You’ll not find any corn, of any height, in Daniel Fish’s wonderfully contemporary reimagining of Rodger’s + Hammerstein’s Oklahoma!. The production was a pre-pandemic sell-out in New York, making it’s London debut last year at The Young Vic. Now it transfers to a wood cladded Wyndham’s Theatre for its West End premiere.
With the cast sitting at a long fold up table, surrounded by countless shotguns, and delivering lines without action, it feels like you may have stumbled into the musical’s first read through. This is the first clue that this Oklahoma! will be radically different to the original. And yet not a word has been changed, instead Daniel Fish has dissected the script and placed emphasis in new places, highlighted different elements and reinvigorated the characters.
The contemporary dress disguises the fact it’s 1906, Oklahoma is on the verge of becoming a state, and Kansas has a skyscraper a whopping seven stories high. But this is a more sexually charged production, it’s particularly noticeable in that famous opening number ‘Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’’, which is slower and far more sultry, and in Ado Annie’s ‘I Cain’t Say No’ which definitely doesn’t have quite the same innocence to it as the original.
But then maybe the original wasn’t as innocent as we thought. After all there’s not a great deal of plot in Oklahoma!, essentially it’s two sets of love triangles that sees the characters spend the entirety of the show lusting after each other, and here…lust they do.
Spread across that long table are cases of Bud Light and steaming crockpots, but despite the pressure cooker environment, there are wonderful comedic moments too. Georgina Onuorah’s Ado Annie is sassy and confident in dealing with the love triangle that also features Will-nice-but-dim Parker (James Patrick Davis, a highlight of the evening) and Stavros Demetraki’s wonderfully scheming Ali Hakim. Liza Sadovy as Aunt Eller also gets a couple of cracking lines that are delivered beautifully.
The staging helps emphasise the small-town community, and it’s a community the audience is made to feel part of, with house lights almost as bright as those on stage. But it also shines a light on the central characters.
Patrick Vaill’s stunning performance of Jud isn’t the typical menace, but a lonely, pitiful and slightly creepy outsider, for the first time you might event start to feel sorry for Jud as he’s excluded from the community that even we are being invited into.
‘Pore Jud is Daid’ is staged mostly in complete darkness, it makes the unsettling undertones of the scene positively frightening. When the lights do come up, Jud and Curly’s faces are projected ghost like onto the back wall, it’s just one of the devastatingly intimate moments this Oklahoma! serves up.
Arthur Darvill’s cocksure Curly, with silky smooth vocals, ably woos Anoushka Lucas’ Laurey. The chemistry between Darvill and Lucas is electric with clear eroticism built in, and in the climactic scene, Lucas easily monopolises the audience’s attention.
Daniel Kluger’s new orchestrations performed by a Bluegrass band, including Mandolin, Pedal Steel Guitar and Banjo, strip back Rodgers’ original music to a more hometown feel. The dream ballet sequence, performed by Marie Astrid Mence, is more a solo contemporary dance, and definitely took some audience members by surprise immediately following the intermission.
This modern Oklahoma! is more than just okay, it’s a superb reinvention of a classic that reworks almost every element to make it oh… what a beautiful evenin’ of theatre.
