Oklahoma! returns to Broadway! Stripped down to reveal the darker psychological truths at its core, Daniel Fish's production tells a story of a community circling its wagons against an outsider, and the violence of the frontier that shaped America.
Over 75 years after Rodgers & Hammerstein reinvented the American musical, this is Oklahoma! as you've never seen or heard it before - reimagined for the 21st century.
Still, this Oklahoma! deserves credit for out-of-the-box thinking and casting. It earns its exclamation point, and it knows it. That emphatic punctuation mark is the biggest thing on the Playbill. All things considered, there should also be a giant question mark.
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.
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