Oklahoma
Music by Richard Rogers
Book and Lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II
Directed by Daniel Fish
Circle in the Square
June 12, 2019
Production website
💉💉💉💉 out of 5.

I have never seen a golden age musical go down this plywood covered path before!  Wow!  When I first entered the stage I thought that Oklahoma was going to be more gimmick than art.  The thrust stage was all boarded up in raw plywood – the floor and all the walls.  Crockpots of chili were cooking away on long picnic tables where front row audience members were seated.  Audience lights were going to be kept up for the majority of the production.  I thought this was going to be a long night.

But then, they started to sing and I was transported.  These songs that I have hummed over and over in my head were being delivered in such a fresh and sexy way that I couldn’t take my eyes off of the stage.  The simpleness of the staging really made the characters come to life.

Without giving too much away – I did remember when I first saw the traditional version of Oklahoma, I found the role of Jud Fry to be quite odd.  Whey did the writer choose to set such a dark, uncomfortable character in the midst of this cheery sugar-coated world?  He seemed out of place.  It also seemed cruel to have songs that were encouraging Jud to take his own life and to make being dead sound better than being alive.

In THIS production, my jaw dropped when they took up this storyline and the “cruelty” that plays out to Jud and get inside it and really make sense of it.  Sweet wistfulness disappeared in seconds.

The other component that I truly loved in this production is the way that they preserved every word from the original text – even those often thrown-away lines of the chorus and the comment they make on the main action.  But in this production, nothing is thrown away.  In fact, it is slowed down, and what you get at this slower, more deliberate pace is scary.  It is as if you played a favorite record album of yours and slowed it down so that you could hear words from Satan.  It was that spooky.  

Some in my group hated this show.  They wanted the traditional Oklahoma that has worked for decades – but, honest to god folks, slow it down and you will be shocked!