Chris Hunt | Oklahoma! [Royal National Theatre, London / 1998, a televised version with a slightly different cast presented on US PBS stations in 2003]

 allegiances

by Douglas Messerli

 

Chris Hunt (film director), Trevor Nunn (stage director), Oscar Hammerstein II (book and lyrics, based on the play by Lynn Riggs), Richard Rodgers (music) Oklahoma! [Royal National Theatre, London / 1998, a televised version with a slightly different cast presented on US PBS stations in 2003]

 

In the few weeks since I wrote about the film Oklahoma! I watched a version of the British 1998 revival on television. That production, a generally fine one—with particularly good performances by Hugh Jackman and Josefina Gabrielle, but with weaker secondary character actors than the movie and what I felt was uninspired choreography by Susan Stroman (the good territory folks were even more gestural and less exuberant in her version)—basically supported my feelings about the dark elements of this fable.

     Even though the Trevor Nunn production attempted to portray Jud in a more balanced manner, and actor Shuler Hensley succeeded (compared to the film portrayal by Rod Steiger) in making Jud more likeable, the dangerous aspects of the culture he represents remained embedded in his behavior. Indeed, in this production it became even more apparent that Laurey had chosen to go with him to the social because he was a farmer, and, accordingly, someone more familiar than the self-assured cowboy Curley. 

     What the film had not revealed to me quite as clearly as the play was that, upon asking Laurey to marry him, Curley “converts,” so to speak, promising to become a farmer. The two warring factions—farmer and cowman—demand alliances, it appears, almost like the family kinships of Romeo and Juliet. And the musical even more pointedly reveals that Aunt Eller and friends are ready to break the law—or at least, as she puts it, “bends it a little”—in order to speed love on its course.

 

Los Angeles, November 2003

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (November 2003).