LONDON With its full-scale, athletic and loving rendition of"Oklahoma!" the Royal National Theatre has approached Rodgers andHammerstein with the same care and intellectual respect it would showto Ibsen.
Oscar Hammerstein II is often underrated because of hissimplicity. "Oh, what a beautiful morning/Oh, what a beautiful day"is the lyric that starts the show, soaring through the theater on thewing of a perfectly shaped melody (and on Hugh Jackman's lovelytenor). Hammerstein's writing has all of the elegant directness ofthat lyric - the elemental, inevitable quality of a Shaker chair.Adapting the Lynn Riggs play "Green Grow the Lilacs," he fashioned amusical about a territory on the verge of statehood.
Save one, his characters are likable, particularly the cowboyCurly (a thoroughly winning Jackman) and his sometimes ornery girl,Laurey (the graceful Josefina Gabrielle). Their courtship is hauntedby the farmhand Jud (Shuler Hensley), a creepy pariah who becomes theviolent emblem of the disenfranchised.
Director Trevor Nunn begins the show with a kind of reverenthush, ringing a false alarm that the evening will be stiff andformal. As the overture starts, Nunn lets the audience glimpse theorchestra at the back of the deep stage. Scrims lower and raise togive us new images: a forlorn, angular prairie house in the middleground, then in the foreground, a high field of corn.
Next, the show's title is projected on a blank curtain, as if itwere the frontispiece of an expensive, shrink-wrapped book, with theword "Oklahoma!" written as if with a cowboy's rope. But Nunn isonly clearing his throat; he gets the fusty, presentational style outof his system and does not look back.
He is helped immeasurably by Susan Stroman's choreography.Cowboys pair off with women in calf-length skirts that swirlperfectly as they leap, recalling the work of the originalchoreographer, Agnes de Mille. As much as any other element in theshow, these dances define the pre-neurotic and uninhibited way thesecharacters deal with their emotions.
In Nunn's production, Jud is the show's central performance.Living in a squalid smokehouse, with nudie pictures for decoration,Hensley's Jud is a swampy thing full of fetid anger that is strongereven than his desire for love.
Set designer Anthony Ward employs stark lines for his windmilland farmhouse. In the background, the orange arc of a prairie andlooming blue sky imitate the aching emptiness of regional prairiepaintings. Though one might argue with some of Ward's flat, uglycolors, his lines are exactly right.
They suggest we view this show as a valuable document, one thatcan tell us something about our origins. Set in the beginning of thecentury, written in the middle of it, now at century's end, a Britishproduction reminds us that "Oklahoma!" is an American treasure, bothprimitive and profound. Los Angeles Times
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