Photo credit: Christal Wagner
Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II had never collaborated until they wrote Oklahoma! Given the long string of successes they would enjoy, it was considerably more than beginner’s luck, and yet, rivalled only by The Sound of Music, nothing they would ever compose had the universality and endurance of Oklahoma!
Oklahoma! was a hit during its 1943 Broadway debut, and nowadays, according to Jill Anna Ponasik, director of Skylight Music Theatre’s upcoming production, the musical enjoys “300 productions at any given time in the U.S. and Canada.” Unlike most Broadway blockbusters, “it never had a dormant period. It never went away,” she continues.
We’re sitting at Café Bella in the Third Ward with a scroll spread across a table: a map of the Skylight production. Pasted to the scroll are the musical’s lyrics, snapshots of preliminary designs for the show and, more tellingly, period photographs from the story’s setting: Oklahoma Territory in early days.
In deciding how to stage Oklahoma!, Ponasik read Rodgers and Hammerstein’s source, Green Grow the Lilacs by playwright Lynn Riggs, a child of Oklahoma settlers, and examined the historical record left behind by photographers. Attached to her scroll are portraits of unsmiling men and women in black and white, wearing work clothes and standing against a barren land. A string band poses in front of a sod house. One family is gathered around an organ, hauled with great difficulty from back east and placed on a bare, earthen field.
“They had almost nothing,” Ponasik says of those settlers. “They had very little in social guidance, material possessions or infrastructure.” Ethnic cleansing—which had already removed the Native Americans by the time Oklahoma’s settlers rushed in—left a blank space under a flat horizon. “There was nothing there, just dirt!” she continues.
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Resulting from those observations, Peter Dean Beck designed an environment that “expresses the open, luminous, treacherous emptiness of the outdoors. Rather than reaching for a nostalgia that never existed (crisp white dresses, perfectly yellow farmhouses, back-flipping cowboys), our production lives in the dust and soil and exposed to the weather in a world with very few comforts,” Ponasik says. She points out that Oklahoma! includes only one indoor scene; everything else occurs outdoors in an atmosphere that, in reality, must have been bleak. “Our stage is not so much a location as an environment. It will be an open space where the actors have to make the scenes happen.”
The impoverished characters will be dressed authentically. Costume designer Karin Simonson Kopischke is working with “genuine faded fabric,” Ponasik explains. Critiquing the familiar Hollywood version of Oklahoma! (1955), which painted the scenario in charming colors, Ponasik asks, “How would a white shirt have been possible with how the settlers had to live and where they had to do laundry?”
‘A Group of Individuals Striving to Form a Community’
When examined closely, the characters in Oklahoma! dwelled in dysfunction. “They’re not even a community yet,” Ponasik says. “Just a group of individuals striving to form a community: optimistic, making mistakes and occasionally good choices.” Facing the real-life pioneers of Oklahoma—whose experiences are glimpsed dimly in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s polished mirror—was high mortality from accidents and violence. “The Farmer and the Cowman” were hard pressed to be friends, and there was no judicial system, just a quasi-trial at Aunt Eller’s house.”
The not-yet community of Oklahoma! includes two outsiders: the sinister loner Jud Fry, a man capable of violence, and the lone minority among the Anglo settlers, the “Persian peddler,” Ali Hakim, a clever immigrant making his way among the rubes. A string band in period costume will be on stage throughout the Skylight performances, playing the music and reacting in real time to the words as they are sung.
When Oklahoma! debuted during World War II under the direction of Rouben Mamoulian, its irresistible music, dynamic choreography and frontier folklore struck audiences as an American answer to a world awash in tyranny. Looking over her scroll, Ponasik and I grapple with the question of why it not only triumphed at its moment of inception but has endured so well and so long.
“It’s long, arching and full of incredibly rich music and theatricality,” Ponasik says. Even though the movie is more than 60 years old, “it helped lodge Oklahoma! into our cultural DNA,” she continues. And still, there seems to be no single answer. The story suggests America as an unfinished country, working through its problems to an ideal set just beyond the flat horizon. Rodgers and Hammerstein, the melodies and speech echoing an idealized past, composed a perfect marriage of words and music. Once heard, those songs refuse to leave your memory.
Skylight Music Theatre performs Oklahoma! Sept. 27-Oct. 13 at the Broadway Theatre Center’s Cabot Theatre, 158 N. Broadway. For tickets and more information, visit skylightmusictheatre.org or call 414-291-7800.
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