Dream Worth A-Keepin'

There are American musicals. There are influential American musicals. And then there’s Oklahoma!

The beloved show about farmers and ranchers in the Oklahoma Territory at the turn of the 20th century—with music by Richard Rodgers and lyrics and book by Oscar Hammerstein II—will celebrate its 75th anniversary in 2018. In the decades since its premiere on March 31, 1943, the show has served as the unofficial standard by which other American musicals measure themselves—whether their creators’ goal is emulation or departure. My Fair Lady, The Music Man, Fiddler on the Roof and countless other shows have worked proudly in the tradition established in 1943, while such titles as Company, A Chorus Line and Hamilton (which currently inhabits the Broadway theatre named after Rodgers) have sought ways to break away from the model.

Oklahoma! will certainly garner renewed attention on its diamond anniversary, and much of that buzz will come from Ashland, where Oregon Shakespeare Festival Artistic Director Bill Rauch is set to direct a visionary new production that changes the genders of certain characters and puts the LGBTQ+ experience onstage. The news has not been without controversy. Some people were clearly taken aback on learning that the venerable Rodgers and Hammerstein Organization (R&H) would allow such striking innovations to what is arguably its cornerstone title. Yet OSF has in recent years sought and found ways to adapt a number of classic musicals, gaining the trust and respect of licensing organizations along the way. This is just another instance of that, albeit a particularly stunning one.

The Ashland experiment won’t mark the first time Oklahoma! has stunned. It has long been called a revolutionary show, in part because of the way it integrated song and dance so smoothly into the story, and in part because it presented characters from America’s heartland instead of sophisticated snappy-talking city dwellers. Based on Lynn Riggs’s 1931 play Green Grow the Lilacs, it explored the lives of a community of rural settlers in 1906, when Oklahoma was about to become a state. The story focused on the romance between cowboy Curly McLain and farmer Laurey Williams and the question of whether it would be Curly or the brooding farmhand Jud Fry who would accompany Laurey to the upcoming box social. It’s hardly a life-or-death situation—until it becomes one. When Curly fights a humiliated and enraged Jud, the farmhand is killed and Curly faces a criminal charge. Despite its reputation for wholesomeness, this musical is not mere fluff. Wrath, envy and lust are among the deadly sins that figure in its scenario.

The talents of the Rodgers and Hammerstein team alone did not make Oklahoma! the immense success it became. America had gone to war in December 1941 after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Suddenly, the tale of a unified community, with farmers and ranchers finding both a literal and figurative common ground, seemed to strike a chord with American audiences. As Meryle Secrest pointed out in her biography of Rodgers, Somewhere for Me, “Musicals that succeed in as spectacular a way as did Oklahoma! are more than artistic successes alone. They speak to a human need which becomes insistent at such moments, i.e., the need to believe in a brighter future.”

The original Broadway Oklahoma! ran until 1948, and has been revived often. Its score—including such songs as “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’ ” and “People Will Say We’re in Love”—thoroughly suffused American culture, and in short order. (The title number even became the Oklahoma state song in 1953.) That the most recent Broadway revival came in early 2002, just months after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, may have been mere coincidence, but the show’s messages of hope and unity were certainly welcomed by shaken Americans at the time. 

Politically speaking, we’re living in tumultuous and divisive times. And, lately, LGBTQ+ gains have been rolled back on a national level. Will Oklahoma!’s reputation as a touchstone for unity and hope come through yet again? And how will Bill Rauch’s innovations fit with the show’s homespun values?

In a long-ago high school production of Oklahoma!, Rauch portrayed Persian peddler Ali Hakim. “I was not well cast, to put it mildly,” he said. At an OSF staff talk in late June 2017, he stressed that he aimed to cast the Hakim role in Ashland with an actor who “self-identifies as Iranian.” In any case, Rauch has continued to love the show. And for a quarter-century he has harbored a dream about staging it in an LGBTQ+-focused way.

“I love musicals,” he said at the staff talk, “and as a gay kid and a gay adult, I felt unrepresented and shut out, and that they were not about me or people like me. And so the idea that this thing that I love—that’s a classic, that has existed—could also reflect the gay community feels very meaningful on a personal level, but also in terms of social justice and the artistic boundary-pushing that is part of what OSF does.”

In August 2016, the first steps were taken to fulfill the director’s dream when Oklahoma! was revealed as the “mystery musical” at a benefit reading for OSF’s annual Daedalus Project, which raises money to fight HIV and AIDS. The reading made the musical’s primary romantic couple, Laurey and Curly, lesbians. It made the comic sidekick couple, Will Parker and Ado Annie, gay men (with “Annie” renamed “Andy”). Ted Chapin, president and chief creative officer of R&H, gave his blessing to the proceedings, which he attended. The wheels for a full-blown production began to turn that night.

“One of the things that I learned from the reading was how sweet people found it, in the most affirming sense of that word,” Rauch recalls. “People again and again said that any misconception or fear that people would find the concept strident were pleasantly surprised by how life-affirming, warm, entertaining and ultimately moving the whole approach was.”

Rauch was elated when R&H agreed to license the production. The Festival reserved a key slot for it in the 2018 season lineup.

It’s not just the two romantic couples in the show who have been reimagined. Laurey’s starchy yet sometimes playful Aunt Eller will be a transgender woman (portrayed by a transgender female performer). Ali Hakim, said Rauch, will be “a cis-gender bisexual man” who “has a great fling with Ado Andy” but winds up married to a young woman named Gertie Cummings.

There was some discussion about whether Jud Fry, like Laurey and Curly, should be recast as a lesbian or remain a heterosexual man. Rauch opted for the latter. He felt Jud needed to be a troubled straight man who is angry that Laurey prefers a woman instead of him.

As for the sexual orientations and gender identities of the rest of the Oklahoma! community, a first-draft idea was to depict the ensemble players mostly as LGBTQ+, with a heterosexual couple or two in the mix. But that approach was later reconsidered. The revised plan was to present the chorus as “majority straight,” said Rauch, because “the world is majority straight.” He didn’t want to make the play’s setting a rural “gay mecca.” “It’s a more typical community, proportionally, in terms of sexual identity, except that we are zeroing in on the love stories of a lesbian couple and a gay male couple.” Nevertheless, OSF will look to cast both straight and LGBTQ+ actors.

Before Rauch came to OSF, he was the artistic director of Cornerstone Theater Company, which often conducted residencies in low-income communities. “In our first five years, we worked almost exclusively in rural towns with populations from 200 to 2,000 people. In every town, no matter how small, we met members of the LGBTQ+ community. In this way, this production’s focus represents the reality we encountered again and again in rural communities throughout the United States.”

The decision to move ahead with this unconventional production caused many ripples. Certain gender pronouns needed to be changed within the text, of course. Revisions to certain of Hammerstein’s lyrics were required. And the musical arrangements also needed alteration, because, in the case of Curly, a female voice will now sing a man’s vocal line (and vice versa in the case of Ado Andy).

That R&H blessed all these changes seems remarkable, especially considering that it has not always been so open to innovation in the shows it licenses (which also include titles by writers other than Rodgers and Hammerstein). Back in 1983, the organization famously gave thumbs down to a New York University production of South Pacific helmed by director Anne Bogart. The action was set in a hospital for wounded veterans, and multiple actors took on the role of Nellie Forbush. Looking back on the Bogart episode, Chapin explained: “While it was fascinating, my instinct told me that property wasn’t ready for a radical rethink.”

He stressed that R&H (which was acquired by the Imagem music-publishing group in 2009) remains protective of its reputation. Chapin has little respect for those who view the Rodgers and Hammerstein shows as “blueprints to create their own show.” He elaborated: “We once allowed a fancy British director to move scenes around in South Pacific, and the results were dreadful.” At the same time, he keeps in mind that, in their own era, the original Rodgers and Hammerstein shows were seen as risks. Oklahoma! and its 1945 follow-up, Carousel, were both first produced by the Theatre Guild, which had begun as an experimental company that rejected staid Broadway conventions.

But what convinced Chapin to approve OSF’s unconventional Oklahoma! was his firm trust in Rauch. Chapin had become familiar with the director from his work on Medea/Macbeth/Cinderella, which was first staged in Los Angeles in 1998. That show blended Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella (a television musical from 1957) with texts from Euripides and Shakespeare. A later version of Medea/Macbeth/Cinderella appeared at OSF in 2012. The show sounded “preposterous” when first proposed, said Chapin. “But not only did it work, it got us a lot of good feedback for allowing it to happen. What we are allowing Bill to do with Oklahoma! is quite specifically permission we are willing to grant him, and him alone. He has earned the right.”

Still, there are stipulations that Rauch and OSF must honor. According to Ted DeLong, OSF’s general manager, some of these have to do with the show’s famous “dream ballet” that ends the musical’s first act. DeLong said that, once a choreographer is hired, an additional conversation with R&H may be in order.

The recent inclusion at OSF of big musicals from the commercial sector has required negotiations that weren’t necessary back in the days when the Festival was all-Shakespeare-all-the-time (or nearly so). With Shakespeare’s plays, unusual adaptations have come to be expected. Nobody needed to seek permission from some Shakespearean tribunal to set The Comedy of Errors in Harlem during the 1920s or to move The Winter’s Tale to ancient China. Nor were there problems in making changes to the two Gilbert & Sullivan operettas—The Pirates of Penzance and The Yeomen of the Guard—that the Festival mounted in recent seasons. Like Shakespeare’s canon, those properties are in the public domain. But with such shows as The Music Man, Guys and Dolls, The Wiz and Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, negotiations with licensing entities have been required. They can seem at times like complicated dances with odd steps and uncomfortable poses.

According to Rauch and DeLong, organizations such as R&H and Disney must approve any changes a company makes to a show’s text or score, including additions, subtractions and shifting of scenes or songs. The Festival is free to cast unconventionally when it comes to race, but not to gender. (So it was fine for OSF to cast an African-American actor in the role of Marian Paroo in The Music Man, but had the shift instead been to have Professor Harold Hill played by a woman, the rights holder could have exercised veto power.) As for moving a show to a different setting or “world”—say, setting Guys and Dolls in classical Greece—rights holders can object. But that, said Rauch, is something the Festival has not yet faced.

With Beauty and the Beast, Disney was exceedingly generous in allowing departures from the norm, according to the show’s director, Eric Tucker. A mid-20th-century prologue was added. Scenes and songs were shifted around. And musical underscoring was removed to make the action seem more like a play and less like “a story pushed along by music.” Tucker worried about having changed Gaston’s death scene—making it a shooting rather than a fall from the castle wall. “Even after being told I could do anything I wanted,” Tucker says, “I still felt I needed to mention [to Disney] the change to Gaston’s death. And in the end that change was met with only excitement on their part.”  

On at least one occasion, though, gaining permission became touch and go, according to DeLong. Director Amanda Dehnert proposed changes to the orchestration of the final moments of Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s Into the Woods, and the rights holders viewed a video recording of the Ashland production before granting approval. Their blessing came only shortly before the show was set to begin its run.

Directors sometimes get pleasing results when working within constraints set by rights holders. In setting out to direct an intimate version of My Fair Lady (songs by Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe) in 2013, Dehnert used a two-piano version of the show’s score that had been approved by Loewe and that she had used in a Trinity Repertory Company production in 2000. She had two pianos placed prominently on the stage, creating an effect that delighted critic Tony Frankel, who called the show “a mash-up of Bertolt Brecht and an Edwardian music hall.”

After OSF’s plan for the boundary-busting Oklahoma! was announced to the press this spring, Rauch received some expressions of concern, but far more expressions of support. He acknowledged that the production would inevitably be challenging for some. He also noted that sometimes the people who initially are most resistant to a challenging work of art are the ones who will undergo the deepest change of heart in the long run.

One wonders what Rodgers and Hammerstein would have thought of this production had they lived into our millennium. Hammerstein died in 1960, Rodgers in 1979—only a decade after the Stonewall riots that have come to signify the beginning of the American LGBTQ+ movement. Meryle Secrest noted in her Rodgers biography that while the composer was probably not the most gay-friendly figure on Broadway, he was aware of the homosexuality of his first writing partner—the deeply troubled (and exceedingly difficult) Lorenz “Larry” Hart— yet nevertheless stood by him for decades. As for Hammerstein, it’s hard to imagine that the man who wrote the lyrics to South Pacific’s “You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught” would have failed to support the LGBTQ+ cause.

Before Oklahoma! opened back in 1943, a song called “Boys and Girls Like You and Me” was cut from its score. While the number will not be restored to OSF’s adaptation, Hammerstein’s lyrics are worth noting. They celebrate the steadfast courage it takes to find and keep love, and they prefigure the words that Hamilton creator Lin-Manuel Miranda presented in a poem delivered on the night he won a Tony Award in 2016—words written to honor the victims of the massacre in a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, earlier that weekend.

Miranda wrote:

. . . Love is love is love is love is love is love is love is love

 cannot be killed or swept aside

This is Hammerstein:

They walk on every village street,
They walk in lanes where branches meet,
And stars send down their blessings from the blue.
They go through storms of doubt and fear.
And so they go from year to year,
Believing in each other as we do,
Bravely marching forward two by two.

Boys and girls like you and me
Walk beneath the skies.
They love just as we love
With the same dream in their eyes.
Songs and kings and many things
Have their day and are gone.
But boys and girls like you and me
We go on and on. 

Oklahoma runs April 18–October 27.