Oklahoma's not OK
April 10, 2019 8:12 PM   Subscribe

Oklahoma! was greeted as jingoistic entertainment in 1943, perhaps in part because a wartime audience didn’t want to see that the musical’s celebration of the platonic ideal of Great America was qualified by a brutal acknowledgment of how cruelly America can fall short. In the context of 2019, Fish’s restoration of the show is a timely refutation of the lie that America can be made great by turning back the clock to some immaculate America of the past. A great America has always been a work-in-progress. The Great America of nostalgic, reactionary fantasy, beatific and white and welcoming to all, never existed in the first place — not even, it turns out, in the bright, golden meadows of Oklahoma!
posted by ChuraChura (26 comments total) 22 users marked this as a favorite
 
This is really interesting. I'm a musical fan, but I don't really bother with Rodgers and Hammerstein, so I knew this had to be bringing something special to the table. Natalie Walker seems to have liked it, which goes a long way with me.

Sadly, this probably cannot be done with The Music Man.
posted by Countess Elena at 8:19 PM on April 10, 2019


When you said Fish I thought you meant the lead singer of Marillion, but my brief foray into what that would be like was dashed when I opened the article.
posted by Radiophonic Oddity at 8:24 PM on April 10, 2019 [2 favorites]


I thought I remembered a Native character in Oklahoma!, but I realized I was getting that musical confused with Lil’ Abner. I chuckled at the only line I could remember from that character—“can’t grow crops on our land,” he solemnly intones, “too much oil.” Welp:
What also should have been within memory in 1943 was the so-called Reign of Terror, the 1920s serial murders targeting Oklahoma’s Osage Indians, many of them millionaire beneficiaries of the oil boom.

posted by infinitewindow at 8:26 PM on April 10, 2019 [11 favorites]


Oklahoma is one of the best musicals. You could write whole books about the Farmer and the Cowman alone. Excited there's (yet another) revival.

I'm still mad I missed the gender-bent version of Oklahoma that was in Ashland last year.

Not Rodgers & Hammerstein, but Bill Callahan's America! drinks from the same well of American tinged with some critique.
posted by Nelson at 8:34 PM on April 10, 2019 [4 favorites]


so it wasn't a beautiful morning?
posted by philip-random at 9:01 PM on April 10, 2019


Oklahoma! Gets a Dark, Brilliant Remake (Todd S. Purdum, The Atlantic)
The essence of Fish’s reinterpretation is the character of Jud Fry, played by Patrick Vaill (who originated the role as a Bard student) not as a burly lout—think Rod Steiger in the 1955 movie version—but as a lean, tortured outsider condemned to a life by himself “like a cobweb on a shelf,” as he sings in his agonized soliloquy, “Lonely Room.” This Jud is a much more sympathetic contender for Laurey’s affections, and his sex appeal is palpable.
Having played Jud in my high school production of this show, I am so behind this.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 9:19 PM on April 10, 2019 [8 favorites]


I've been close to Oklahoma! all my life. It was my mother's favorite musical since she was a young girl; she used to sing us to sleep with chorus after chorus of "Pore Jud is Daid." We'd fold our little hands across our chests when she took her big rallantando on "His fingernails have never been so clean." It was a dream come true last summer when I finally got to be in a local production of the show.

I really feel like this reviewer just hasn't been paying attention if they somehow have been missing the darkness that's been baked into the show all these years. For gosh sakes, Jud burned down the barn of the last girl who turned him down. He's the Elliot Rodgers of the turn of the century, Incel of the Old West, stalker of the smokehouse. When Laurey begs Curly not to sell his gun, it's because she is (rightly) afraid for both of their lives. Jud isn't just some not-quite-as-perfect-as-the-other-guy rival in a rom-com triangle. Our Jud was soooo good - gave you chills just from the little silence he'd hold before each line.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 9:28 PM on April 10, 2019 [23 favorites]


Thanks for posting this, I saw the "This Oklahoma fucks" tweets but never would have looked into it more than that. This sounds really interesting and I really love the entire concept. Same thing when you listen to pop songs and listen to what they're actually saying stripped of the tempo & melodies and it's often pretty dark and gross. I'm also fascinated to learn the history of the original playwright.

I always had kind of a vague feeling that it was kind of ironic for these blonde white settlers to be singing "We know we belong to the land, and the land we belong to is grand". Like wouldn't it be great if the people who did these terrible things actually believed anything that we were imagining them to be saying.
posted by bleep at 10:01 PM on April 10, 2019 [1 favorite]


Also the interview with the guy who licenses the rights to various productions was REALLY interesting, he is kind of in inheriting the role of the author to decide what's ok to stage and what isn't and how he goes about that seems to be pretty balanced and sensible:

What happened in Daniel’s production at Bard, previously, was Curly picked the gun up out of the box and shot him in cold blood. And it was followed by a scene in which Curly gets off, claiming self-defense. And leaning partly on the fact that they wanted further rights, so that I still had an opportunity to have the conversation, I said you can’t do that. That is too far removed from what’s in the script. Every bone in my body says you can’t show cold-blooded murder that is clear to everyone witnessing it in the audience, then he gets away with it. There’s enough of that going on in the world, but don’t put it in Oklahoma!

I said, “Figure out a way to do it so that people don’t take that away from it.” And he has. It’s chilling, what he does.

Was that a different conversation to have?
We put it in the contract, let’s put it that way. Occasionally you have to do that, and you have to show the moxie that owning the copyright gives you.

posted by bleep at 10:34 PM on April 10, 2019 [5 favorites]


I really feel like this reviewer just hasn't been paying attention if they somehow have been missing the darkness that's been baked into the show all these years.


Indeed. While I've never seen a professional stage version, the movie, which Rodgers and Hammerstein were heavily involved in, is much darker than people seem to acknowledge and its themes are different than it seems people like to claim. It just points to some of the problems in cultural transmission of knowledge in how we think we understand things.

In this case, from my perspective, the issue largely lies in people waning to see the story as "belonging" to Curly, as the male lead, when the dynamic of the show more properly situates the questions in the show "belonging" to Laurey. The show reverses the usual theme of the western based around the dilemma of the cowboy, the urge to be free and follow the call of manifest destiny in roaming the "untamed west" is matched against a call to settle down and be part of "civil society" as represented by the woman. The dilemma is his, freedom vs domesticity, where something is shown as lost for him either way he chooses.

Oklahoma's story is about Laurey's decision, and the fears she has in choosing either one of them. That's the essence of Laurey's dream, the big balletic dance number in the show, the mix of desire and fear in the uncertainty over who these men are and how the threat of control and sexual violence is always lurking as a danger with these kinds of men. It's her life and freedom that's the centerpiece of the show more than Curly's and the rest of the story reinforces that theme, like Ado Annie's more humorous seeming difficulties with her choices.

Jud is the outsider, the biggest threat to the community and Laurey for carrying the idea of remaining "uncivilized", but he's matched to Curly who is different more by degree than absolute values and that holds for the other men in the town as well, with Will, Ado Annie's erstwhile beau, bringing the kaleidoscope/knife to the town, with its explicit connection between sex and violence, and Ali Hakim taking the part of a different kind of outside "threat" to the relationship between Annie and Will and the social order. Annie and Will's All or Nothing number shows the imbalance of control expected, even as Annie isn't having it, and that points back to Curly and Laurey's relationship where that concern remains.

At the end, the "other" has been vanquished and order restored, but the threat isn't erased, just absorbed into the social order shown in the faux trial conducted to clear Curly of Jud's death. Even in the movie there's something unsettling about how easily Curly gets off and how much of a sham the "trial is, but it isn't given the emphasis needed to really make that point resonantly clear, as in the stage version mentioned above. It's a fantastic musical, I love the film and it sounds like the new stage version is going to be great. I just wish I could see it.
posted by gusottertrout at 12:16 AM on April 11, 2019 [15 favorites]


I grew up with the title song. We had to perform it every year at one school event or another, cause, well there wasn't a lot of well-known pop culture that could be latched onto as "celebrating" our state.

I hated it. We all hated it. It was presented as saccharine jingoistic pablum. We were all of us uncomfortably aware that we lived in a poor redneck area of a poor, culturally backwards state. Singing what felt like contrived historically inaccurate jibber-jabber about a place we knew intimately was soul-crushing and embittering and just made us ever more desperate to escape.

Years later i saw the movie, and was startled to realise just how weird the actual play was. But it still felt like it bore only the faintest of relationships to the state in which i was born. A catchy title that fit the rhyme scheme. A set of rural archetypes. Poverty. White people on unacknowledged stolen land.

I guess i never got it. There are lots of stories that could be told about the state's history. Ones that captured some of what made it an interesting but often painful place with a lot of rough history whose details still damage people's lives. But the play itself never seemed to capture much of that. It was about a nowhere place that happened to also be named Oklahoma.
posted by allium cepa at 12:26 AM on April 11, 2019 [12 favorites]


Sadly, this probably cannot be done with The Music Man.

Harold Hill, a villainous con man with a recent background in the entertainment industry, defrauds an Iowa community (during caucus season?) and convinces them to follow an ill-conceived scheme that is both against their own interests and values and financially lucrative for him personally. At the end of the show, he's led away by law enforcement in handcuffs.

Bit of a stretch, but I could see this happening.
posted by gimonca at 4:46 AM on April 11, 2019 [12 favorites]


I've always had a soft spot for Oklahoma!, it has some great songs. Including one of my favorite slutty anthems, "I Cain't Say No". The revival sounds great and I wish I could see it.
posted by cpatterson at 5:16 AM on April 11, 2019 [3 favorites]


The show has always had darkness in it, but people will go a long way to gloss over darkness in their entertainment when it's inconvenient.

This sounds like a great revival - bringing new focus to what's always been present.
posted by rmd1023 at 6:04 AM on April 11, 2019 [1 favorite]


Sadly, this probably cannot be done with The Music Man.

There's some really rich, dark satire at the edges of The Music Man that flirts with exposing the ugliness in small-town America; most productions move past it pretty quickly in favor of the big-band musical numbers (which are fun as hell, respect). Recall that Harold Hill (which incidentally, isn't even his real name--we never even LEARN HIS NAME) whips the town up into a puritanical frenzy over the fear of "undesirables" introducing a "seedy element" into the small town of River City, even lacing his warning with the racist specter of "RAGTIME, shameless music that'll grab your son, your daughter, in the arms of a jungle animal instinct."

Hill (NOT HIS REAL NAME) is a fascinating conman, too, in that he's not just selling the idea of a boy's band as the cure for the town's troubles--he's selling an image of himself. Donald Trump has been described as "a poor person's idea of a rich man"; Harold Hill may be described as an unsophisticated person's idea of a sophisticated person. He purports to be the pioneer of a revolutionary pedagogical style called "the Think System" which he uses to organize and teach boys' bands. In reality, this is a cover for his total lack of qualification for the task. The same early 20th century small-town culture that Meredith Willson saw revering charlatans like Hill (NOT HIS REAL NAME) when he wrote The Music Man in the 1950s, that same US culture reveres charlatans like Mehmet Oz and Tyler Henry today.

Of course, the one person that suspects anything is amiss is the town librarian, who has been sneered at for years by the entire town's civic leadership for her supposed snobbish intellectualism, castigating her as an ice queen while at the same time whispering about how she's a harlot and golddigger. This whisper network has in essence shut her off from the community, so when she tries to raise a warning, she's easily dismissed.

The opening number also contains some interesting bits about the death of small town communities due to the rise of the automobile; cynically, the people bemoaning this shift are predatory salesmen who are upset at their loss of a captive sales audience.

The Music Man is dark as fuck, y'all.
posted by duffell at 6:05 AM on April 11, 2019 [38 favorites]


Also we’re looking at a revival of the musical Ragtime, which is expressly dark and weird AND all about race and immigration and anarchists 1919 and 2019 blurring in a our neo-gilded age empire in decline,
posted by The Whelk at 6:21 AM on April 11, 2019 [8 favorites]


The Music Man is also really focused on a lot of sexual dynamics. Marion wants love but the town has kept her out by, as duffell says, branding her both a harlot and a snob, so here's this guy who is chasing her for reasons she knows aren't pure and he may see her as an easy mark but maybe this is a chance for something...? And Hill is singing about sadder but wiser women who know what the game is about except he's wrong, Marion presumably didn't seduce a guy to get a library and isn't interested in a fling. I do wonder what happens after the parade. I think Marion probably makes most of the decisions from that point onwards.
posted by PussKillian at 6:39 AM on April 11, 2019 [3 favorites]


It's very possible that Winthrop is Marion's child, isn't it? i.e. "Sadder but wiser"?
posted by mikelieman at 7:27 AM on April 11, 2019 [2 favorites]


As lore has it, Oklahoma in Choctaw means “red people.”
This line from the article really pisses me off. Choctaw are actual human beings, who I'm pretty sure all speak English. You can fucking ask them what 'Oklahoma' means without calling on whatever the fuck you think 'lore' is.
posted by Quonab at 8:56 AM on April 11, 2019 [11 favorites]


All this time I figured that the core problem with Oklahoma and The Music Man was that they're both condescending to middle America, and more broadly to anybody who's not situated or at least inclined to frequent the Broadway theatre. It's possible that my self-appointed position as Lord Chancellor of Flyover Country has colored my perception.
posted by Flexagon at 11:43 AM on April 11, 2019 [2 favorites]


And yet middle America loves them. (As a flyover girl myself and a former Gracie Shinn, I think I can say so.) They're reliable chestnuts for community theaters, for better or worse. Not that I can say no to a good chestnut. I'm trying to figure out how to get to a not-quite-local Little Shop of Horrors myself.
posted by Countess Elena at 12:42 PM on April 11, 2019 [1 favorite]


The Music Man is dark as fuck, y'all.


Spoilers for a movie made in 1962 and a short story written in 1890 to follow.

We were watching The Music Man on TCM recently, and it closes with "Hill" having presumably gulled the town and been accepted by them, even after the disastrous "concert" in which it's revealed that the townspeople have spent their hard-earned money on instruments their children will never learn how to play.

Presumably. Because as we watched the final sequence, which features "Hill" and Marion dressed in their finery and leading a parade of instrument-playing children through the streets as townspeople cheer, my husband mused, "I like to think that after the disaster of the kids not playing, a few of the men picked up Harold from the boarding house that night, drove down a dark country road to someone's property, then beat him to death. And what we're seeing on screen right now is the last, delirious vision he has before he dies, like in 'An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.'"

I love that interpretation. Imagine that Harold Hill meets his end at a town that thinks the best justice is meted out with the moonlight helping along.
posted by sobell at 5:06 PM on April 11, 2019 [5 favorites]


I love that interpretation. Imagine that Harold Hill meets his end at a town that thinks the best justice is meted out with the moonlight helping along.

They busted his whatchamacallit
posted by duffell at 5:30 PM on April 11, 2019 [3 favorites]


I mean I had a conversation about American musicals and the current moment, and socialism: The Music Of Something Beginning
posted by The Whelk at 9:11 PM on April 11, 2019 [1 favorite]


This is probably the same kind of guy who thinks South Pacific is just a bunch of guys prancing around in sailor hats, singing about how much they like dames.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 11:09 PM on April 11, 2019 [1 favorite]


Is this just the WW2 generation almost totally gone, and people forgetting about the massive numbers of the dead in these conflicts? Nowadays, we can't assume the unspoken knowledge of days past?

My grandad would always eventually change the subject to his stories about nurses, if you asked him how dropping all those firebombs on Asian cities went. Nothing like a dame('s whisky ration).
posted by eustatic at 11:59 PM on April 12, 2019 [1 favorite]


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