Oklahoma! at the 5th Avenue theater
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Provocative 'Oklahoma!' hits 5th Avenue stage
"Oklahoma!," the classic tribute to hardy — and singing and dancing — pioneers by Rodgers and Hammerstein at the 5th Avenue Theatre.
"When a show works perfectly," wrote Broadway composer Richard Rodgers, "it's because all the individual parts complement each other and fit together."
Many elements in the 5th Avenue's ambitious, vivacious mounting of "Oklahoma!," the first musical in the timeless canon of Rodgers and lyricist-author Oscar Hammerstein, fit together like a horse and buggy.
Others are mismatches.
In this classic paean to the hardy pioneers who carved communities out of the bedrock of the American West, the splendid R & H score — from the jubilant "Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin' " to the rousing title anthem — rings out in clear voices, backed by a full orchestra (under Ian Eisendrath's baton).
Donald Byrd's choreography pays fond tribute to the Agnes de Mille folkloric toe-tappers, and ballet, from the original 1943 production, but Byrd also adds vital, clever accents from his own edgy oeuvre.
Eric Ankrim's boyish/goofy cowpoke Curly and Alexandra Zorn's golden-soprano farm gal Laurey charmingly spar and spark their way to love.
The Oklahoma sky turns many gorgeous hues in Tom Sturge's lighting design, and Lynda L. Salsbury's period costumes have all the right boots, buttons and bows.
But at cross-purposes in Peter Rothstein's staging are some heavy symbolic gestures that burden a buoyant fable with excess baggage.
Matthew Smucker's set uses shifting barn walls to reframe different scenes, at worst making claustrophobic a land celebrated for its wide-open expansiveness.
In Act 1 we barely get a glimpse of those rolling fields Curly sings of, where the corn grows "as high as an elephant's eye." And sometimes those barn walls hem in the dances.
Drawing more debate are the racial implications in the show's use of Kyle Scatliffe, an imposing black actor and fine singer, as the villainous misfit Jud Fry.
The production's easy social mingling of white settlers and their African-American neighbors as they dance, drink, bathe and mete out frontier justice together may be a historical stretch. (Oklahoma's black pioneers tended to reside in all-black towns.)
But we buy it: theater is fantasy, not literal reality. And multiracial casting in classics is now common — and, when used to reflect and explore our own social dynamic, enriching.
But depicting Jud as a homicidal black brute, prone to quivering rages, who forces himself on a virginal white girl? What point is intended?
In the "Poor Jud is Dead" sequence, Curly's urging the farmhand to hang by a rope inevitably brings to mind racist lynchings — not the mock suicide the satirical lyrics allude to.
So is Jud meant to be more oppressed than the other African-American characters? Is the agitated portrayal meant to shed psychological light on Jud, and his society? To this viewer, it just came through as a provocative but unintentional caricature.
Meanwhile, the cornpone comedy in numbers like "All or Nothing" and "I Cain't Say No" are broadly played for conventional comic relief by bubbly Kirsten deLohr Helland (as flirty Ado Annie) and Matt Owen (as her exuberant suitor, Will Parker).
And Byrd's big dance numbers — the "Kansas City" clog-a-thon, the jolly hoedown to "The Farmer and the Cowman" and the lurid sexual (and here racial) nightmare of Laurey's dream ballet — are the showstoppers they oughta be.
"Oklahoma!" is not sacrosanct. Modern artists promote its ongoing viability by bringing new perspectives to it. One just wishes the detours the 5th Avenue took with this Broadway favorite were more "complementary" to the whole enterprise.
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