Oklahoma!

Oklahoma!, American musical first opened on Broadway in 1943, written by composer Richard Rodgers and lyricist and librettist Oscar Hammerstein II—it was the first of 11 musicals written by the iconic team. Oklahoma! follows the events surrounding two love triangles between white settlers in the Oklahoma Territory at the turn of the 20th century.

Source material

Oklahoma! is based on a 1931 play by Cherokee playwright Lynn Riggs called Green Grow the Lilacs, a melancholy elegy for Indian Territory as Oklahoma stands on the precipice of statehood. Oklahoma! did away with most of that context and stripped away the play’s concern over sovereignty in Indian Territory, as well as its queer undertones (Riggs himself was gay). However, Hammerstein still felt (as he wrote in The New York Times in 1943) that Riggs’s play “is the wellspring of almost all that is good in Oklahoma!.” Many of the original play’s characters and their dialogue were retained, as well as Riggs’s poetic stage directions, which inspired Hammerstein’s lyrics.

Synopsis

Oklahoma! is set in the Oklahoma Territory in 1906, just before Oklahoma was admitted as a state. The musical dramatizes the courtship of a young farm girl named Laurey and a brash, self-assured cowboy named Curly. Their romance is complicated by another man—Jud Fry, a social outcast who works on Laurey’s aunt’s farm—who is also interested in Laurey. A comedic subplot follows a love-struck Ado Annie as she negotiates her own entanglements with two men: the first, her fiancé who does not want to marry her; the second, a cowboy who tries to win her and her father’s approval.

Film adaptation and stage revivals

The 1955 film adaptation, starring Gordon MacRae and Shirley Jones and directed by Fred Zinnemann for Twentieth Century-Fox (now 20th Century Studios), was the most expensive movie musical ever produced at that time, with a budget of $7 million. Rodgers and Hammerstein retained significant creative control over the production and ensured that the film remained largely faithful to the stage show. The movie’s soundtrack sold tremendously well, becoming the first-ever album to be certified gold by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) in 1958.

Oklahoma! has also enjoyed several stage revivals in the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, and Japan. Broadway revivals opened in 1951, 1953, 1979, 2002, and 2019, the most high-profile of which occurred in 2019.

Daniel Fish’s critically acclaimed 2019 Broadway revival (which began as a student production at Bard College in 2007) was widely noted for catapulting Oklahoma! into the 21st century with a pared-down production leaning into the story’s dark, violent undertones. Fish’s revival was praised for bringing depth to antagonist Jud Fry and for its stripped-down, modern orchestrations featuring country- and bluegrass-inspired instrumentation. The production won Tony Awards for best revival of a musical, and for best featured actress in a musical for Ali Stroker’s performance as Ado Annie, which made Stroker the first person who uses a wheelchair to win a Tony Award for performance.

Legacy

Oklahoma! is widely regarded as a watershed in American musical theater history as the form’s first “unified” musical, in which all the elements of the show work together to further the plot. The show also deviated from the traditional conventions of musical comedies with its understated opening number and prioritization of narrative elements over the expected structure and frenetic pace of the era’s typical musical. It launched the golden age of American musical comedy, which lasted from 1943 until 1959.

The original Broadway production, which ran for a record-setting five years, featured choreography by American dancer Agnes de Mille. De Mille’s deeply psychological “Dream Ballet,” which closed the first act, gave remarkably serious consideration to young Laurey’s romantic desires and fears and helped jump-start de Mille’s groundbreaking Broadway career.

Since then, throughout the show’s many iterations, Oklahoma! has become an enduring classic. The song “Oklahoma!” became the state’s official song in 1953, and the 1943 cast recording was added to the National Registry in 2003. According to a 2020 NPR analysis, Oklahoma! was the most popular musical performed by high schools in the 1960s–70s and the second most popular musical in the 1980s–90s.