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.
This is not a piece of theater that allows you to sit back and be entertained. Fish demands almost as much from the people in the audience as he does from his cast, forcing them to really listen for lines delivered in near whispers, or reorient when the show is plunged into total blackness. Always a threat of violence lurks. 'Country is changing, got to change with it,' Curly says, not long before the rousing title song ends the show. But from the driven, verging on angry way it's sung, the message is clear. That change will come at a price.
Daunno, who plays his guitar a good bit, and Jones sing out with gusto and swap insults not far from the level of Benedick and Beatrice in William Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing. Testa has fun with Aunt Eller's orneriness and adds to the evening's singing (in a traditionally non-singing role). Special praise has to be aimed the way of Ali Stroker, who's taken on the prairie-promiscuous Ado Annie. She bounds about with fervor in a wheel chair. It may be that her countrified version of 'I Cain't Say No' is the highest of the highlights on display. James Davis comes purty close with his sung and danced 'Everything's Up to Date in Kansas City.' Will Brill doesn't lift his voice in song much, but he nails down the meddling peddler well enough, particularly on his 'mind your own business' line.
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