Some Musical (and Other) Readings

The “landmark” status of Oklahoma! prompts examining it through a series of case studies in terms of how musicals work in dramatic terms (not least given their inherent lack of verisimilitude); the problems of reconciling convention with innovation; the way the show plays with pastoral tropes; its connection with notions of Manifest Destiny; the treatment of characters according to gender and ethnicity; the role of Oklahoma! as wartime propaganda; and the question of how close the Broadway musical might come to being a form of “American opera.” These issues reveal the cultural work that the show did in 1943, and still does today.

Heading for Broadway

Although there was a complete libretto for what became Oklahoma! when the typical five weeks of rehearsals began on 8 February 1943, plus a number of the songs, there was still much work to do. The principal cast was fixed, including Alfred Drake (Curly), Joan Roberts (Laurey), Celeste Holm (Ado Annie), and Joseph Buloff (Ali Hakim), but others still needed to be recruited (Howard da Silva as Jud Fry). Some roles were expanded (Gertie Cummings) and others dropped (Lotta Gonzales, who was to have ended up marrying Ali Hakim). Act 1 was fixed early on, but act 2 was subject to constant revision even during the tryouts in New Haven and Boston (when the show was titled Away We Go!). In part this was due to problems of staging, but Rodgers and Hammerstein also remained unclear on the musical contents until the week before the Broadway opening, on 31 March 1943.

Contracts and Commitments

Theresa Helburn was initially uncertain about whether to treat Green Grow the Lilacs as a “cowboy play” with songs by the likes of Woody Guthrie and Tex Ritter, as something aspiring to higher artistic status (music by Aaron Copland or Roy Harris), or somewhere in between. Richard Rodgers also needed to deal with his longtime but collapsing partnership with Lorenz Hart. Even after Helburn had fixed on Rodgers and Hammerstein, in summer 1942, there were important decisions to be made about the director (eventually, it was Rouben Mamoulian), choreographer (Agnes de Mille, chosen because of her work on Copland’s Rodeo), and the casting of the show. The Guild approached various Hollywood stars (Deanna Durbin, Groucho Marx, Anthony Quinn, Shirley Temple) but took a different path in the end. No less troublesome was how to generate the large amount of money needed to get a musical onto the stage.

Setting the Stage

The pre-premiere publicity for Oklahoma! generated by the Theatre Guild fixed many of the themes that would dominate its reception history. The Guild had already established a pattern of creating musical versions of plays it had previously staged, by way of George and Ira Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess of 1935. Its executive director, Theresa Helburn, tried to persuade a number of Broadway composers to pick up the torch, including Kurt Weill (for Ferenc Molnár’s play Liliom, which later became Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Carousel). She also saw some potential in Lynn Rigg’s Green Grow the Lilacs, first done by the Guild in late 1930. Riggs was one of a new generation of “regional” playwrights, and he drew on his own upbringing in Claremore, Oklahoma, for a work interweaving vernacular dialogue and cowboy songs. Rodgers and Hammerstein, however, came from quite other theatrical traditions; anything they did would necessarily be very different.

From Stage to Screen

Oklahoma! was a surprising success on Broadway, and although the Theatre Guild considered other possible creative teams for new musicals, the now-sealed Rodgers and Hammerstein partnership proved hard to resist. A touring company was in place by late summer 1943, and Oklahoma! traveled internationally after the end of World War II (not least, to London’s West End in 1947); meanwhile, the Guild needed to replace cast members leaving one or other productions of the show. In 1953, Rodgers and Hammerstein bought the Guild’s rights to all three of the shows they had done under its auspices (including Carousel and Allegro). In part, this was to maximize their profits from intended film versions. The 1955 film of Oklahoma! took advantage of the new Todd-AO wide-screen process and location shooting to produce a vivid rendition of the show that, however, also needed to be followed, or resisted, in subsequent stage versions.

Creative Processes

A striking amount of material survives to document the creation of what became known as Oklahoma!—including Hammerstein’s sketches and drafts for the libretto (first completed in November 1942), his subsequent work on the lyrics for the songs, and Rodgers’s music manuscripts. These sources reveal how they worked both together and separately in particularly, if differently, creative ways. They also help generate a chronology of the early stages of the show’s genesis that raises further questions about later accounts of it, not least in terms of the dream-ballet at the end of act 1, for which Agnes de Mille claimed significant credit. In addition, the orchestrations by Robert Russell Bennett reveal what he added in terms of instrumental color and, at times, new musical notes.