Touring North Texas, Daniel Fish’s violent deconstruction of ‘Oklahoma!’ lacks cohesion

When Oklahoma! arrived on Broadway in 1943, it was an unprecedented sensation, operating for 5 years and a pair of,212 performances, a report that held up till 1956. In style with the general public, the groundbreaking musical was additionally lauded by critics for its refined integration of songs and dance numbers right into a dramatic narrative.

However what nobody appeared to note beneath the structural improvements of the “e-book musical” was the informal angle towards violence on the coronary heart of Oklahoma! It took one other six many years for the theme of American frontier justice and its implications for the current day to come back to the fore in director Daniel Fish’s startling tackle Rodgers and Hammerstein’s first collaboration.

Pandemic-delayed between its 2019 Tony-winning Broadway revival and a nationwide tour, Fish’s wildly tone-swinging model simply accomplished a run at Winspear Opera Home and is headed to Fort Price’s Bass Efficiency Corridor.

After the Uvalde college capturing, presenter Broadway Dallas issued a warning that prop weapons can be fired throughout the present. Fish’s Oklahoma! has prompted walkouts in all places it’s been. At a closing weekend matinee on the Winspear, a couple of dozen patrons streamed out at intermission, which isn’t uncommon for giant touring productions in Dallas. Subscribers typically purchase tickets out of civic responsibility or take a threat, then depart when their expectations aren’t met.

The presentation is unusual from the beginning, approaching like quaint group theater earlier than out of the blue turning garish with coloration, quantity and outsized Blair Witch-like projections, then again once more. It has the whisper-to-a-scream dynamics of a tune by the Pixies whereas failing to create a dialogue between these contrasting parts.

Nonetheless, it’s at instances a marvel to take a look at as designers Laura Jellinek (set) and Scott Zielinski (lighting) have made daring artistic decisions. At key moments, the stage is encompassed by faint baths of pink or inexperienced mild, calling consideration to what’s simply beneath the floor of Oklahoma! — the American penchant for violent injustice serving the wants of the bulk.

With this half-dark look and fast modifications in tone, Fish places the highlight on the cracks within the American dream.

One of many belongings you discover straight away is how underpowered the actors sound, starting with Sean Grandillo’s cocky cowboy Curly McLain sarcastically singing “Oh What a Lovely Mornin’” as if he have been off-mic within the bathe. (Fish skips the overture and the rise of the curtain.) The seven-piece band assembled behind the stage additionally flattens out the music by underplaying it.

The plot is deceptively easy: a pair of affection triangles, the primary one amongst Curly, farm lady Laurey Williams (Sasha Hutchings, whose vocals and dancing shine) and the crude farmhand Jud Fry (Christopher Bannow with hippie lengthy hair and a clean stare). The trio trades insults in a type of foreplay that has earned this manufacturing the outline “horny Oklahoma!” The reality is intercourse (together with accompanying violence) all the time has occupied the musical’s middle.

The set is fashionable day-ish: plywood picnic tables holding six-packs of Bud Gentle, stalks of corn and Crock-Pots; coolers on the ground; coloured tinsel streamers strung throughout the ceiling; the left and proper partitions lined with racks of lengthy weapons — 118 in complete. (Fish instructed Jellinek he wished “too many weapons.”)

“The Surrey with the Fringe on High” follows with a bit extra animation, Curly torture-teasing Laurey with the promise of a flowery rig he might or might need to take her to the field social. (She’s already promised Jud she’d go together with him.) Everybody’s a seducer in Oklahoma!, even Aunt Eller (Barbara Walsh), who says if she was a couple of years youthful she’d be after Curly, too.

The second threesome is anchored by Ado Annie (Sis), who “cain’t say no” to no matter man she’s within the presence of, be it the touring cowpoke Will Parker (Hennessy Winkler), who brings house tales of how “every part’s up-to-date in Kansas Metropolis,” or the touring snake-oil salesman Ali Hakim (Benj Mirman), making an attempt to keep away from marriage in any respect prices, even when Annie’s pop Carnes (Mitch Tebo) threatens him with a gun.

That is Fish’s overriding theme. The present will get loud or bizarre each time the violent scenes come round, the director feeling obligated to spotlight what Rodgers and Hammerstein let the viewer work out on their very own. The 1955 movie model is simply as startling as Fish’s however it permits you to come to its murderous undercurrents of your individual accord.

When Curly goes to the smokehouse the place Jud sleeps to encourage his rival to hold himself, the theater goes darkish. We see a projection of Jud’s face in grainy black-and-white protecting the again wall. That type of images is repeated throughout the postmodern dream ballet, a surreal 15-minute solo as a substitute of a gaggle quantity filled with flailing and gesticulating as a substitute of correct dancing, Jordan Wynn standing in for a napping Laurey as she wrestles with which man to choose.

On account of these jarring sequences, the manufacturing by no means jells right into a cohesive narrative, most likely not Fish’s intention. As a substitute, with out altering a phrase and just one essential plot level, he has created an Oklahoma! about Oklahoma!, an in-your-face deconstruction of what Fish fears everybody missed the primary time round.

Oklahoma! has all the time ended with a fast non-trial that exonerates Curly for Jud’s loss of life. Within the unique, Jud falls on his personal knife throughout a battle with Curly. Fish as a substitute has upped the ante to implicate Curly extra immediately.

That is Fish’s remaining testomony, mentioning what he finds most annoying about Oklahoma! as if he’s criticizing Rodgers and Hammerstein for his or her subtlety. The musical is not a bit of revolutionary leisure. In Fish’s imaginative and prescient, it’s turn out to be a treatise.

Particulars

June 21-26 at Bass Efficiency Corridor, 525 Commerce St., Fort Price. $44-$99. basshall.com.