’s lots of lifting and carrying, it really does feel strong and Western. The “dream ballet” is listed in the original. This is Laurey’s Freudian dream of cowboys as horses and demon women and a wedding. Stunning in concept and execution here.
The curtain call
Set design 5? Singing? 5 Dancing and choreography? 5 Acting 5? I couldn’t see anything to take it below that.
*****
AN ASIDE: THE HISTORY
The song: Oklahoma!
The story takes place just as Oklahoma achieves statehood in 1907. The area moved on maps in 1890 from “Indian Territory” to “Oklahoma Territory” then on to plain Oklahoma in 1907. The programme has an essay on what “Indian Territory” meant. This is where around forty Native American tribes were forced to move to so that white settlers could take their ancestral lands elsewhere. It was supposed to be a reserve for them, carved out between Texas and Kansas, but then white settlers moved in there too. I smiled at one review that thought the cast all carried guns because they were in “Indian territory (with a small t)” or maybe they should have typed “Injun territory.” Not so. These were settled tribes, not hostiles in the Wild West a few decades earlier. The name Oklahoma is from two Choctaw words: okla and humma meaning ‘red people.’ i.e. Native Americans. So Oklahoma was basically ‘Indian Territoty’ but in Choctaw.
The songs also reference the “range war” conflict in the pioneer period between cowboys / cattlemen who wanted to be able to let their cattle range freely, and the farmers who wanted to fence their land … and had to fence their land to be able to claim it. Curly and Will are cowboys who’ll have to settle down and become farmers. A lifestyle change is illustrated on the “freedom to roam” spectrum from Ali the peddler to cowboys to farmers.
The musical came in 1943 just three years after the film version of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. That describes the trek of the Okies from Oklahoma to California after the catastrophic dust bowl destroyed their farms, which were re-possessed by banks, already in trouble after the 1929 Crash. Oklahoma had been settled during an unusually wet couple of decades and farming removed the top soil so that when dry periods returned, it blew away. I found that interesting … were Rodgers and Hammerstein trying to raise the image of Oklahoma with the magnificently stirring title song? Were they being ironic?
COMPARISONS
I spent a few happy minutes checking out versions of the title song on the iTunes Store. The 1943 and 1955 sound quite weedy to me, with the 1998 National Theatre production having more punch … which may be recording techniques. As it stands in my memory, Chichester 2019 sounded best of the lot.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAID
4 star
Mark Lawson, The Guardian ****
Although it begins with someone hymning a “beautiful mornin’”, Oklahoma! becomes a surprisingly dark evenin’ in the right hands – which it’s found in a revival by Jeremy Sams that perfectly executes its jolly and sombre elements.
Domenic Cavendish, Telegraph ****
Here are glorious songs – courtesy of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II in their first collaboration – that transport you to wide open spaces where romance burgeons amid the fertile corn, lungs are lusty, sinews strong. There’s more thundering hoofing in Chichester than you’d get in a safari park.
Alex Wood, What’s On Stage ****
But the real winner is Matt Cole’s choreography, channelling all the best bits of Agnes de Mille. Two stand-out showstoppers – “Dream Ballet” and “The Farmer and The Cowman” – deliciously sandwich the interval, while Isaac Gryn delivers a masterclass in lassoing in “Kansas City”. Euphoria, humour and tension all coexist as the piece spirals towards a sad climax.
Chris Omaweng, London Theatre ****
3 star
Nick Curtis, Standard ***
Bella Todd, The Stage ***
The production feels unresponsive to the racial tension its apparently colour-blind casting evokes. Stereotypes of black masculinity are ignited without being interrogated – in the ‘dream ballet’, the costume design for which contrasts virginal white and raunchy black, Jud ravishes Laurey before pushing Curly into the pit in a burst of hellish flames. The spectre of lynching hovers around Jud’s death, yet the direction assuages Curly and his community of responsibility as rapidly as the kangaroo court.
LINKS ON THIS BLOG
JEREMY SAMS
Half A Sixpence, Chichester 2016
Monsieur Populaire, Bath 2015 (Translator & director)
A Damsel in Distress, Chichester 2015 (book)
The Rehearsal, Chichester 2015 (Translator & director)
SCOTT KARIM
The Country Wife, Chichester 2018
Young Marx by Richard Bean & Clive Coleman, Bridge Theatre 2017
Imogen (Cymbeline Renamed), Globe 2016
The Merchant of Venice, Globe 2015
Othello, National Theatre, 2013
Four blockbuster songs. Not bad for a musical, where one song is generally enough. ‘Oh what a beautiful morning’ is a standard, and the rest go close. Maybe the record is Sound of music, where all but one of the songs are known by nearly everyone.
As always, I wish I could go to one of these productions.
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For Rodgers and Hammerstein, I guess Sound of Music is the one, but overall on musicals, West Side Story would be my benchmark. However, Bernstein’s songs are intrinsically ‘more modern’ in some way.
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