Oklahoma! - The Road to Success

[njr]

I bought a VHS tape of this, ages ago, only to discover that Hugh’s performance was deleted from it! I was so mad! Glad to finally see it!

Nancy

[jo]

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Trying to squint-read all his script notes

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From a thread discussing Patrick Wilson --

[jo]

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Congratulations to "Aunt Eller"

[njr]

^ Was that “Ugly Sweater Day?” 😂

[jo]

It was only recently that I read that Hugh met XMen producer Lauren Shuler Donner backstage after the show. I have always thought that she was only in the audience in London. Their actual meeting each other now seems to explain why of all the movies that were being considered for filming by Hollywood that Hugh chose to audition for the role of Wolverine. Did Lauren S. Donner encourage him to do so? Patrick Whitesell also saw him in Oklahoma! but I think they did not have a professional relationship at that point -- so the likely suggestion of the first audition might have come from Ms.Donner. The last audition when XMen was already filming in Canada and needed someone to replace Dougray Scott must have come from Whitesell ( Hugh mentioned sometime ago that he was tipped by his agent to go to Canada when the audition invitation came along).




Jo

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Now he's part of history classes

[jo]

www.broadwayworld.com/westend/article/BWW-Feature-WE-SAW-THEM-FIRSTTHE-MUSICAL-ACTORS-Five-Musicals-Whose-Male-Performers-Later-Became-Stars-20210215

BWW Feature: WE SAW THEM FIRST/THE MUSICAL ACTORS - Five Musicals Whose Male Performers Later Became Stars
We look back to when Hugh Jackman was Curly, Adrian Lester was Bobby, and more
by Matt Wolf Feb. 15, 2021

BWW Feature: WE SAW THEM FIRST/THE MUSICAL ACTORS - Five Musicals Whose Male Performers Later Became Stars. We've looked across the past few weeks at a range of plays over time that offered crucial opportunities to an array of then little-known men and women who have since hit it big. Now, it's time to cast a glance at those stage musicals in London that brought to the attention of keen-eyed playgoers various people whom the world would get to know later, in some cases as major names indeed.

It's tempting to mention en route the blink-and-you-miss-them appearances made by a then 17-year-old James Corden in the ensemble of Martin Guerre, or Richard Armitage back in the day scampering about in Cats, which seems an odd credit for a TV heartthrob whose stage choices of late have embraced heavyweight titles by Arthur Miller (The Crucible) and Chekhov (Uncle Vanya). In noting them, we nonetheless give pride of place to five men remembered from their comparative dotage who have gone on to dazzle us in the years since.


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Clarke Peters, Guys and Dolls, National Theatre 1984 and 1996

The American actor Clarke Peters was a regular, and invaluable, presence on the London stage well before he joined the cast of the iconic HBO series The Wire, playing Detective Lester Freamon. Since then, he's been an invaluable asset to the ensemble casts of Harriet (as Harriet Tubman's father), Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, and current Oscar hopeful Da 5 Bloods (seen in conversation about that film below). I first encountered his protean gifts in not one but two iterations of Richard Eyre's historic National Theatre revival of Guys and Dolls, where he took over as Sky Masterson the first time round and then refreshed the roll from scratch a dozen years later, bringing his signature charm and elan to the roll of the high-stakes gambler both times round.


Adrian Lester, Company, Donmar Warehouse 1996

The Stephen Sondheim/George Furth musical from 1970 is a curious beast - a celebrated show featuring a central character Bobby (or, in the recent gender flip on the part, Bobbie) who can often seem a passive presence in a musical all about finding a soulmate for him (or her). But I shan't ever forget the ease with which the dazzling Adrian Lester put Bobby at the deserved heart of Sam Mendes' revival of Company, which lives on in a filmed version. Lester also made history as the first Black performer to take on this role in any major production, a fact that may not seem any big deal now but was momentous at the time. So, too, was Lester's soul-baring performance, for which he won an Olivier.



Hugh Jackman, Oklahoma!, National Theatre, 1998



You had to be there, and how lucky for those of us who were. I'm referring to the thrill of encountering a little-known (in the UK, anyway) Australian performer by the name of Hugh Jackman who was first heard as Curly in Trevor Nunn's seminal National Theatre production of Oklahoma! and minutes later seen as the character loped into view - a double whammy for the ages, since which time the rest really is history. Jackman never took Oklahoma! to Broadway (Patrick Wilson inherited the role there), but instead became both a bona fide movie star and Broadway stalwart who will be giving us his Harold Hill in The Music Man early next year to mark the giddy return of live theatre to the city. We're counting down the days now, trust me.


Bertie Carvel, Parade, Donmar Warehouse, 2007

This chameleonic actor has become a name via such TV gigs as Doctor Foster and The Sister and won both Tony and Olivier Awards for playing the media mogul Rupert Murdoch in Ink, a play that itself cries out for a screen transfer. But his questing intelligence and fine voice were put to memorable use earlier on as a Southern Jew suspected of murder in the 2007 London premiere of Jason Robert Brown's dark and disturbing Parade, for which Carvel was nominated for an Olivier. He went on to win one for his fearsome and funny turn as "the Trunch" in the premiere of Matilda but seriousness matters to this actor and his Leo Frank, brooding and compelling, was something to behold.



Jonathan Bailey, The Last Five Years, 2016

Jonathan Bailey lent invaluable support to the National's vaunted 2013 revival of Othello, playing Cassio opposite none other than Adrian Lester, and he was amongst those circling the fearsome (and often undressed) figure of Matt Smith in American Psycho at the Almeida. But several years before his gender-flipped Jamie in the Marianne Elliott-directed Company won him an Olivier, Bailey played a very different Jamie in composer Jason Robert Brown's self-directed Off West End revival of The Last Five Years at the St James Theatre (now The Other Palace). Bailey has more recently been found bringing sauciness and wit to the breakaway Netflix hit Bridgerton, which should transform an ever-welcome London theatre presence into an international star.


Were you lucky enough to catch any of these performances? Let us know on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter!

*Saw Hugh Jackman in the London revival of OKLAHOMA! late in the run. Did not know him...but noted his commanding stage presence and powerful legit stage voice! Rediscovered him when I got a copy of the VHS version of Oklahoma!

*Must have seen the blink-and-you miss performance from James Corden because I did the see an early performance of MARTIN GUERRE in London. Also saw him in HISTORY BOYS when it transferred to Broadway ( presumably he was also in the London production. Other future stars in that show was Dominic Cooper in the film version of MAMMA MIA!


Jo

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I have recounted this story about Lea Salonga discovering Hugh Jackman a few times... but this clip sees Lea describing that first glimpse of the Hugh Jackman as simply unforgettable.



The other actress sitting with her when they discovered Hugh doing a rehearsal for the concert tribute was Maria Friedman ( with whom Lea performed together in the Sondheim quartet in the concert).

Lea wonders if Hugh had sung songs on set when he was cast as Wolverine. She said that it is a rarity to see such a masculine person involved in musical theatre (given the LGBTQ reputation of many leading men in musical theatre). I guess Lea did not know that it was also a woman, but this time the XMen producer herself Lauren Shuler Donner, who saw Hugh Jackman in Oklahoma!...and when the time came that Dougray Scott ( the choice of Fox CEO Tom Rothman) could not make it... was the one (LaurenSDonner) who suggested " let's bring in Hugh Jackman"!

Just to correct Lea's impression -- Patrick Whitesell, Hugh's longtime agent, encouraged him to return to the stage in The Boy From Oz on Broadway. It was the other people around him who advised against it. But aren't we glad that Hugh followed Patrick's advice?




This was the performance whose rehearsal introduced Lea and all the mesmerized ladies to that man with the "incredible masculinity"( per James Mangold's description)

[jo]

Could the man at the back of Hugh wearing a white shirt and arm raised be Warren Carlyle?

He was the dance captain and assistant choreographer for the production. He is also listed in the cast as "Jake" so he was part of the cast.


Jo

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Oklahoma! without Hugh Jackman!

Published in the Tampa Bay Times --

Oh, what a beautiful musical!
By JOHN FLEMING
Published Aug. 29, 2005


Somewhere in America, just about any day of the year, Curly is singing about a beautiful morning, Aunt Eller is revving up a barn dance for the farmer and the cowman and Laurey is dreaming about who's going to take her to the box social.

Oklahoma! was the first show Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II wrote together, and it revolutionized musical theater when it premiered in 1943. It is still performed all the time and tops many a list of great American musicals.

"The two shows that are extraordinarily durable are Oklahoma! and The Sound of Music, and I say that because of the sheer number of productions that happen year in and year out," said Ted Chapin, president of the Rodgers & Hammerstein Organization, which licenses productions of the shows. "Each has about 600 different productions a year in America."


On a rainy Friday morning, in the R&H offices on the 24th floor of an anonymous building in the theater district, with a portrait of Rodgers looking down from the conference room wall, Chapin sipped coffee from a Show Boat mug and talked about what it's like to be in charge of the mother lode of American musical theater.

The organization handles not only all things Rodgers and Hammerstein, from theatrical rights to music publishing to orchestral and vocal performances to movies, but also represents other songwriters such as Irving Berlin, Andrew Lloyd Webber and Adam Guettel, the next great hope among American theater composers (and Rodgers' grandson). The organization holds rights to Big River, Smokey Joe's Cafe, Swing! and many other shows.

The main subject at hand was the Oklahoma! tour that comes to the Tampa Bay area this week. It was spawned by a wildly successful revival in London and a less successful one on Broadway.

Chapin, a boyish 54, grew up in the '60s, and the first time he saw Oklahoma! he wondered what all the fuss was about. "I remember my reaction was, "What's the revolution?' I had seen Show Boat the year before. Show Boat is about miscegenation; it's tough stuff. Oklahoma! is a bunch of cowboys, and it seems more old-fashioned than Show Boat."

As an aspiring young director ("I wanted to be Hal Prince"), Chapin was more enamored of the musical theater of Stephen Sondheim. He chronicled his time as a production assistant during the creation of Sondheim's brilliant, problematic Follies, directed by Prince, in the 2003 memoir Everything Was Possible.

Today he appreciates Oklahoma! as a culmination of all the innovation introduced into musical theater by artists from Rodgers and Hammerstein (working with different partners) to Cole Porter, George Balanchine and Kurt Weill.

"I like the Rodgers quote that the orchestrations had to sound like the costumes look," Chapin said. "That notion of it all being integrated, which we now take for granted, was the revolution."

Oklahoma!, adapted from a play by Lynn Riggs called Green Grow the Lilacs, was the first show to bring together music and story in a thoroughly persuasive way.

"The score is one amazing song after another," Chapin said. "Ultimately, musicals withstand the test of time because people like the scores. The story is a story of coming of age, a story of a territory becoming a state becoming a country. The story is not the most breathtaking thing in the show _ who's going to take the girl to the box social? _ but the way they did it was what makes it enduring."

Rodgers and Hammerstein classics were mostly being performed in schools, community theaters and summer stock until a remarkable series of Broadway revivals in the last decade. The best was English director Nicholas Hytner's radical rethinking of Carousel. There also were Broadway productions and tours of The King and I and The Sound of Music. South Pacific had a London production and a U.S. tour. Even Flower Drum Song, rarely performed because of its outdated view of Asian-Americans, was revived on Broadway with a revised book by David Henry Hwang, but it did not do well.

Oklahoma! was the crown jewel of the catalog, and a Trevor Nunn-directed revival at England's National Theatre, with Hugh Jackman playing Curly, promised revelations to come. Chapin, who says "there was no big master plan" behind the string of R&H revivals, was bowled over by the show when it opened in London in 1998.

"It was amazing. It had a sense of discovery. I even said it was better than Carousel," he said.



But when producer Cameron Mackintosh wanted to bring Oklahoma! to Broadway the next year, Actors' Equity objected, saying there was no way the union would allow the quintessential American musical to be performed by, and provide jobs to, a British company.

"My feeling is that at that moment the air started to go out of the tires," Chapin said.

It wasn't until 2002 that Oklahoma! finally made it to Broadway, but without Jackman. Instead, Curly was played by Patrick Wilson, who grew up in St. Petersburg, coming off his Tony Award-nominated performance in The Full Monty. The lone British holdover from the London production was Josefina Gabrielle, playing Laurey. A onetime soloist with the National Ballet of Portugal, her performance of the Act One-closing dream ballet was billed as a first, because dancers usually step in for the actors in the number.

Chapin, who has veto power in any Rodgers and Hammerstein production if he chooses to exercise it, liked Wilson's Curly ("I'm a huge Patrick fan") but thought the loss of Jackman upset the dynamics of the central relationship.


"Josefina was extraordinary playing opposite Hugh Jackman," he said. "She's not an instinctive actor. She's a very good dancer. But there was something between her and Hugh that was magic onstage. She's not a skilled enough performer to adjust to Patrick Wilson, who is a very fine performer. There just wasn't chemistry there."


Jackman, of course, made it big in his Broadway debut last season, winning a Tony for his portrayal of Peter Allen in The Boy From Oz. "I just wish he'd come in Oklahoma!" Chapin said.

Wilson went on to be nominated for an Emmy Award for his performance in Mike Nichols' production of Angels in America for HBO. He plays Raoul in the movie of The Phantom of the Opera that is to be released in December.




There were other problems with Oklahoma! Chapin said Nunn was less than fully engaged in the production ("Trevor doesn't like replicating shows") and designer Anthony Ward was preoccupied with another project. The inattention led to a crucial lapse in the staging in the Broadway venue, the Gershwin Theater, a large, charmless space that has housed few hits, though Wicked has now settled in for a long run.

"They made the classic mistake of what not to do in a large theater: They made it seem even larger," Chapin said of Nunn and his creative team. "It looked like the St. Louis Muni. It looked like a 12,000-seat outdoor theater. I just don't think anybody did their job."

Oklahoma! lasted less than a year on Broadway, a major disappointment. The tour has been a bit jinxed as well. Performed by a non-Actors' Equity cast, it became something of a political football in contract negotiations between the union and the League of American Theatres and Producers.

Under the new contract, ratified in August, Equity cast members are paid a minimum of $1,381 a week, plus a per diem, with some large touring musicals allowed to pay on a sliding scale. Actors in non-union shows are paid much less.




Chapin said that a non-Equity cast doesn't hurt a show such as Oklahoma! in which most of the characters are in their 20s. "It hasn't affected the business of the tour, and it hasn't affected the critical reaction to it."

Still, the lack of noteworthy credits among the cast bios is dismaying for a show that is, after all, opening the 2004-05 Broadway series at the Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center. The Nunn staging was re-created by Fred Hanson, and Susan Stroman's choreography was redone by Ginger Thatcher.

Except for a possible revival someday of South Pacific, the R&H pipeline to Broadway is emptier than it has been in years, but Chapin has plenty of projects in the works. A stage production of Berlin's White Christmas opens in San Francisco in November. "We hope it will give theaters an opportunity to put A Christmas Carol aside for a year or two and do White Christmas," he said.

The DVD of Cinderella, the original 1957 version with Julie Andrews that Rodgers and Hammerstein wrote for television, is to be released in December.

And then there are all the other markets around the world where Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals are performed. Oklahoma! has been translated into German, French, Spanish and Japanese.

"The Sound of Music has the most universal appeal," said Chapin, who went to a production in Shanghai this year. "Germany and Austria have a little trouble with it, but the rest of the world knows it from the movie."

The DVD of Cinderella, the original 1957 version with Julie Andrews that Rodgers and Hammerstein wrote for television, is to be released in December.

And then there are all the other markets around the world where Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals are performed. Oklahoma! has been translated into German, French, Spanish and Japanese.

"The Sound of Music has the most universal appeal," said Chapin, who went to a production in Shanghai this year. "Germany and Austria have a little trouble with it, but the rest of the world knows it from the movie."

The translations take some liberties that probably would have amused Hammerstein, a lyrical craftsman with a sense of humor.

"In Japan, it's interesting," Chapin said. "What they tend to do is do the dialogue in Japanese and the songs in English."

John Fleming can be reached at [phone] or flemingsptimes.com.

PREVIEW

Oklahoma! opens Tuesday and runs through Oct. 31 at the Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center. $20-$66.50. [phone], toll-free 1-800-955-1045; www.tbpac.org.

The translations take some liberties that probably would have amused Hammerstein, a lyrical craftsman with a sense of humor.

"In Japan, it's interesting," Chapin said. "What they tend to do is do the dialogue in Japanese and the songs in English."

John Fleming can be reached at [phone] or flemingsptimes.com.

[jo]

No offense to Patrick but I think that while he has a beautiful singing voice...he doesn't have the charisma of Hugh Jackman. I did not know of him then but I was eager to see him as Raoul in the film adaptation of Phantom of the Opera. But he turned out to be a big disappointment to me -- He didn't have the big screen appeal that I expected. I thought Gerard Butler had more appeal even with his "rock music" voice.

Patrick eventually went to Hollywood and is now known as the lead in "The Conjuring" franchise.

He also joined the Barbra Streisand album which also featured Hugh ("Any Moment Now").


Jo