Oklahoma! returns to Broadway! Stripped down to reveal the darker psychological truths at its core, Daniel Fish's production tells a story of a community circling its wagons against an outsider, and the violence of the frontier that shaped America.
Over 75 years after Rodgers & Hammerstein reinvented the American musical, this is Oklahoma! as you've never seen or heard it before - reimagined for the 21st century.
As with many a reimagining of a classic, not all of Fish's gambits entirely work. That Act 2 dream ballet, reworked since the show's run last fall at Brooklyn's St. Ann's Warehouse, is overlong and dramatically muddy. And his most radical departure from Oscar Hammerstein's script comes in the finale with the decidedly understated return of Jud at the wedding of Curly and Laurey.
Many of the vocals avoid the bravura in favor of the isolated choke. Most of the dance has been cut; what survives is largely an expression of individual feeling, as when Gabrielle Hamilton dances a solo dream ballet, clad in an ironic 'Dream, Baby, Dream' shirt, wherein it seems America might crush Laurey under its oppressive weight. No wonder Rebecca Naomi Jones plays the putative romantic heroine as unhappy throughout, removed from her world, aware of her own metaphors, interested in a furtive fumble with Jud Fry (the excellent Patrick Vail, who avoids all the usual tropes) but clearly far smarter than her daffy Curly (Damon Daunno).
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