Review Roundup: What Did the Critics Make of the OKLAHOMA! West End Transfer?

OKLAHOMA! tells a story of a community banding together against an outsider, and the frontier life that shaped America. Seventy-five years after Rodgers & Hammerstein reinvented the American musical, this visionary production is funny and sexy, provocative and probing, without changing a word of the text.

Winner of the Tony Award and WhatsOnStage Award for Best Musical Revival and the Evening Standard Theatre Award for Best Musical, this bold new version features all of the classic songs, including Oh! What a Beautiful Mornin’ and I Cain’t Say No, re-orchestrated and reimagined for the 21st century. So what did the critics think?

Photo Credit: Marc Brenner

Laura Jones, BroadwayWorld: In previous incarnations, Jud (Patrick Vaill) is depicted as a menacing, dangerous man, and while he is still that, this Jud offers a deeper insight into the character. He's more vulnerable and, for possibly the first time, you feel some sort of sympathy for him. Vaill, who has been with Fish's production since its conception, portrays him as a misunderstood outsider, constantly battling his inner demons which makes the ending all the more devastating.

Nick Curtis, Evening Standard: Believe the hype. Daniel Fish’s radical staging of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Western musical from 1943 is utterly thrilling. Though the music is as gorgeous as ever, this version strips away many of the folksy, hokey accretions the show has acquired over the years and finds something much darker and more powerful.

Xi Ye, Everything Theatre: The darker elements of the musical are spaced out with moments of relief, brought about by the subplot and the general horniness of the entire cast. The love triangle among Ado Annie (Georgina Onuorah), Will Parker (James Patrick Davis) and Ali Hakim (Stavros Demetraki) is a funfest of sexual desires in a literal sense. There is hardly a moment that these three can keep their hands off each other. The trio are a menace to the audience sitting in the front row, who are the victims of winks, flirtations and also splashes of water.

Clive Davis, The Times: This is no ordinary revival. Daniel Fish’s Tony award-winning production, which crossed the Atlantic to the Young Vic last year and now gets an upgrade to a traditional proscenium arch, is just the kind of experiment to set musical lovers at each other’s throats. Some will praise it as an audaciously grungy reinvention; others will call it sacrilege.

Alice Saville, TimeOut: With sex so firmly in the foreground, everything about this story shifts. In traditional productions, boy-crazy farm girl Ado Annie is pure comic relief. When she sings ‘I'm just a girl who can't say no!’, it's a straightforward excuse for some jolly old-timey slut-shaming. But here, Georgina Onuorah plays an Annie whose desires can't be so easily laughed at: she tenderly cradles her more prim and proper friend Laurey (Anoushka Lucas) in her arms as she sings about loving that's ‘sweeter than cream’, centimetres away from a kiss. And this Laurey is rapt, not judgemental.

Dave Fargnoli, The Stage: Approaching the text with uncompromising clarity, director Fish intentionally excises much of the lightness from the show, excavating unspoken themes of sexual violence and criminal complicity along the way. Here, the unsettling number Pore Jud is Daid becomes a coercive act of emotional abuse. The closing wedding sequence has distinct echoes of Tarantino with its blood-splattered bridal party and deadpan dialogue.

Average Rating: 83.3%

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