Theatre: Rodgers & Hammerstein's Oklahoma! (2022)

•  Show: Rodgers & Hammerstein's Oklahoma!
• Venue: Ahmanson Theatre

I just saw The Bard Summerscape production of Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! I was really excited to see it because the promotions were highlighting a “colorful” cast and I wanted to see how that dynamic would play into the original story. It turned out to be awful. 

 The stage was set up like a country music hall. Several picnic tables with paper tablecloths, set with six packs of beer, and a few crock pots, one table with a pile of corn ears and a few stainless-steel bowls. The band set behind the tables in full view on the stage. The standing backdrop was covered by the blown-up image of a house and possibly a tractor in a field of grain in beige tones. There were invisible doors built in for actors and stagehands to enter and exit the stage. Not sure what they're going for, but at this point, I was open to a new interpretation. 

I was excited when it started immediately with Oh What a Beautiful Morning, which was arranged to be a country song. That’s different. Curly strolled around the set with a guitar playing solo. All the music was arranged differently than the original musical. The songs I heard had a tinge of foreboding. Even Surrey with a Fringe On Top, which is normally a very happy, hopeful song, felt uncertain and possibly sad. Not sure why, but maybe in keeping with the stage being set up like a music hall, at different points the characters would pull out a microphone and start singing into it as if on their own personal stage. Sometimes the stage lights even changed so it turned into a mini concert. 

All the characters were sexualized. I like the reimagined Ado Annie. In the movies she is depicted as silly and stupid. This Annie was more deliberate. Will Parker spanked himself and incorporated a lot of pelvic movements into his lines. Aunt Eller gave off some bisexual vibes. Jud was Manson-esque creepy. Although the acting and dialogue didn't give a clear sense of the story, yet, I was still in at this point. 

Where I started to separate from this production, was the number Many a New Day (I think) when the women characters start shucking corn. It was so messy and wasteful. They angrily shucked the corn and threw the husks around the stage. As if in an outrage, they broke the ears in half and chucked them into a big cooking pot. I didn’t see the point of their anger. I don’t know why they would want to be so messy with the corn husks. Corn silk is a pain to clean up. The whole scene seemed pointless. 

I held on until suddenly the lights dropped, plunging us all into theater darkness to experience the conversation between Curly and Judd in the smokehouse, which was originally written as troublesome scene, but listening to two men exchange that dialogue in this production, it became ominous and scary. Then as they sang Poor Jud is Daid, I was totally pulled out of the story with the switch from darkness to night vision camera close-ups projected onto the backdrop. Blair Witch, anyone?

I didn’t like that you had no sense of location. Where was this story taking place? Where was it going?

I didn’t like that the music was foreboding. 

I didn’t like the corn shucking.

I didn’t the smokehouse scene. 

Maybe I’ve got this all wrong, but the original Oklahoma! was full of hope. Hope for a future statehood. Hope for love. Hope for the American dream. Yes, there are dark parts to the original story, but it is the contrast of the darkness to the hopefulness that makes Oklahoma not a silly, happy-go-lucky play, but a dynamic musical that through song and movement attempted to sum up the good, bad and gray areas of life in the U.S. territories. 

This version I’m going to call Deconstructed Oklahoma? On Bath Salts.  You don’t know where you’re at. You don’t know where you’re going. You don’t know why everyone is so mad and so horny. The lights and colors change suddenly all the time, even to complete darkness. And then suddenly, you stare into extreme close-up faces. 

I saw this show with my best friend who had never seen Oklahoma! in any form and didn’t know the story. At the intermission I asked him if he had an idea about the story, the setting and what the characters were planning to do. He kind of had a clue but summed it up as a “fever dream.” We made up our minds to leave. I always say if you don’t like a movie or a TV show to turn it off. Don’t waste your life. This was the first time I exercised that philosophy in a theater.