Before there were red states and blue states — before, in fact, all the states were states — there was the Oklahoma of "Oklahoma!" The great musical, set in Oklahoma territory circa 1900, is also a great primer in what all of us, once upon a time, used to call "American" values.
"You gotta be hearty," says one of the characters, summing it up. And the cowpunchers, farmers’ daughters, rope twirlers and other heartland types in this rousing, superlative revival at the Paper Mill Playhouse are as hearty as all git-out.
There’s cocky Curly the cowboy (Adam Monley), whose courtship of the high-hatting Laurey (Brynn O’Malley) is less lovey-dovey than hand-to-hand combat. There’s randy Ado Annie (Megan Sikora), whose on-again off-again romance with the none-too-bright Will Parker (Brian Sears) is like a compendium of all the farmer’s-daughter jokes that were ever told by all the traveling salesmen of the world.
There’s Aunt Eller (Louisa Flaningam), who is a granny with a gun.
And there’s a passel of cowpokes, farm girls in calico and various grizzled folksy types who, under the brisk direction of James Brennan and the lively choreography of Peggy Hickey, kick up their spurs with abandon.
The thing furthest from modern attitudes — and yet absolutely right in terms of the play — is the hearty contempt that all the characters have for the depressed Jud (Andrew Varela), a gloomy Gus who sits brooding in his smokehouse, surrounded by pornographic postcards and feeling sorry for himself.
A musical written in today’s post-"Sweeney Todd" era would have made him the hero. What makes "Oklahoma!" such an accurate distillation of the American character, as once understood, is these frontier folks’ willful embrace of the sunny side — and their instinctive distaste for anything dark or complicated. "Why don’t you do sumpin’ healthy once in a while, stid of stayin’ shet up here a-crawlin’ and festerin’," says Curly, a gaslight-era Dr. Phil, eyeing Jud with contempt.
"Oklahoma!" — first staged in 1943, when wartime America needed reassurance of those old-fashioned values — has been called a watershed.
It was the turning point that transformed Broadway musicals from a hodgepodge of songs and star-turns into an "integrated" mix of song, story and three-dimensional characters. It is also, to this day, one of the best-built of all shows, with an all-aces score by Richard Rodgers ("Oh What a Beautiful Mornin’," "Surrey With the Fringe on Top," "People Will Say We’re in Love," "Oklahoma!") and a folksy book by Oscar Hammerstein II that is just substantial enough to be interesting, but not weighty enough to drag the fun down with it.
There is, in short, little you could do to ruin the show once you’ve cast singers who can sing and dancers who can dance. This, Paper Mill has — emphatically — done.
But what’s interesting is the nuances that can make a familiar show fresh, given a good cast and good direction.
It’s one thing, for instance, for Hammerstein (this was his first collaboration with Rodgers) to write, "The breeze is so busy it don’t miss a tree/and the old weepin’ willow is laughin’ at me."
It’s another thing for Monley, singing Curly’s famous entrance song, "Oh What a Beautiful Mornin’," to give a little smile as he sings these lines — as if delighting in his own cleverness — which then morphs into another, more self-deprecating smile as if he’d realized he was maybe laying it on a bit thick. Suddenly those lines become not Hammerstein’s purple prose but Curly’s — and a neat summing-up of his character, to boot.
While Monley’s good but light voice does not have the operatic heft of an Alfred Drake or Gordon MacRae — the signature Curlys of stage and screen — he more than makes up for it with nice acting moments like that. And he’s got a great sparring partner in O’Malley’s high-spirited, combative Laurey. She has the soaring voice to give a song like "Out of My Dreams" the right touch of romance, but she’s also scrappy. Some of her numbers with Monley, like "Surrey with the Fringe on Top," are less duets than tussles.
Ado Annie, usually a bit of a sad sack, is a bit more aggressive here, and the squeaky-voiced Sikora plays her with a glint in her eye. She’s very good; so is Sears as her good-hearted, knuckle-headed boyfriend. Flaningam is a feisty Aunt Eller, Jonathan Brody is a droll peddler and John Jellison sings the best, most spirited "Farmer and the Cowman" on record.
Varela’s Jud is by turns creepy and pitiable, and his "Lonely Room" is both a show-stopper and a hair-raiser. Choreographer Hickey seems to have channeled both Agnes de Mille, the show’s original choreographer — this was one of the first Broadway shows to feature serious dance — and Bob Fosse, particularly in the superbly slinky dance of the three "French postcards" (Anne Horak, Kiira Schmidt and Lauren Marshall) in the creepily Freudian dream sequence.
And the dancers have an appealing, open-sky environment of weathered farmhouses and lush cornfields to kick, strut and two-step in, thanks to set designer Anthony Ward and lighting designer F. Mitchell Dana.
After all these years, "Oklahoma!" is still hearty. America is maybe a little less so. Which is why this show, in addition to being hugely entertaining, also seems a little poignant now.
E-mail: beckerman@northjersey.com
