Post by jo on Apr 7, 2019 21:11:36 GMT -5
The New York Post review is as outraged as Rex Reed's Observer comments ( 1 of 4 stars or 25% mark)
nypost.com/2019/04/07/oklahoma-review-anti-gun-revival-of-classic-shot-to-hell/
Johnny Oleksinski
Entertainment
‘Oklahoma!’ review: Anti-gun revival of classic shot to hell
By Johnny Oleksinski
April 7, 2019 | 9:00pm | Updated
Theater review
"Oklahoma!"
At the Circle in The Square Theatre, 1633 Broadway. Running time: 2 hours, 45 minutes, one intermission. 212-239-6200
The corn is as high as an elephant’s eye, and so is my blood pressure, thanks to the revival of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Oklahoma!”
In director Daniel Fish’s pretentious production — which opened Sunday on Broadway, fresh from Brooklyn’s St. Ann’s Warehouse — everything you cherish about this classic has been taken out behind the barn and shot, replaced by an auteur’s bag of tricks and a thesis on gun control and westward expansion. Here, the West was won by a culture of violence and toxic masculinity — what fun!
The audience at the Circle in the Square Theatre sits on three sides of the stage, the plywood-covered walls plastered with rifles. The pit orchestra’s more like a seven-person bluegrass band, decked out in plaid, and the house lights are cranked all the way up. This looks like a hootenanny, you think.
Well, hold your horses. The lights stay on in the house for most of the show, maybe to create intimacy. But the almost constant brightness, which changes only a handful of times to neon green or red and at one point goes dark entirely, muddies the storytelling. No scene seems any different from the next, and the whole thing is a mostly joyless chore.
The story remains the same. Two potential suitors, cowboy Curly (Damon Daunno) and farm hand Jud (Patrick Vaill), both dream of accompanying Laurey (played with a furrowed brow by Rebecca Naomi Jones) to the box social and beyond.
You may recall Curly as a heroic Hugh Jackman type, who grins through “Oh, What A Beautiful Mornin,’ ” and Jud as an Andre the Giant type. No longer. Now, both of them are stick-thin creeps with greasy hair. Lucky for us, they have awful purty singing voices.
So does Ali Stroker, who plays Ado Annie, the gal who can’t say no, opposite James Davis’ doofy Will Parker. The funny, sexier-than-usual pair tries their best to keep things light in this giant frown of a staging, as does Will Brill as their third wheel, oily peddler Ali Hakim.
In fact, they and Mary Testa’s pushy Aunt Eller would be a fine addition to any other production of “Oklahoma!” But their instruction here would seem to be “have a lousy time.” The actors lounge around on benches, speaking quietly with no particular investment in the scene. When we arrive at the should-be showstoppers — the title song, “The Farmer and the Cowman” — choreographer John Heginbotham has the cast lazily amble around as if drunk.
Agnes De Mille’s famous Dream Ballet has been ditched for an overlong, gymnastics floor exercise danced, with admirable muscularity, by Gabrielle Hamilton in little more than a sparkly T-shirt reading “Dream Baby Dream.” Lovely.
Some of Fish’s ideas are fun. The chili and cornbread doled out to the audience at intermission is tasty, and the women snapping ears of corn during “Many A New Day” gives the scene rebellious energy. But in putting his actors in modern dress, making guns his wallpaper and forcing every moment that a gun is brandished or even mentioned to have bombastic significance, Fish clearly is saying he’s not a great fan of the culture of the Great Plains — of yesteryear or yesterday. In a preposterously heavy-handed sequence, he even has Jud present Curly with a pistol, rather than the usual knife, which leads to a shocking but inane conclusion. All this, in a hokey old show that includes the lyric, “Gonna give ya barley, carrots and potaters.” Listening to the New York audience applauding their own virtuosity makes a guy want to put this “Oklahoma!” out to pasture.
On the other hand, the New York Times review by Ben Brantlee is mostly impressed --
Theater
|
Review: A Smashing ‘Oklahoma!’ Is Reborn in the Land of Id
Critic’s Pick
Review: A Smashing ‘Oklahoma!’ Is Reborn in the Land of Id
By Ben Brantley
April 7, 2019
How is it that the coolest new show on Broadway in 2019 is a 1943 musical usually regarded as a very square slice of American pie? The answer arrives before the first song is over in Daniel Fish’s wide-awake, jolting and altogether wonderful production of “Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma!,” which opened on Sunday night at the Circle in the Square Theater.
“Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’” is the title and the opening line of this familiar number, a paean to a land of promisingly blue skies and open spaces. But Curly, the cowboy who sings it, isn’t cushioned by the expected lush orchestrations. Nor is the actor playing him your usual solid slab of beefcake with a strapping tenor.
As embodied by the excellent Damon Daunno, this lad of the prairies is wiry and wired, so full of unchanneled sexual energy you expect him to implode. There’s the hint of a wobble in his cocky strut and voice.
Doing his best to project a confidence he doesn’t entirely feel, to the accompaniment of a down-home guitar, he seems so palpably young. As is often true of big boys with unsettled hormones, he also reads as just a little dangerous.
He’s a lot like the feisty, ever-evolving nation he’s so proud to belong to. That would be the United States of America, then and now.
Making his Broadway debut as a director, Mr. Fish has reconceived a work often seen as a byword for can-do optimism as a mirror for our age of doubt and anxiety. This is “Oklahoma!” for an era in which longstanding American legacies are being examined with newly skeptical eyes.
Such a metamorphosis has been realized with scarcely a changed word of Oscar Hammerstein II’s original book and lyrics. This isn’t an act of plunder, but of reclamation. And a cozy old friend starts to seem like a figure of disturbing — and exciting — depth and complexity.
Mr. Fish’s version isn’t the first “Oklahoma!” to elicit the shadows from within the play’s sunshine. Trevor Nunn and Susan Stroman’s interpretation for London’s National Theater of nearly two decades ago, while more traditionally staged, also scaled up the disquieting erotic elements.
But this latest incarnation goes much further in digging to a core of fraught ambivalence. To do so, it strips “Oklahoma!” down to its skivvies, discarding the picturesque costumes and swirling orchestrations, and revealing a very human body that belongs to our conflicted present as much as it did to 1943 or to 1906, the year in which the show (based on Lynn Riggs’s “Green Grow the Lilacs”) takes place.
Editors’ Picks
Laura Jellinek’s set suggests a small-town community center that might double as a polling station, decorated with festive banners, colored lights — and a full arsenal of guns on the walls. It’s made clear that we the audience are part of this community. The house lights stay on for much of the show, in a homogenizing brightness, that is occasionally and abruptly changed for pitch darkness. (Scott Zielinski is the first-rate lighting designer.)
There’s chili cooking on the refectory tables onstage, for the audience’s consumption at intermission. A seven-member hootenanny-style band sits in plain view. The well-known melodies they play have been reimagined — by the brilliant orchestrator and arranger Daniel Kluger — with the vernacular throb and straightforwardness of country and western ballads.
The cast members — wearing a lot of good old, form-fitting denim (Terese Wadden did the costumes) — are just plain folks. Singing with conversational ease, they occasionally flirt and joke with the audience seated on either side of the stage. We are all, it would appear, in this together.
Though the cast has been whittled down to 11 speaking parts (and one dancer), the key characters are very much present. They include our scrapping leading lovers, Curly McLain and Laurey Williams (Rebecca Naomi Jones); their comic counterparts, Will Parker (James Davis) and Ado Annie (Ali Stroker); that bastion of homespun wisdom and stoicism, Aunt Eller (Mary Testa) and the womanizing peddler Ali Hakim (Will Brill).
Oh, I almost forgot poor old Jud Fry (Patrick Vaill), the slightly, well, weird handyman who’s sweet, in a sour way, on Laurey. Everybody forgets Jud, or tries to. Not that this is possible, with Mr. Vaill lending a charismatic, hungry loneliness to the part that’s guaranteed to haunt your nightmares.
These people — in some cases nontraditionally yet always perfectly cast — intersect much as they usually do in “Oklahoma!” They court and spark, fight and reunite. They also show off by picking up guitars and microphones and dancing like prairie bacchantes. (John Heginbotham did the spontaneous-feeling choreography.) They use household chores, like shucking corn, to memorably annotative effect.
Ms. Stroker’s boy-crazy, country siren-voiced Ado Annie, who rides a wheelchair as if it were a prize bronco, and Mr. Davis’s deliciously dumb Will emanate a blissful endorphin haze. Mr. Brill is a refreshingly unmannered Ali Hakim, and Ms. Testa is a splendid, wryly authoritative Aunt Eller.
But there’s an abiding tension. This is especially evident in Ms. Jones’s affectingly wary Laurey, who regards her very different suitors, Curly and Jud, with a confused combination of desire and terror.
That her fears are not misplaced becomes clear in an encounter in Jud’s dank hovel of a home. Curly sings “Pore Jud,” in which he teasingly imagines his rival’s funeral with an ominous breathiness.
The scene occurs in darkness, with a simulcast video in black and white of the two men face to face. And the lines between sex and violence, already blurred in this gun-toting universe, melt altogether.
I first saw Mr. Fish’s “Oklahoma!” at Bard College in 2015, and again at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn last year. It was an exciting work from the get-go, but it just keeps getting better. The performances are looser and bigger; they’re Broadway-size now, with all the infectious exuberance you expect from a great musical.
At the same time, though, this production reminds us that such raw energy can be harnessed to different ends, for ill as well as for good. In the earlier versions, I had problems with its truly shocking conclusion — the scene that takes the most liberties with the original. In its carefully retooled rendering, it’s disturbing for all the right reasons.
The other significant change here involves the dream ballet, which in this version begins the second act and has been newly varied and paced. It is performed by one dancer (the exquisite Gabrielle Hamilton) with a shaved head and a glittering T-shirt that reads “Dream Baby Dream.”
What she does is a far cry from the same sequence as immortalized by Agnes de Mille, the show’s legendary original choreographer. But on its own, radically reconceptualized terms, it achieves the same effect.
As she gallops, slithers and crawls the length of the stage, casting wondering and seductive glances at the front row, Ms. Hamilton comes to seem like undiluted id incarnate, a force that has always been rippling beneath the surface here.
She’s as stimulating and frightening — and as fresh — as last night’s fever dream. So is this astonishing show.
Circle in the Square
235 W 50th St.
nypost.com/2019/04/07/oklahoma-review-anti-gun-revival-of-classic-shot-to-hell/
Johnny Oleksinski
Entertainment
‘Oklahoma!’ review: Anti-gun revival of classic shot to hell
By Johnny Oleksinski
April 7, 2019 | 9:00pm | Updated
Theater review
"Oklahoma!"
At the Circle in The Square Theatre, 1633 Broadway. Running time: 2 hours, 45 minutes, one intermission. 212-239-6200
The corn is as high as an elephant’s eye, and so is my blood pressure, thanks to the revival of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Oklahoma!”
In director Daniel Fish’s pretentious production — which opened Sunday on Broadway, fresh from Brooklyn’s St. Ann’s Warehouse — everything you cherish about this classic has been taken out behind the barn and shot, replaced by an auteur’s bag of tricks and a thesis on gun control and westward expansion. Here, the West was won by a culture of violence and toxic masculinity — what fun!
The audience at the Circle in the Square Theatre sits on three sides of the stage, the plywood-covered walls plastered with rifles. The pit orchestra’s more like a seven-person bluegrass band, decked out in plaid, and the house lights are cranked all the way up. This looks like a hootenanny, you think.
Well, hold your horses. The lights stay on in the house for most of the show, maybe to create intimacy. But the almost constant brightness, which changes only a handful of times to neon green or red and at one point goes dark entirely, muddies the storytelling. No scene seems any different from the next, and the whole thing is a mostly joyless chore.
The story remains the same. Two potential suitors, cowboy Curly (Damon Daunno) and farm hand Jud (Patrick Vaill), both dream of accompanying Laurey (played with a furrowed brow by Rebecca Naomi Jones) to the box social and beyond.
You may recall Curly as a heroic Hugh Jackman type, who grins through “Oh, What A Beautiful Mornin,’ ” and Jud as an Andre the Giant type. No longer. Now, both of them are stick-thin creeps with greasy hair. Lucky for us, they have awful purty singing voices.
So does Ali Stroker, who plays Ado Annie, the gal who can’t say no, opposite James Davis’ doofy Will Parker. The funny, sexier-than-usual pair tries their best to keep things light in this giant frown of a staging, as does Will Brill as their third wheel, oily peddler Ali Hakim.
In fact, they and Mary Testa’s pushy Aunt Eller would be a fine addition to any other production of “Oklahoma!” But their instruction here would seem to be “have a lousy time.” The actors lounge around on benches, speaking quietly with no particular investment in the scene. When we arrive at the should-be showstoppers — the title song, “The Farmer and the Cowman” — choreographer John Heginbotham has the cast lazily amble around as if drunk.
Agnes De Mille’s famous Dream Ballet has been ditched for an overlong, gymnastics floor exercise danced, with admirable muscularity, by Gabrielle Hamilton in little more than a sparkly T-shirt reading “Dream Baby Dream.” Lovely.
Some of Fish’s ideas are fun. The chili and cornbread doled out to the audience at intermission is tasty, and the women snapping ears of corn during “Many A New Day” gives the scene rebellious energy. But in putting his actors in modern dress, making guns his wallpaper and forcing every moment that a gun is brandished or even mentioned to have bombastic significance, Fish clearly is saying he’s not a great fan of the culture of the Great Plains — of yesteryear or yesterday. In a preposterously heavy-handed sequence, he even has Jud present Curly with a pistol, rather than the usual knife, which leads to a shocking but inane conclusion. All this, in a hokey old show that includes the lyric, “Gonna give ya barley, carrots and potaters.” Listening to the New York audience applauding their own virtuosity makes a guy want to put this “Oklahoma!” out to pasture.
On the other hand, the New York Times review by Ben Brantlee is mostly impressed --
Theater
|
Review: A Smashing ‘Oklahoma!’ Is Reborn in the Land of Id
Critic’s Pick
Review: A Smashing ‘Oklahoma!’ Is Reborn in the Land of Id
By Ben Brantley
April 7, 2019
How is it that the coolest new show on Broadway in 2019 is a 1943 musical usually regarded as a very square slice of American pie? The answer arrives before the first song is over in Daniel Fish’s wide-awake, jolting and altogether wonderful production of “Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma!,” which opened on Sunday night at the Circle in the Square Theater.
“Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’” is the title and the opening line of this familiar number, a paean to a land of promisingly blue skies and open spaces. But Curly, the cowboy who sings it, isn’t cushioned by the expected lush orchestrations. Nor is the actor playing him your usual solid slab of beefcake with a strapping tenor.
As embodied by the excellent Damon Daunno, this lad of the prairies is wiry and wired, so full of unchanneled sexual energy you expect him to implode. There’s the hint of a wobble in his cocky strut and voice.
Doing his best to project a confidence he doesn’t entirely feel, to the accompaniment of a down-home guitar, he seems so palpably young. As is often true of big boys with unsettled hormones, he also reads as just a little dangerous.
He’s a lot like the feisty, ever-evolving nation he’s so proud to belong to. That would be the United States of America, then and now.
Making his Broadway debut as a director, Mr. Fish has reconceived a work often seen as a byword for can-do optimism as a mirror for our age of doubt and anxiety. This is “Oklahoma!” for an era in which longstanding American legacies are being examined with newly skeptical eyes.
Such a metamorphosis has been realized with scarcely a changed word of Oscar Hammerstein II’s original book and lyrics. This isn’t an act of plunder, but of reclamation. And a cozy old friend starts to seem like a figure of disturbing — and exciting — depth and complexity.
Mr. Fish’s version isn’t the first “Oklahoma!” to elicit the shadows from within the play’s sunshine. Trevor Nunn and Susan Stroman’s interpretation for London’s National Theater of nearly two decades ago, while more traditionally staged, also scaled up the disquieting erotic elements.
But this latest incarnation goes much further in digging to a core of fraught ambivalence. To do so, it strips “Oklahoma!” down to its skivvies, discarding the picturesque costumes and swirling orchestrations, and revealing a very human body that belongs to our conflicted present as much as it did to 1943 or to 1906, the year in which the show (based on Lynn Riggs’s “Green Grow the Lilacs”) takes place.
Editors’ Picks
Laura Jellinek’s set suggests a small-town community center that might double as a polling station, decorated with festive banners, colored lights — and a full arsenal of guns on the walls. It’s made clear that we the audience are part of this community. The house lights stay on for much of the show, in a homogenizing brightness, that is occasionally and abruptly changed for pitch darkness. (Scott Zielinski is the first-rate lighting designer.)
There’s chili cooking on the refectory tables onstage, for the audience’s consumption at intermission. A seven-member hootenanny-style band sits in plain view. The well-known melodies they play have been reimagined — by the brilliant orchestrator and arranger Daniel Kluger — with the vernacular throb and straightforwardness of country and western ballads.
The cast members — wearing a lot of good old, form-fitting denim (Terese Wadden did the costumes) — are just plain folks. Singing with conversational ease, they occasionally flirt and joke with the audience seated on either side of the stage. We are all, it would appear, in this together.
Though the cast has been whittled down to 11 speaking parts (and one dancer), the key characters are very much present. They include our scrapping leading lovers, Curly McLain and Laurey Williams (Rebecca Naomi Jones); their comic counterparts, Will Parker (James Davis) and Ado Annie (Ali Stroker); that bastion of homespun wisdom and stoicism, Aunt Eller (Mary Testa) and the womanizing peddler Ali Hakim (Will Brill).
Oh, I almost forgot poor old Jud Fry (Patrick Vaill), the slightly, well, weird handyman who’s sweet, in a sour way, on Laurey. Everybody forgets Jud, or tries to. Not that this is possible, with Mr. Vaill lending a charismatic, hungry loneliness to the part that’s guaranteed to haunt your nightmares.
These people — in some cases nontraditionally yet always perfectly cast — intersect much as they usually do in “Oklahoma!” They court and spark, fight and reunite. They also show off by picking up guitars and microphones and dancing like prairie bacchantes. (John Heginbotham did the spontaneous-feeling choreography.) They use household chores, like shucking corn, to memorably annotative effect.
Ms. Stroker’s boy-crazy, country siren-voiced Ado Annie, who rides a wheelchair as if it were a prize bronco, and Mr. Davis’s deliciously dumb Will emanate a blissful endorphin haze. Mr. Brill is a refreshingly unmannered Ali Hakim, and Ms. Testa is a splendid, wryly authoritative Aunt Eller.
But there’s an abiding tension. This is especially evident in Ms. Jones’s affectingly wary Laurey, who regards her very different suitors, Curly and Jud, with a confused combination of desire and terror.
That her fears are not misplaced becomes clear in an encounter in Jud’s dank hovel of a home. Curly sings “Pore Jud,” in which he teasingly imagines his rival’s funeral with an ominous breathiness.
The scene occurs in darkness, with a simulcast video in black and white of the two men face to face. And the lines between sex and violence, already blurred in this gun-toting universe, melt altogether.
I first saw Mr. Fish’s “Oklahoma!” at Bard College in 2015, and again at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn last year. It was an exciting work from the get-go, but it just keeps getting better. The performances are looser and bigger; they’re Broadway-size now, with all the infectious exuberance you expect from a great musical.
At the same time, though, this production reminds us that such raw energy can be harnessed to different ends, for ill as well as for good. In the earlier versions, I had problems with its truly shocking conclusion — the scene that takes the most liberties with the original. In its carefully retooled rendering, it’s disturbing for all the right reasons.
The other significant change here involves the dream ballet, which in this version begins the second act and has been newly varied and paced. It is performed by one dancer (the exquisite Gabrielle Hamilton) with a shaved head and a glittering T-shirt that reads “Dream Baby Dream.”
What she does is a far cry from the same sequence as immortalized by Agnes de Mille, the show’s legendary original choreographer. But on its own, radically reconceptualized terms, it achieves the same effect.
As she gallops, slithers and crawls the length of the stage, casting wondering and seductive glances at the front row, Ms. Hamilton comes to seem like undiluted id incarnate, a force that has always been rippling beneath the surface here.
She’s as stimulating and frightening — and as fresh — as last night’s fever dream. So is this astonishing show.
Circle in the Square
235 W 50th St.