Christopher Walker reviews Daniel Fish’s Oklahoma
Wow! Daniel Fish’s Oklahoma is the darkest, deepest, reinterpretation I’ve ever seen, writes Christopher Walker.
And I’ve seen a lot. It’s quite brilliant.
When Rodgers & Hammerstein musicals came to a drab post-war London, they seduced everyone with bright colours and beautiful people.
They ushered in the American age.
The Marlborough cowboy became a global icon, and youngsters from London to Tokyo started wearing blue jeans and eating beefburgers.
In the movie Oklahoma, pretty blondes picked oversized apples in a new Garden of Eden, and competed for handsome cowboys singing “Oh what a beautiful mornin’.”
Time for a reality check.
The only pretty blonde in this version is the set.
Wood stretches as far as the eye can see.
Laurey Williams (played by Anoushka Lucas) fends off two fabulous body positive girls.
Georgina Onuorah as Ado Annie sings – “I kind of rounded up a little and now the boys act diff ‘rent to me.”
While Rebekah Hinds’ Gertie Cummings has a laugh like a hyena, and Liza Sadovy is a bizarrely crotch-grabbing Aunt Eller.
In their baby-doll party dresses from Walmart, they’re a fright. Pity the poor cowboys.
The clowning of Will Parker and Ali Hakim is true to the original, and gloriously played by James Patrick Davis and Stavros Demetraki).
But Patrick Vaill’s nuanced treatment of hired hand Jud Fry is revolutionary.
In the original, Rod Steiger played him menacingly enough to later be cast as the Boston Strangler.
Here Jud is the bullied outsider, as when cowboy Curly McLain (Arthur Darvill) threatens him with his own funeral – “Poor Jud is Daid.”
Time to wake up from the ‘American Dream.’
Life in the West was brutal. Guns were everywhere, and still are.
About 45,000 people a year now die in the United States from gun-related injuries, and incredibly, there are some 600 mass shootings every year.
And where exactly had all the native Americans gone?
At some of the most intense moments, the audience is shown handheld video footage then plunged disconcertingly into darkness.
Emerging feels like waking up from a nightmare.
Bye, bye, Miss American Pie…”
Tickets: https://www.delfontmackintosh.co.uk/whats-on/oklahoma
Picture: Patrick Vaill (Jud Fry), Arthur Darvill (Curl McLain) and James Patrick Davis (Will Parker) in Oklahoma! Picture: Marc Brenner