‘Oklahoma!’ review: Anti-gun revival of classic shot to hell

The corn is as excessive as an elephant’s eye, and so is my blood strain, thanks to the revival of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Oklahoma!” In director Daniel Fish’s pretentious manufacturing — which opened Sunday on Broadway, contemporary from Brooklyn’s St. Ann’s Warehouse — every little thing you cherish about this classic has been taken out behind the barn and shot, changed by an auteur’s bag of tips and a thesis on gun management and westward enlargement. Right here, the West was received by a tradition of violence and poisonous masculinity — what enjoyable! The viewers on the Circle within the Sq. Theatre sits on three sides of the stage, the plywood-covered partitions plastered with rifles. The pit orchestra’s extra like a seven-person bluegrass band, decked out in plaid, and the home lights are cranked all the way in which up. This appears to be like like a hootenanny, you suppose. Nicely, maintain your horses. The lights keep on in the home for many of the present, perhaps to create intimacy. However the nearly fixed brightness, which adjustments solely a handful of instances to neon inexperienced or crimson and at one level goes darkish fully, muddies the storytelling. No scene appears any totally different from the subsequent, and the entire thing is a largely joyless chore. The story stays the identical. Two potential suitors, cowboy Curly (Damon Daunno) and farm hand Jud (Patrick Vaill), each dream of accompanying Laurey (performed with a furrowed forehead by Rebecca Naomi Jones) to the field social and past. You could recall Curly as a heroic Hugh Jackman sort, who grins by way of “Oh, What A Lovely Mornin,’ ” and Jud as an Andre the Large sort. Not. Now, each of them are stick-thin creeps with greasy hair. Fortunate for us, they’ve terrible purty singing voices. So does Ali Stroker, who performs Ado Annie, the gal who can’t say no, reverse James Davis’ doofy Will Parker. The humorous, sexier-than-usual pair tries their greatest to maintain issues gentle on this big frown of a staging, as does Will Brill as their third wheel, oily peddler Ali Hakim. In actual fact, they and Mary Testa’s pushy Aunt Eller could be a advantageous addition to another manufacturing of “Oklahoma!” However their instruction right here would appear to be “have a awful time.” The actors lounge round on benches, talking quietly with no explicit funding within the scene. After we arrive on the should-be showstoppers — the title music, “The Farmer and the Cowman” — choreographer John Heginbotham has the solid lazily amble round as if drunk. Agnes De Mille’s well-known Dream Ballet has been ditched for an overlong, gymnastics flooring train danced, with admirable muscularity, by Gabrielle Hamilton in little greater than a shiny T-shirt studying “Dream Child Dream.” Pretty. Some of Fish’s concepts are enjoyable. The chili and cornbread doled out to the viewers at intermission is tasty, and the ladies snapping ears of corn throughout “Many A New Day” offers the scene rebellious vitality. However in placing his actors in fashionable costume, making weapons his wallpaper and forcing each second {that a} gun is brandished and even talked about to have bombastic significance, Fish clearly is saying he’s not an awesome fan of the tradition of the Nice Plains — of yesteryear or yesterday. In a preposterously heavy-handed sequence, he even has Jud current Curly with a pistol, relatively than the standard knife, which leads to a stunning however inane conclusion. All this, in a hokey outdated present that features the lyric, “Gonna give ya barley, carrots and potaters.” Listening to the New York viewers applauding their very own virtuosity makes a man need to put this “Oklahoma!” out to pasture. Share this: https://nypost.com/2019/04/07/oklahoma-review-anti-gun-revival-of-classic-shot-to-hell/ The post ‘Oklahoma!’ review: Anti-gun revival of classic shot to hell appeared first on My style by Kartia.