"NO LEGS NO JOKES NO CHANCE"

The story’s “second bananas”: lusty Ado Annie (Ali Stroker) and deliciously dim Will Parker (James Davis). These iconic characters were added to create the original Oklahoma!, a musical adaptation of Lynn Riggs’s 1930 play, “Green Grow the Lilacs.” (c) Little Fang Photo

If the critic who panned the first Oklahoma! in 1942 for its lack of “legs and jokes” saw Daniel Fish’s version, he’d have to come up with a different zinger. Without changing a word, the Tony Award-winning revival, ending its triumphant run at Broadway’s Circle in the Square theayter on January 19, exposes repression’s backlash, presents a gender dynamic in which women are both objectified and hyper-sexual creatures, and is a bona fide barrel of laughs. Looking over Rodgers and Hammerstein’s libretto, it was a mystery and miracle to me that so much blatant talk of lost bloomers, nudie pics, strip shows, and racy lyrics, like those of the play’s notorious Ado Annie’s “I Can’t Say No,” didn’t shut down the original show:

“I hate to disserpoint a beau
When he is payin’ a call.
Fer a while I ack refined and cool,
A-settin’ on the velveteen settee—
Nen I think of thet ol’ golden rule,
And do fer him whut he would do fer me!”

As belted by Tony-decorated Ali Stroker, the canon’s naughtiest song nearly brought down the barn. With brilliant comedic phrasing and a voice worthy of Broadway’s Golden Age—a time bookended by Oklahoma! and the same team’s Sound of Music in 1959—Stroker’s let 'er rip rendition sent chills through my toes, the body’s evidence that you are witnessing an artist who came to play. A closer look at the lyrics, however, reveals some uncomfortable information around Ado Annie’s coming of age. As she tells our heroine Laurey (Rebecca Naomi Jones), “Now, Laurey, you know they didn’t nobody pay me no mind up to this year, count of I was scrawny and flat as a beanpole. ‘Nen I kind of rounded up a little and now the boys act diff’rent to me.” Though an older actress usually plays the part, Ado Annie’s just past puberty! She then continues her theme song:

Other girls are coy and hard to catch
But other girls ain’t havin’ any fun!
Ev’ry time I lose a wrestlin’ match
I have a funny feelin’ that I won!
Though I c’n feel the undertow,
I never make a complaint
Till it’s too late fer restraint,
Then when I want to I cain’t.
I cain’t say no!

In this last stanza “I can’t” turns from the figurative to the literal. Any serious implications in these lyrics are drowned out by zeal for the song, but a more graphic Oklahoma! is right in the text.

Bright lights, small city. On Laura Jellinek’s set, the cast and audience of this Oklahoma! are in each others’ faces. (c) Little Fang Photo

Annie’s less-than-doting father has put a price of $50 on her hand in marriage and there are two suitors in the running: Cowboy Will Parker, who genuinely thinks he loves her, and a traveling peddler Ali Hakim, who took some liberties he might need to make good on. While Annie awaits her fate, Laurey also must choose which dude, cowboy Curly or farmhand Jud, will have the honor of escorting her to that evening’s box social. But Laurey just cain’t say yes. Or maybe she don’t wanta; as portrayed by Jones, Laurey seems to teeth with resentment—in my interpretation—about the third-rate drama her young life is amounting to, an uninspiring draw between two suitors she could take or leave. When the hardselling peddler says she “must be wanting something,” Laurey divulges:

Me? Course I want sumpin. (Working up to a kind of abstracted ecstasy) Want a buckle made outa shiny silver to fasten onto my shoes! Want a dress with lace. Want perfume, wanta be purty, wanta smell like a honeysuckle vine!…Want things I’ve heared of and never had before—a rubber-t’ard buggy, a cut-glass sugar bowl. Want things I Cain’t tell you about—not only things to look at and hold in yer hands. Things to happen to you. Things so nice, if they ever did happen to you, yer heart ud quit beatin’. You’d fall down dead! 

Poor Laurey can’t get no satisfaction. She wants material things in the way country covets town and then the things she can’t describe. Those things might be love, marriage, and babies, or they might be actually things a thinking person wants to feel: inspiration, achievement, pride. The sorts of things a truly free person gets to aim for. Laurey’s ennui puts her alongside the Annas and Emmas in a literary tradition that understands the tensions bred by inequality or even imbalance, whether in society or at home. What does the Peddler come up with to sell her? Smelling salts. The remedy for women out of sorts, for so much of time, has been little helpers of one form or another. These salts were meant to bring Laurey to her senses, to help her make a decision between Lacklusters 1 and 2. As her Aunt Eller says, “Throwin’ away yer money!” And either way she was.

Jones came into her own with a riveting “Out of My Dreams.” (c) Little Fang Photo

What then about the men? From the musical’s iconic opening lyric, “Oh, what a beautiful mornin’…,” understudy Denver Milord as our hero Curly is an Orpheus you can’t take your eyes off of. In his second number, he tries to surrey Laurey to his underworld in a rendition so sensual it put me in mind of Kate and Leo’s Titanic carriage scene. Make no mistake about what he’d like to do in his “Surrey with the Fringe on Top.” Desire is writ large, with the men on equal display. Annie’s suitor Will, played by the deliciously daft James Davis, is so pent up you can just feel what the sight of Annie does to him. Terese Wadden’s costumes play a wonderful role: between Will and Curly’s leather-framed bits, chaps may just make a comeback as the most hilarious sartorial turn-on since the codpiece. Milord and Davis wore them as a peacock’s feathers, thrusting and swaying to help light the intended fire.

It may take more’n chaps to win Laurey’s heart. (But they’re a good start.) (c) Little Fang Photo

Having read Frank Rich’s marvelous piece for New York magazine last spring, “Oklahoma was never really OK,” I carried his line of thought into my viewing. His take on the mythology surrounding Make American Great Again is beautifully summarized when he writes:

“The production is not a slab of agitprop in the current fashion. There are no Trump masks or Trump impersonators or MAGA caps. (Fish first conceived his version in pre-Trump 2007.) There is no Trumpian villain — or villains at all, actually — only the earnest, flawed Americans of the original. It’s by looking anew at what was there all along that this Oklahoma! illuminates the tragic fault lines that were built into the show as they had been built into America: the conflicts between the white-American majority and the Other — whether the Other is defined by race, immigrant origins, class, or sexuality…In the context of 2019, Fish’s restoration of the show is a timely refutation of the lie that America can be made great by turning back the clock to some immaculate America of the past. A great America has always been a work-in-progress.”

With Rich’s words ringing in my ears, Oklahoma! was more intellectual discovery than emotional catharsis. Arguably drama first and musical second, Fish’s vision is layered exploration of the play’s themes and our often inhumane condition. Like Hillbilly Elegy, the 2016 megahit memoir by J.D. Vance that some (sadly) feel is a poor excuse for white plight, it exudes concern for lost souls and their surroundings. It’s dangerous for everyone when any citizen feels they were born on rock bottom, have got nothing to lose, and that their actions won’t affect their outcomes. Inequity or accident, this is the gray cloud that travels over the play’s doleful antagonist Jud Fry, who is portrayed with sustained heartbreak by Patrick Vaill. Villainized in the standard revival, Fish and Vaill’s Jud is more Heathcliff than hellion and a nuanced tragedian, quite like a real suffering person—so rarely a caricature.

Pore Jud’s misjudged. The mocking Curly goads him into fantasizing about committing suicide and attending his own funeral in the surreal number “Pore Jud is Dead.” One of the most cryptic scenes I can remember, it took me a moment to grasp (for I did not know the story) what Curly was actually playing at: “teasing” a misfit, the underdog, into imagining his death. (c) Little Fang Photo

In 1961 Helene Hanff published a marvelous midlife memoir, Underfoot in Show Business. Hanff, a failed playwright, successful TV writer, and the author of the achingly dear 84, Charing Cross Road, documented the birth of Oklahoma! to hilarious effect, having had a worm’s eye view in its press office during her early bohemian days. She tells us how its producers—the Theatre Guild—on the heels of 16 flops, sold their theatre and building to fund the show. We learn it was originally called Away We Go and renamed Oklahoma! in a last-ditch marketing effort that called for the re-doing of 10,000 mimeographed press releases. Composer Rodgers and Librettist Hammerstein had never worked together and the cast were all untried or unknown performers. These unpromising credentials had the Guild’s employees pretty much banking on unemployment as the show approached opening. As Hanff describes:

“During February, people from other floors drifted into our office with progress reports. This was, they informed us, the damnedest musical anybody’d ever hatched for a sophisticated Broadway audience. It was so pure you could stage it at a church social. It opened with a middle-aged farm woman sitting alone on a bare stage churning butter, and from there it got cleaner. They did not feel a long sequence of arty dancing was likely to improve matters on the farm.”

I finished Underfoot the night before seeing Oklahoma! and Hanff’s cast of characters, the specters of 1943, were with me every stomp of the way. As I took my seat on 51st Street, where my own family got its New York start three apartments ago, I thought of Hanff who, home with a cold, had missed Oklahoma!’s opening night but awoke on April Fool’s Day 1943 to a musical theatre forever changed.

Joan Roberts, Betty Garde, Alfred Drake, and cast of original 1943 Oklahoma! (Vandamm Studio/NYPL for the Performing Arts)

As for the music, much like you will see when Conor McPherson’s Girl from the North Country comes to Broadway on February 7, the arrangements are the thing. Just as Simon Hale gives us a whole new Dylan to sing, Daniel Kluger’s arrangements excite the ear where familiar and new meet, time colliding between Rodgers’s genius and a half century of country music, electric guitar, and even Nineties grunge. My mind’s ear found Hendrix’s “Star Spangled Banner” and Jeff Buckley’s version of “Hallelujah” in the Dream Ballet, in which Laurey’s internal dilemma is expressed through dance. Choreographer John Heginbotham has interpreted Agnes de Mille’s groundbreaking ballet into a dance for one. His prima assoluta, the extraordinary Gabrielle Hamilton, unleashes a tour de force so powerful it sent tears down my husband’s face and brought to my mind the Christmas lyric: “the hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight.”

Gabrielle Hamilton dances in a sequined T-shirt dress that reads “Dream Baby Dream.” (c) Little Fang Photo

Like Helene Hanff, whose family were theatre maniacs in Thirties Pennsylvania, so too were Frank Rich’s in Fifties D.C., a tale he shares in his own fascinating midlife theatre memoir, Ghost Light. Alongside Fish’s revival, Hanff’s and Rich’s reminiscences make for a powerful reminder of the guts and sacrifice it can take to make a flop or a hit, how many people are involved alongside the few names that recognizably survive, and that a show of depth—like a person—can often bear a thorough re-examination, a second act. This Oklahoma! is open to many interpretations, none of which are facile, none of which make it easy to be partisan, but all of which make it easy to love humor and humans, music and its makers, and the theatre-going experience as the truest of community events, from the church basement to the Great White Way.