Bawdy, Bloody, Brilliant: Oklahoma! Revival Analysis

Warning: Spoilers for the Oklahoma! revival tour ahead and discussion of topics such as suicide, gun violence, and predatory behaviors

The house was around half-capacity as the actors assumed their places on the stage for the first time. After the first two gunshots went off midway through the first act, I saw at least two companies hastily make their way to the exit. After we returned from intermission, several seats that had been filled for the first act were now vacant. And after a couple or two left at different points during the second act, I was shocked to see that yet another few patrons walked out five minutes before the show ended.

This production, as far as I could tell, made a crucial mistake. For a reimagining as dark, visceral, and at times, downright frightening as this, I wanted to see trigger warnings on the website before you bought your tickets, on the doors before you enter the theatre, in the playbills for your pre-show perusal, in the announcements before the show began. I saw none of these, save an unnecessary pre-show message that reminded us no real guns or ammunition were ever utilized in this production. At no point did I even see a rating, like PG-13 or 16+. This decision on their part was irresponsible and potentially dangerous for their patrons, and I hold this against both the tour and Broadway Dallas for not being amply transparent about the content of this show, especially since it is often viewed as “safe ground”, considering it is a 1940’s Rodgers and Hammerstein Golden Age musical.

At the end of the day, however, the stark contrast between this gut-wrenching revival and the buoyant original production without ever changing a word of the original text proves that this show never should have been considered “safe ground”. The original production used the exact same script, but stifled itself with fluff: fun dances, colorful costumes, and minimal exploration into the moral ambiguity of each individual. This production, however, strips away the fluff to clearly expose its sinister foundations, and as Will Parker sings in “Kansas City”, “they went about as fur as they could go”. The result was a bawdy, bloody, and brilliant revival I absolutely adored.

I had precious few reservations regarding this production, so I will begin there. When you entered the theatre, the stage was set as a country potluck, with picnic tables aligned in an irregularly cubicle space. The flats had no diagonal whatsoever; you felt like you were looking into a box. And with both the stage right and left walls covered in guns, the overall aesthetic was borderline unsettling. The first 30 minutes of the show were staged completely within the context of this potluck, with all of the actors sharing the stage at the same time. Personally, I found the rules of this staging hard to follow: are all of the characters present the entire time? Are you supposed to ignore them? Is the whole thing really taking place at this potluck, or is it simply an evocative, minimalistic staging approach? Why is Laurey talking to Aunt Eller about how much Jud scares her when he’s sitting right behind her, staring them both down with a cold, hardened expression? At intermission, I was reminded that this was likely the remnants of the revival’s original staging in the round. At the revival’s Broadway home, The Circle in the Square, when the actors were sitting at their picnic tables, they were probably watching the action with the audience just behind them. In the context of this knowledge, the staging made more sense, but I wished they had altered it to better fit a proscenium. It also resulted in annoyingly static staging for the better half of the first act: there was a lot of sitting and talking, with very little variation or stagecraft to engage me. That is, until the lights went out completely. But I will get to that later. My last key problem with this production was that it was taken out of the context of the early 1900s and clumsily dropped into the present day. This decision made characters like Ado Annie non-sensical to me. She sings a song called “I Cain’t Say No” where she bemoans the fact that she is unable to turn down the advances of a man: though the song only refers to making out, it’s hard to believe that, especially within a modern context, she is not sexually active. Therefore, when a travelling peddler asks her to sleep with him and she assumes this will come with a marriage proposal because how could it not, her character becomes a messy contradiction of the experienced and the naive that I found difficult to decipher. Additionally, when Curly tells Laurey how Oklahoma is going to become a state and join the Union, I again found myself wondering, what am I supposed to buy into? Is the modern-day setting supposed to be a metaphor or a literal time transplant? If it’s a metaphor, what is that metaphor supposed to be? If it’s literal, what do I make of these lines? My experience as both a theatre maker and theatre patron has taught me that audiences are willing to suspend their disbelief and accept whatever rules the production lays out for them, but when the rules are not clearly defined, it becomes confusing.

However, when a revival is such a bold reimagining of a classic work, it goes without saying that some ideas will work better than others. But so many of the concepts in this show were absolutely brilliant. In my opinion, the first moment of jaw-dropping staging and theatricality was when Curly went to visit Jud in his shed to try to convince him to hang himself. The entire scene was played in complete darkness. You could not see a thing until the song “Poor Jud is Daid” began. The rest of the scene was played with one spotlight shining dimly over the two men, making the first, very sudden and incredibly loud gunshot (into the air) absolutely terrifying. This staging tactic was employed again in the second act, to even greater effect. When Jud walked Laurey home after the box social, the lights went out and they had a very tense encounter where Jud asked Laurey why she was careful to never be caught alone with him. Then, likely for a solid thirty seconds, you could hear them making out in complete darkness. At some point, you could also a hear the clink of a belt buckle (though there was no way to tell if the belt was Jud’s or Laurey’s, nor who took off the belt). It became clear that at some point a boundary had been crossed, as Laurey became frightened and yelled at Jud to leave her. This choice was fascinating because, traditionally, Jud makes an advance on Laurey and she immediately reprimands him; however, the way it was staged in this production, it was hard to believe the entire encounter was non-consensual. It also made the fact that you couldn’t see what Jud did to spook Laurey stomach-dropping and horrifying. Then, after Laurey found Curly to tell him what happened, he showed no concern for her experience and began to kiss her ferociously and greedily. Later, when Jud asks to kiss the bride at Laurey and Curly’s wedding, Laurey obviously participates in the kiss. All of these dynamics made the Laurey/Curly/Judd love triangle infinitely more interesting and disturbing. In all honesty, I didn’t like any of them, but that made me love the ingenuity of the show all the more!

Finally, the greatest moment of the show was the only true change to the original production, though none of the text was altered. In the original, Judd and Curly get in a knife fight at Curly and Laurey’s wedding, ending in Judd falling on his own knife and the town putting together a makeshift court to pardon Curly on account of self-defense. This production, however, inherently changed the final actions of the play in favor of a darker, and in my opinion, more thrilling, approach. In the revival, Judd gives Curly a gun as a wedding present. After placing it in Curly’s hand, Judd stands back, seemingly inviting Curly to shoot him. After a dead silent few moments where the mounting tension was almost unbearable, Curly pulled the trigger, splattering himself and his wife’s faces and white wedding clothes in Judd’s blood as Judd falls to the ground. Following this very obvious murder, the town rallies together to prove before the biased, wedding-guest judge that Curly acted in self-defense, despite the fact that they all just witnessed the murder and knew Judd had made no physical advance toward Laurey or Curly. The one dissenting voice is shut down by Aunt Eller and the judge, and Curly is coached by the judge into proclaiming he acted out of self-defense. The whole company then returns to the festivities, dancing and singing the number “Oklahoma!” with the blood-splattered bride and groom. It was thoroughly chilling and utterly brilliant.

This ending did make me ponder, however, if Rodgers and Hammerstein themselves would have been pleased with this explicit change of their original material. I can’t help but think that, as a writer myself, I would have serious misgivings if someone changed the climax of my play completely to fit a new vision. However, Rodgers and Hammerstein passed away a long time ago now, and it is a true testament to their material that it is still worth being revived and applied to today. Either way, I believe this revival is such a vast improvement on the traditionalist vision of this musical and, for the most part, it stayed truer to the source material than the original production itself by giving the dark moments their due.

The production’s next stop is Bass Hall, and I highly recommend this revival to anyone interested in a fresh, edgy take on this well-loved musical. If you would prefer an enjoyable, light-hearted, and traditional night at the theatre, however, it would probably be just as well for you to pop some popcorn and revisit the 1955 movie.

Originally published June 11, 2022