But timing–and fresh talent–are everything. This week a gorgeous, long-awaited production of “Oklahoma!” opens on Broadway, with the kind of advance buzz and box office ($12 million) that could make Max Bialystock go legit. In a spring theater season heavy with revivals and adaptations, this show is the one to beat. It seems providential that “Oklahoma!” has landed at a time when we’re acutely aware of our Americanness, when the bedrock of our history and culture seems particularly precious. With its reverence of cowboys and pioneering farmers, of beauti-ful land and endless possibility, the show was an instant success when it first opened on Broadway in March 1943, when America was deeply entrenched in war. (Tickets were impossible to come by, but any soldier in uniform got standing room free.) Nearly 60 years later, “Oklahoma!”–or, at least, this “Oklahoma!”–is surprisingly welcome once again.
The irony is that it took a Brit to rekindle a quintessential American show. Trevor Nunn, the legendary director of “Cats” and “Les Miserables,” hadn’t staged a musical revival before he tackled “Oklahoma!” for London’s Royal National Theatre in 1998, where it became a huge hit. “It’s just something I’ve always been passionate about,” says Nunn, 62, whose introduction to the musical was the 1955 film. “I like the material that I deal with to have some sort of spiritual content.” The story–set in the Oklahoma Territory in the early 1900s–seems banal: who’s gonna take Laurey to the picnic? Curly, the cute cowboy, or Jud, the scary hired man? But Rodgers’s transcendent score and Hammerstein’s poetic words elevate the theme of Manifest Destiny–of conflict and hardship, equality and fairness–in carving out a new country.
Nunn made one radical move. He persuaded the R&H estate to let him ditch the original Agnes de Mille choreography, and he brought in Susan Stroman to fashion gutsy, athletic dances. “I don’t think we’ve reinvented ‘Oklahoma!’ but I do think we’ve rediscovered it,” says the brilliant choreographer and director of “The Producers.” “Doing research about the West, about the fights between the farmers and the cowmen–fencing land, against land being open–led me to do choreography that had the theme of fighting and masculinity.” She also incorporated square dancing, and clog dance steps for the booted cowboys.
Nunn and his team scoured the musical’s original source, a forgotten play by Lynn Riggs from 1931 called “Green Grow the Lilacs,” for ideas. When Hammerstein agreed to join Rodgers on the project to transform “Lilacs” into what first had the god-awful title “Away We Go!”, they hadn’t worked together before. Hammerstein preferred to write lyrics before the music was composed, and Rodgers, who’d always worked the other way round, rose to the challenge. On opening night, they had no idea they were making theater history and nervously awaited the reviews. Mary Rodgers, the composer’s daughter, was too young to attend, but she remembers going into her parents’ room the next morning. “They were in such a great mood, all the newspapers spread all over the bed,” she recalls. “They said I could go riding that day, and I thought, oooh, they had a good time.”
Still, when Nunn approached this American classic, he faced that eternal problem–just as the audience is buying into the characters, they break into song. “It’s terribly important that the story is populated by real people, in design, costume, in every tiny detail of behavior,” says Nunn, who was artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company for 18 years. “It’s quite similar to the Shakespeare problem. You have to convince the audience that everyone in a Shakespeare play is real, human, contradictory, though each character is speaking in iambic pentameter, sometimes directly to the audience. You’re mixing the belief in naturalistic performance with theatrical necessity. It’s a fine balance.”
The New York production has no big stars, but at least one performer could become one. Patrick Wilson, stepping into the big boots of Australian actor Hugh Jackman, who played Curly in London, is terrifically winning. He lopes onstage as if he just got off a horse. (“I’m bowlegged to begin with,” says Wilson modestly, which is pretty darn winning, too.) And in that natural way Nunn strives for, Wilson breaks into “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’” in a lovely, all-American tenor. Last season he was nominated for a Tony for “The Full Monty” on Broadway (where he caught Nunn’s attention). While he performs “Oklahoma!” eight times a week, the 28-year-old actor is rehearsing for an equally big plum: playing Joe Pitt, the closeted Mormon lawyer, in the HBO mini-series “Angels in America,” directed by Mike Nichols. He’s in august company: Emma Thompson, Meryl Streep, Al Pacino. Here’s Wilson’s theory of acting: “When it comes down to it, I just want you to believe my story, I just want you to go ‘OK’ to anything I do.” His effortless charm as Curly–whether teasing Laurey (“They’re like Beatrice and Benedick,” he says) or fighting Jud–helps break through the artifice that mars so many musical productions.
But make no mistake. Trevor Nunn’s “Oklahoma!” is a classic musical. He’s taken the work on its own terms, without winking at it or tampering with its essence. Yet he’s managed to restrict the corn to the song about the elephant’s eye, and a fresh breeze seems to have blown away any creakiness in the 60-year-old show. Now maybe a new generation can discover what so enchanted their grandparents. And we can remember once more that the land we belong to is grand.
