In this atone age – the age of looking sceptically at old assumptions – the American musical is coming in for scrutiny. It is hard to imagine a show being more effectively rethought than Daniel Fish and Jordan Fein’s Broadway production of Oklahoma!.
All around the pale wood set designed by Laura Jellinek and Grace Laubacher, guns hang above the heads of the audience, who face each other on either side of the stage, as if ready for hoedown – or mow-down. Daniel Kluger’s reorchestration has stripped away lushness from the music, which is played by an onstage string band: country-twanging, roaring into rock, making a chorus sound less like a cowboy whoop than a war cry, yet capable of melting into intimacy with People Will Say We’re in Love. Being a no-disguise production, for much of the evening the house lights are up, but Scott Zielinski’s lighting plunges the action into total darkness for some disturbing encounters and turns the air an eerie turquoise at fantasy time. The hopeful young couple Curly and Laurey are last seen in wedding clothes, spattered with blood.
