Review
Excerpts
UCI’S
‘OKLAHOMA!’ A WORK OF ART. …No musty museum
piece[but] an Oklahoma! with the dust blown off, the cobwebs
removed and the full panorama of story and score brought out
in the open, a great achievement… a work of art in all
its full and proper glory.” --Irvine World News
“Wildly
entertaining with beautiful musical numbers and dancing, that
will keep the audience either completely on the edge of their
seats or on the floor with teary-eyed, stomach-aching laughter.”
-- New University
“A
CHARMING, BUOYANT AND REFRESHING REVIVAL. Cohen finds much social
import in the work...[but] fortunately directs the production
as just what it is - a joyous, grand musical. Cohen’s
staging is marvelous, full of vaudeville shtick and ripe with
larger-than-life performances. There is a naiveté about
these characters that doesn’t exist in America or anywhere
else today and was a great morale booster in 1943. That feeling
is still refreshing in our own dark world, and Cohen and McKayle
capture it beautifully. In Cohen’s brisk tempos, and through
Dennis Castellano’s delicious Broadway pitband musical
direction, the proceedings breathe with crackling life.”
-- Los Angeles Times
“This
UCI staging proved once and for all that Rodgers & Hammerstein’s
groundbreaking 1943 show is the great American musical.”
-- Orange County Register
“A
vibrant version of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s darkly hued
American Musical.” “Okie” Award, year-end
wrap-up, --OC Weekly
Director’s
program note
I
wonder if it’s wholly irrelevant that the stressed syllable
of “Oklahoma” - a syllable that, in the title song
of our show, also carries the highest and longest note - is
“home.” Would we have so embraced this song - or
the musical it titles - for fifty years if it were about “West
VirGIIIIIN-ya?” Or “CaliFOOOOORN-ya?” I don’t
think so. There’s certainly something homespun about Oklahoma!
And homely too, perhaps. But there’s also, in it, a strong
resonance of an our American HOME, and the planting of American
roots.
I have called Oklahoma! America’s national opera. Its
stature can hardly be in question: the American Drama League,
earlier this year, ranked Oklahoma! as the most important musical
theatre work of the century. Oklahoma! inaugurated not only
the legendary collaboration of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein
II (Carousel, South Pacific, The King and I, The Sound of Music),
but also what we now call the “golden age” of American
musicals that filled U.S. theatres for an entire generation
- up through Fiddler on the Roof by most accounts - and continues
to fill them in modern revivals from Broadway to Capetown to
Tokyo and beyond. And Oklahoma’s near-seamless integration
of serious drama (from Lynn Rigg’s Green Grow the Lilacs,
the source play), serious ballet (in the original choreographic
notions of Agnes de Mille) and the singing and dancing of established
musical comedy created a theatrical form that remains America’s
greatest contribution to world drama.
And yet my own admiration for Oklahoma! extends far beyond its
soaring score, heartfelt lyrics, and formal innovations. First,
to its true progenitor, the nearly-forgotten Lynn Riggs, whose
centennial we celebrate this year. While still in his twenties,
Riggs was ranked with Eugene O’Neill, particularly for
his rough-textured regional realism: “In Lynn Riggs our
American theatre has found a poet who can bring to it an authentic
note of ecstasy and passion,” claimed an esteemed critic.
It is to Riggs’ Green Grow the Lilacs (1931) that we owe
the entire story, all the characters (save Will Parker), and
almost all of the spoken dialogue of Oklahoma! Even fragments
of Rigg’s stage directions found their way into Hammerstein’s
lyrics: “Mr. Riggs’ play is the wellspring of almost
all that is good in Oklahoma!” Hammerstein admitted. “I
kept most of the lines of the original play without making any
changes in them for the simple reason that they could not be
improved upon.”
Detesting Broadway’s conventions, Riggs sought to create,
as he put it, “a kind of truth about people who happen
to be living in Oklahoma.... They are voiceless, tongueless.
Gamblers, traders, vagabonds, adventurers, daredevils, fools.
Men disdainful of the settled, the admired, the regular ways
of life. Men on the move. Men fleeing from a critical world
and their own eyes. Pioneers, eaten people." When we look
beyond the jollity of Oklahoma!’s merrier moments, we
can see the hardworking, hardliving, and often agonizing rural
life (“eaten people!”) of territorial America.
But
there was more than merriment on Rodgers and Hammerstein’s
minds as well, certainly in 1942-43 when Oklahoma! was first
written and put into production. These were, of course, the
darkest years of World War II and the Nazi holocaust: to most
Jews of Rodgers’ and Hammerstein’s (and my own parents’)
generation, America was a promised land. For many of them, frankly,
it was THE promised land. To be able to sing “We know
we belong to the land, and the land we belong to is grand,”
was hardly a given fact for many people, and many peoples, in
1943. Sadly, it is hardly a given fact in many parts of the
world today.
Oklahoma
territory was settled in a free-for-all land rush, and Oklahoma!
is a musical drama about the assimilation of its settlers into
a collective statehood and brotherhood. “The farmer and
the cowboy should be friends,” sings Aunt Eller, if the
American dream is to succeed. But in a somewhat overlooked lyric,
Ike adds this phrase:
“And
when this territory is a state
And j’ines the union just like all the others,
The farmer and the cowman and the merchant
Must all behave theirsel’s and act like brothers.”
We were not all farmers and cowboys, even in Oklahoma. Of course
the “merchant” in this play is Ali Hakim. It’s
the role that Lee Strasberg played in the original Riggs version
and Joseph Buloff in the musical: both of them got their start
in New York’s Yiddish theatre. Ali’s last name (which
comes from the Yiddish “hacham” or “clever
guy”) was, however, original to Hammerstein’s version,
and Hammerstein himself jokingly portrayed the character privately
at Oklahoma!’s first anniversary party as “Ali Hakimstein.”
Ali Hakim represents a third petitioner for inclusion in the
American dream. Twisted Jud Fry, in whose shadow we might possibly
see a future Timothy McVeigh, represents a fourth. And there
are many others, but, of course this is only a play.
Much
as we all may go along with Ike’s advice that we “behave
oursel’s and act like brothers,” the sad reality
is that our differing interpretations of those counsels makes
brotherhood problematical, at best, in much of the world today.
Homilies won’t by themselves suffice. But theatrical engagement,
and musical theatre in particular, can be an immensely powerful
cultural force, precisely because it works on our unconscious
minds, long lingering in our memories and dreams. Maybe that’s
why, at this time in our lives, we - your directors, none of
whose ancesters came to this country on the Mayflower - have
thought to “come home” to Oklahoma this end-of-century
season.
See:
Andrea Most, “We Know We Belong to the Land” PMLA
January 1998, and Phillis Cole Braunlich, Haunted by Home: the
Life and Letters of Lynn Riggs, Oklahoma University Press, 1988.
