When I went to NYC in January 2020 (yes, I know, right before the pandemic), I was told I had to see the revival of Oklahoma!. I was skeptical – it was a Golden Age musical, so it was old-fashioned by today’s standards, and it had never been one of my favorite ones. But I was told, “Oh, this is different. This isn’t your mother’s Oklahoma!”
And it wasn’t.
And I think it was very true to the mission that Oscar Hammerstein II set when he started writing Oklahoma with Richard Rodgers (their first collaboration). To shake things up – to fully integrate the story, the songs, the dancing – instead of having the songs being merely a toe-tapping diversion. Instead, the songs moved the action along, they were a continuation of the dialogue, and they developed the characters fully. Hammerstein had started this work with Jerome Kern in Showboat, but it was fully realized in Oklahoma! and in their other musicals of the 1940s and 1950s.